Here at Ayden UMC we’ve been in the midst of discerning God’s unfolding vision for us as the community of God active in the community around us. We’ve been praying, listening, asking questions and compiling the answers in search of what it might look like for our church to faithfully grow over the next five to ten years.
The question at the core of this discernment has been this:
“What is God calling Ayden United Methodist Church to do and to be in this next season of ministry?”
The answers have been exciting to hear. God has given us some amazing visions and dreams and as a way of helping us to visualize the interconnectedness of those visions and dreams I’ve collected all of the responses and fashioned them into a word cloud.
The image that you see above represents the things that we have identified as the most important parts of our identity and calling in this community. In fact, you’ll notice that at they very center are the words “God” and “community.” All of the other hopes and dreams revolve around our love of God and our commitment to seeking the peace and prosperity of the community in which we find ourselves.
This has lead us to the next phase of our visioning process and that is the formulation of a mission statement. The greatest commandment, as laid out by Jesus in scripture, is to love God with all of our heart and to love our neighbors as ourselves. It seemed pretty clear that loving God and serving others were important to us, but as the church leadership discussed that further, the reason that those two things were important was that they were the building blocks of something more. These two ideas at the core of our faith are also the key to living into the kingdom of God and the foundations upon which authentic Christian community is built, and so we thought it only proper to add that as well.
Our new mission statement at Ayden UMC then, is this:
“Loving God, Serving Others, Building Christian Community.”
I’m so excited that our church council has adopted this vision for our church and I can’t wait to see how this bears fruit as we begin to plan some specific, measurable goals for this next season of ministry.