The Church is about worship and about mission and about being a sign of the presence and of 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 centred 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, to recognise God's Spirit at work in their lives.
Despite everything 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 heal its wounds, respect its integrity and share its gifts.
In lands of beauty and uncertainty, of living covenants and broken promises, of renewed hope and slow justice, of open spaces and shifting values, we 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. Not for ourselves only do we wish 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, yet we aim to be a safe place for lovers and for 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 heritages, 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. We need the gifts of urgency and of patience.
In every age the Scriptures speak with fresh relevance and unexpected ways. We join the prayers of the Psalms with the passions and anxieties of our lives. We identify with the wanderings, faith and failures of the people of Israel. We see ourselves in the joys and struggles of the early Christians.
We hear Jesus’ promises in the beatitudes, his challenge in the sermon on the mount and the wit and wisdom of his parables. In communion we know afresh his presence as 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 acknowledge his call to go, to baptise and to teach.
We recognise Jesus’ authority in the present and to the end 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 heroes of conviction, the struggles of ordinary life and stories of costly faith. May we learn from failure as from success, and imitate their faith. May we too take risks to find pearls of great price as we seek 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.
John Roxborogh, 2002