Mission & Vision
OUR MISSION
Our mission is to passionately love God and to purposefully love others.
Our mission centres on the Great Commandment, Jesus’ summary of the entire Old Testament (Matt 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34). These commands are often interpreted from an individual perspective ie. each of us is to love God with all our being, and love others as ourselves. However, while that is true, the passages from which these are taken (Deut 6:4-5 and Lev 19:18) are directed to Israel corporately as the people of God. Therefore we believe these verses are equally applicable both corporately to the church as the people of God, and to each of us as individuals.
The first adjective passionately attempts to capture the idea of Deuteronomy 6 - that we are to love God with everything we have. Every part of life is to be involved in our loving and following after God. Worship involves all of life.
The second adjective purposefully describes loving people both intentionally (in that we are focused on looking for ways to practically and deliberately love people) and strategically (in that we have a strategy or process in place). This strategy or process is built on the Great Commission.
Fulfilling the mission of passionately loving God and purposefully loving others involves focusing in three directions as a church community:
An Upward Focus on God.
To passionately love God means to actively and consistently respond to God’s character and love. Biblically, this is a life of worship, which is to be pursued both individually and corporately as God’s people.
An Outward Focus on Others.
Jesus purposefully loved people who were far from God (Luke 19:10), and any command to love others as ourselves has to include those who are lost and separated from God. Therefore, outreach among those who do not know Christ is a key part of purposefully loving people.
An Inward Focus on One Another.
The 'one another' commands of the New Testament also make it clear that we are love those who are fellow believers in Christ (Rom 12:9-13). Therefore, purposefully loving people also includes actively helping one another grow and become more like Jesus.
OUR VISION
MULTIPLYING THE IMPACT OF GOD'S GRACE.
Two centuries ago the first missionaries arrived in Aotearoa to bring the good news of Jesus. Today, millions now call Aotearoa home, but many who have come here or were born here have no relationship with God. This is a country in deep need of spiritual awakening, where new missionaries are needed to once again bring the good news of great joy to a people in spiritual darkness.
We dream of multiplying the number of people at Summit Church who view themselves as missionaries to this community. As we multiply missionaries, we dream of multiplying numbers of people trusting in Christ, thereby multiplying our ethnic diversity as we welcome people from all ethnicities, and multiplying our impact in the wider community.
As we multiply our impact and diversity, we dream of multiplying passionate disciples of Jesus, as well as multiplying mature servant-leaders. And as we multiply disciples and leaders, we dream of multiplying new campuses and churches as new missionary outposts in this spiritually needy country.
And all of this will be built on a desire to multiply our dependency on God as we seek him through ongoing prayer and faithful obedience, walking by faith and not by sight.