The Church is about worship and about mission and about being
a sign of the presence and the coming of the Kingdom of God.
We seek to be a worshipping community that nurtures faith, a
faithful community that stimulates mission, and a missionary community that is
rooted in worship.
In music and word, poetry and movement, art and action, we
come just as we are as we also strive to offer the best that we can be.
In home and community, workplace and church, we serve others
through being true to ourselves, claiming God’s promise to do more than we can
ask or think.
The church exists to call people to worship God, to follow
Jesus Christ, and to make him known, to make it possible for people to know that
God is with us.
We recognise the authority of the Word of God over the church
and the world, and our responsibility to discern, obey and proclaim that Word.
We bear witness to the grace of God in Jesus Christ and to the
gift and gifts of the Holy Spirit.
We are thankful for the goodness of creation and acknowledge
our responsibility to respect its integrity and to share its gifts.
In this land of beauty and uncertainty, of living covenants
and broken promises, of renewed hope and slow justice, of open spaces and
shifting values, we would seek Jesus, and ask that he teach us to pray.
We want to live lives that make it more easy and not more
difficult for others to believe in God.
Not for ourselves only do we seek to build communities that
make it possible to live the Christian life.
We want to seek and to share truth, to encourage faithfulness,
to facilitate a sense of wonder, to stir curiosity for the things of God and of
creation, and never to lose our respect for wisdom.
We acknowledge our inability to be all things to all people,
but we aim to be a safe place for lovers and children, for the elderly and the
awkward, for the hurt and the handicapped, for the different and the simple, for
friends and the friendless, for those who have found success, and those for whom
there is no place to rest. Without one another we are incomplete in Christ.
We recognise our responsibility to respect the cultures of our
heritage, to affirm what is good, and to challenge all that makes people less
than human.
We confess that we see justice in different ways, and perceive
paths to peace through different routes. We struggle with the burden of
discernment through prayer, study and debate. We acknowledge the pain of change
and the cost of renewal.
In every age the Scriptures speak with fresh relevance. We
join the prayers of the Psalms with the passions and anxieties of our lives. We
share the wanderings, faith and failures of the people of Israel. We respect the
profundity and example of Paul. We hear Jesus’ promises in the beatitudes, his
challenge in the Sermon on the Mount and his humour and seriousness in the
parables.
In communion we share memories of his life, death and rising
again. Like the first disciples we worship even as some of us have doubts, and
also like the first disciples we accept his call to go, to baptise and to teach.
We recognise Jesus’ authority and claim the promise of his
presence. We pray that the Spirit of the Lord, which came upon him, may also be
upon us, to bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the
blind, and to inspire words and deeds which say that the time has come when the
Lord will save his people.
The men and women who brought us to this land also shape us.
We recall with nostalgia and respect heroes of conviction, the struggles of
ordinary life and stories of costly faith.
May we learn from their failings as from their success, and
imitate their faith not their foolishness. May we too take risks to find pearls
of great price.
Help us also to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with
all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and our neighbour as
ourselves.
