From the Rector Five Purposes of the Church Father Victor

Now that the year is nearly half over, I'd like to remind you of something I said at the annual meeting in January. You may recall I identified five purposes of the Church, and said I would be returning to them again and again through the year. Here are the purposes, with brief explanations: 1. Evangelism is bringing a non-believer into a personally-acknowledged relationship with Christ. 2. Fellowship is bringing a believer in Christ to membership in a particular church. 3. Discipleship is the process of maturing in faith, so that a church member becomes spiritually mature. 4. Service is the action of a disciple, using his or her gifts to serve Christ in ministry in daily life and in the world. 5. Worship is the overarching purpose of the church, holding together all other purposes, yielding all our life individually and together up to the glory of God. From each purpose of the church, programmatic implications follow. If we're going to be serious about evangelism, we need a program for bringing people to Christ. (No program will do it, of course!, but we would be foolish not to do our best in devising programs.) Alpha is such a program, and already a number of people have drawn closer to Christ, in articulate, exciting ways, through that program. It will continue here as long as God blesses it, and even now a lot of people are making plans for the fall Alpha course. If we are to be serious about fellowship, we need to be intentional about joining our parish. Hence the membership class which I wrote about in the last newsletter. It will be offered again before we have our next baptism. I was all set to offer a class on developing spiritual maturity, but a late snow scared us off. I've done all the work on it, and so it's ready to go, once we find a good date. I hope lots of you will want to take it. It's very important that we keep working on good spiritual habits like prayer, Bible reading, generous giving, and Church participation. Service is our mission work. Resurrection has a strong missions program with a long history. What perhaps we need to work more on is how to help each Christian who is a member and who is growing in spiritual maturity discover and put to work his or her gifts for mission. Would you like to learn a good principle of service? It's this: "The ordained lead, and the people minister." You are all ministers, thanks to your baptism. My calling in this place is not to meet your needs, but to give you tools and encouragement so that you can become a minister! Another important principle of service is this: it's okay to try a ministry. We won't lock you in forever! Nursery, youth choir, mothers' group, a driving ministry. You can try it, and we give you permission to gracefully stop if, for whatever reason, it doesn't work out. Let's keep talking with each other and praying about what God's purposes are for the Church of the Resurrection. Back