Often the first question you are asked when someone learns you are a Christian is, “So, where do you go to church?” If it were up to us, we’d like to make that an impossible question to answer! Instead of having a single church location, our vision for New Hope is to completely fill our region with small groups of Christian friends who are all actively living out their faith together! For many people, if you took away the church building, the programs, the Sunday services, and the church budget, they wouldn’t know what to do! But our faith was never supposed to be about buildings, budgets, programs or services…Jesus said that we are supposed to be a people who love God, care for each other, and who bring light to a dark world. Our faith is supposed to be about our daily attempts to live as Christ did, not an affiliation with a religious organization. So, if church isn’t the building or it’s programs, what and where is it? Well, imagine New Hope not just having one church building, one service, one set of ministries, one set of outreaches in Easton, but having 50 or 100 or 1000?! We envision in our future having completely saturated our community with small pockets of Christians, rather than drawing a host of believers together in a single location. Jesus went “to the people”, but if churches aren’t careful, they can sit back, open their doors, and just wait for “the people to come to them”. Our Small Group based structure puts the emphasis on decentralizing church and on sending Christians into the world rather than expecting the world to come to them. Our church’s motto for many years now has been, “people helping people to help people”, and it is based on the principle found in 2 Timothy 2:2 that our faith is meant to be shared! If you are interested in a non-traditional approach to church, and are interested in reaching out to non-traditional people in our community, then consider joining us in our mission!
22
Jun
2011
