Our Vision, Mission and Values 

Our Vision

Our vision statement acknowledges our desire for a deeper life with God while at the same time recognising we are all on this journey together.

Learning to experience a different kind of life through a personal relationship with Jesus


Our mission

We are drawn to the idea of people flourishing in life; living life to the full or experiencing it in abundance. (John 10:10) We also believe that a flourishing life can only come from a relationship with Jesus. That flourishing life should then manifest itself in different ways; it will be visible in how we live. That new life we believe will be visible in at least three ways: -

    1.Rich relationships between people inside the church and with those we know outside the church. The church is a body made up of many interdependent parts. (1 Corinthians 12) 
    2.Our character increasingly being changed so we become more like Jesus. We become people who act as Jesus would act if he was living my life and in my situation. 

    The church’s primary mission is to make disciples – apprentices of Jesus (Matthew 28:19). We believe this change is effected by the Holy Spirit and requires our cooperation through spiritual disciplines that we engage in to make ourselves available to Him.
    3.We will be more concerned for the world around us in terms of those in our families, communities and places of work who do not yet know Jesus. We will also be concerned about the good news of Jesus being communicated to a wider world in word and deed. (Matthew 28:19)

These three aspects of a flourishing life are things we as a church can invest people, time and resources into.

When Jesus met a blind man in Mark 10, he asked him “what do you want me to for you?” Unless we are a people who have a desire for more of God and more from the life that he offers us, we will not flourish. We want to be a people therefore who want a deeper relationship with Jesus. We want to be people who from that desire, are committed to act upon it by seeking character transformation and are concerned for the lives of those around us.

We understand our mission therefore to be: -

We want to be people who flourish in our relationship with Jesus resulting in rich relationships with others, transformation of our character and the bringing of hope to the world around us

Our Values
 
Our values help us form and keep our group identity. When we do anything as a church it should broadly align with our values. As a church we should be comfortable saying “we are a people who seek to live out these values”.
The following are values that we see at Swords Baptist Church

    1. Followers of Jesus – We believe as followers or disciples of Jesus that God wants to conform us to the character of his son Jesus (Romans 8:29). While we cannot change ourselves, we also recognise that no one accidentally drifts into holiness and that it will take intentional cooperation with the Holy Spirit, surrender to him, through enacting practices also known as spiritual disciplines as we apprentice under Jesus 
    2. Joy – We believe that joy as a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) is evident at SBC. Where joy is absent in a community, growth is less evident (Hendricks, 2020, p. 62). The following are some benefits of joy in a community setting.

        a. I feel like I belong
        b. I feel more stable when things go wrong
        c. It is easier to be myself
        d. I feel free to share my heart with God and others

Joy is something that we want to continue to experience and promote as a value at SBC

    3. Community - We believe strong, interdependent relationships are key in a local church body. We want people to individually develop a personal interactive relationship with Jesus Christ which comes from spending time in his presence and with each other. As we seek to share life together we want to be open to being challenged in love by one another in terms of how we live so that we can grow to be more like Jesus 

    4. Multi-Ethnic – We are a diverse group of people who each have a story of origin. While we want to remain an ‘Irish’ church we want at the same time to celebrate our diversity as we believe it is a picture of heaven (Revelation 7:9) 

    5. Grace-Centred – We acknowledge that we are a blood-bought people and that in our own strength we would be completely without hope. (Romans 5:8; Ephesians 2:8-9) We received that grace and seek to extend it to others with God’s help. 

    6. Hearts – The heart is the wellspring of a person’s life (Proverbs 4:23). What is going on in a person’s heart is who they really are – what they believe about life. We believe that the condition of our hearts is more important to Jesus than “how well we play by the rules” (Richard Foster). We want our people to live from their hearts rather than just their thinking (cognitive centre) 

    7. Bible-based – We believe the Bible is God’s words to us. It is our authority where we find how best to live. But more than that we believe God reveals his heart to us through the 66 books that constitute the Bible; so much so that we see it as God’s love letter to us. 

    8. Sharing the hope we have in Jesus – We believe the offer of new life in Jesus through trust in Him is the good news everyone is ultimately searching for. It is our desire to live authentic, transparent lives that are filled with hope, that cause others to need us to account for the hope that is within us. (1 Peter 3:15)

With that in mind our values can be summarised as: -

We at SBC desire to be a people who  ...

• Follow Jesus, resulting in character change through living out the practices he modelled
• Experience Joy that is deep, resilient, and resistant to challenging times
• Are part of a Community which responds to God’s love for us by pursuing genuine, deep relationships with one another
• Are Multi-Ethnic in our makeup, practice and worship
• Are Grace-centred as we seek to reflect God’s grace to us
• Seek to live from our Hearts 
• Look to the Bible as God’s truth where he reveals himself to us
• Share the hope we have in Jesus in our everyday conversations and through living lives that demonstrate our trust in him