You may have heard that, in the midst of this pandemic, our youth minister and ministry intern Adam Lubbers has been facilitating discussions with our new Discipleship Team, made up of our mission & outreach, children’s, and youth committees, to discern and discover how we might best fulfill the mission of the church in our time and place.
The mission of the United Methodist Church is “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” We seek to fulfill this mission in three ways:
- Proclaiming the good news of God’s grace
- By exemplifying Jesus’ command to love God and neighbor
- And thus seeking the fulfillment of God’s reign and realm in the world, which is the vision Scripture holds before us.
The process by which we do this is as follows:
- Proclaim the gospel, seek, welcome, and gather persons into the body of Christ
- Lead persons to commit their lives to God through baptism by water and the Spirit and profession of faith in Jesus Christ
- Nurture persons in Christian living through worship, the sacraments, spiritual disciplines, and other means of grace, such as Wesley’s Christian conferencing
- Send persons into the world to live lovingly and justly as servants of Christ by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the stranger, freeing the oppressed, being and becoming a compassionate, caring presence, and working to develop social structures consistent with the gospel
- Continue mission of seeking, welcoming, and gathering people into the body of Christ
(See the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, para. 122)
Through this process, we hope to discern what the ministry of CHUMC shall look like going forward to most effectively fulfill our mission. I invite you to be in prayer for CHUMC, the discipleship team, and Adam as the process continues.
Grace and peace,
Rev. J.D. Allen
Senior Pastor
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