05.10.06 thequest email UPdate

Back in February and March our leaders gathered together for a revisit of our core vision, mission and values. We wanted to stop and have a checkpoint: a time to look back and see what has been accomplished, a time to look at what God is putting into place in the present and a look toward the future.

It was a great opportunity to interact with everyone and to have the Spirit lead us as a group. Our new mission statement became crystal clear in the dialogs that we had. Our original mission statement was a great place to start, but there were some edits that we wanted to make. Some aspects we really wanted to hang onto. Let me share with you the revision:

thequest seeks to connect men, women and children
to authentic and loving relationships
with people and Jesus
through embracing communities


Here are a few rambling thoughts about the revision:

The big theme of "connecting" was something that everyone really was passionate about. Our logo, the paperchain links, really communicates that connecting idea too.

The "men, women & children" is a change from urban folk. God has added children to our community and we really feel like God is calling us to connect with them. This is certainly not to the exclusion of adults. We really broadened our mission...to all people! At the same time, don't think that we are leaving urban Columbus. We just recognize that some of our folks and house churches are in the greater metro area. We actually envision being a network of house churches spreading throughout urban & metro Columbus and beyond. The city is at the heart of our mission.

Authentic relationships have been a hallmark of our network, but we added loving to our statement. We have noticed that sometimes people can be authentic...but not very loving. Jesus said we would be marked by our love...so we want to mark ourselves that way.

The connection we are seeking to make is with people and Jesus. We took a step to be even more bold than the prior statement...which had God, rather than Jesus. We felt like it was time to be very strong about Jesus--it's all about HIM!

We changed the last phrase to "embracing communities, " rather than one community. The network isn't huge, but it is broad--and it continues to grow and broaden. We do want to connect with everyone in the network, but the main call of our network is to have "embracing communities." We felt like our mission needed to be carried out in every house church and community that we endeavored upon. If we do that in all of our churches and groups, then the whole network will be an embracing community. The primary emphasis is on the house churches rather than the drawing of all of them together.

So our mission...
connecting men, women and children to authentic and loving relationships with people and Jesus through embracing communities.

Let's live it out! It's all about Jesus.

Press on,

Mike

05.10.06 thequest email UPdate