Our Mission & Vision
Idaho Springs Anglican Fellowship - Summer 2024
The mission of this church
and, we believe, of the universal Church—is formed for us by Jesus Himself in His Great Commission found in Matthew 28:18–20: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This Great Commission is built on the Great Commandment of Jesus found in Luke 10:27:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
For simplicity’s sake, we say that our mission is to be:
“Disciples of Jesus, discipling in love.”
We understand that our personal and communal walk of faith is formed and grows as we invest ourselves in ministering to and discipling others. This mission statement forms our concept of how we work for the Kingdom of God:
"The gathering of Idaho Springs Anglican fellowship exists to glorify God and make disciples by nurturing a community in which every person has the opportunity to grow in intimacy with Jesus Christ and with others."
"We seek wholeness in Christ to facilitate communities of wholeness in the world."
This leads to our vision—what we point to purposefully (our Mountaintop) and how we get there today (our Milestones). While we have much work to do together in further discerning God’s vision for this burgeoning church, here is what we are hearing so far:
Vision
Idaho Springs Anglican Fellowship glorifies God by celebrating the healing power of the Holy Spirit through prayer, praise and worship that overflows into community, living the joy of knowing Jesus as Lord and Savior.
How We Get There
The following milestones are our points of integration into the vision—”how we get there”. They help us build momentum in climbing to the mountaintop, the vision God is unwrapping before us, by showing us how we will specifically live into God’s vision for us. They are comprehensive and specific, and point to our short-term means for living into this vision:
Worship
Jesus calls us to “worship the Father in Spirit and truth” (John 4:23). While our everyday lives are a constant act of worship (Romans 12:1), we have an innate need to come together in corporate worship (Hebrews 10:25). The history of worship in the Anglican tradition points to Three Streams (sacramental, charismatic and evangelistic) in one river of Christianity. In corporate worship we experience the presence of God that joins us to the worship before the throne of grace in the heavenly realm (Revelation 4). We are revived and transformed by the Holy Spirit. We experience His gifts to do the same things Jesus did, thereby making the Kingdom of God something we experience in worship.
Discipleship
The apostle Paul tells us in Romans 12:1–2 (Message): "So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you." Amen! Inspired by this, we pray that we become Biblical Christians who fully reflect the light of Christ in the world in our “everyday, ordinary” lives. We are part of God's transformative love, working for His Kingdom and overwhelming the darkness in the world, one life at a time and whole communities at a time, connected with His universal Church across time. We do this through various discipleship programs that incorporate Bible teaching, prayerful formation, orthodox theology, transformational healing and practical missional service in an intergenerational setting, so we form Biblically based Anglicansnh o are empowered to live Christ-centered lives.
Community-centered Ministry
We are part of the community and for the community God has placed us in. Our call is to partner with the community to expand the life of Jesus Christ into the community. We do this by serving in both tangible and spiritual ways, and we strive to make those spiritual and tangible ways one. This means providing for those in need in the community—through financial assistance and resources in terms of people, time and materials. Among the ways we do this are by partnering with our local community outreach, Loaves & Fishes Feeding Ministry. We also plan to actively volunteer in the ECHO shelter on a regular basis. As we form relationships with the families and staff, we hope to grow in love and discernment to better understand how we can more fully serve in Christ’s image, in the specific ways we hear Him call us to minister and further partner in the community. The opportunities are too many to name here. Suffice it to say, we are open to our Lord’s leading in how to more specifically share and grow in the knowledge and love of God in Jesus Christ.
In the coming months, we will collectively discern together God’s call to us for deeper community interaction and build this into how we implement the Vision God is giving us. In addition, we will look to discern how we interact in mission with those close and far - our “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth”