Faith & Mission
Faith and Mission
Faith and Mission may seem at the very heart of Christianity, and indeed they are, and they are both characteristics of the Church.
Both of them need to be understood in the ontological sense. We can't be Church without Faith, and we can't be Church without Mission. On the one hand they are both about the nature of what the Church is.
Yet also both of them need to be understood as doing words. Faith is a gift, and yet also faith is a response to grace. Faith commits us to trust God. And Mission is not just something they do out there, every time we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes in glory (Which we do at every service) we are engaging in mission, and we are called to be bearing witness to the love of God in our daily lives.
2 Corinthians 5:19
In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
Faith and Content | Faith and Action
Faith for us is not simply that matter of belief, for on the one hand there is the content of that belief. The core of the content of that belief is probably traditionally best expressed in the Nicene Creed as agreed by the whole Church at the 1st Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, which we affirm in the Communion Service on most Sundays.
Faith is the matter of our response to the inexhaustible love of God, which includes not simply the acknowledgement of our own failings, but also our reciprocation however inadequate to God's love in worship, and living life in service to both God and those around us.
Reconciliation is at the heart of what we are about, and this is central to our being. We are not simply a church near a bridge, we are ourselves a bridge church, joining heaven and earth in Faith and Mission.