About
Vision & Values
Christians have been meeting on the site of St Bartholomew's for almost 800 years.
It’s been a long and varied journey, with ups and downs along the way, but throughout, Jesus Christ has been a sure and constant foundation.
Today we’re a diverse and growing community, united in a vision for people to be drawn into relationship with Jesus, built up in their spiritual lives, and sent out in service to our community and the world. We’re passionate about reaching out to those around us with the good news of Jesus, and passing on this good news to generations to come.
We know we’re not the finished product, but we hope you’ll come and join us on our journey, as we gather week by week to worship God, grow together as a church family, and learn together to live out our love for God and His world in all of life.
On the rest of this page, you can find out a little bit more about our ‘DNA’ as a church, the things that are most precious to us, and the sort of church we’re aspiring to be, as God works in and through us.
Our vision
Words like “vision”, “values” and “strategy” can feel like empty buzzwords. We try to use them as a sketch map to guide us, rather than a blueprint to follow precisely:
Our identity
Who we are
The body of Christ serving the parish of Edgbaston
Our purpose
Why we exist
To form devoted disciples of Christ
Our values
How we do things
Renewing worship
Faithful teaching
Honest community
Sacrificial mission
Public faith
See belowOur vision
Where we are headed
To be a church where anyone can encounter God
Welcome & hospitality
To be a church where everyone expects to change
Discipleship & transformation
Our strategy
How we get there
1
Welcome & hospitality
To be a church where anyone can encounter God
To be a place where anyone can encounter God means to embody in our life more and more the extravagant generosity of God in welcoming anyone to be His children. The heart of the gospel is grace: the extraordinary claim that the completely self-sufficient God, who in total perfection of being has no need of anything or anyone to sustain his own life, has acted in space and time history to win back to Him a world that has become alienated from Him. Human beings are both central to that alienation – we have led the creation in rebellion against our Creator – and, astoundingly, also at the heart of God’s plan to restore creation. The church’s calling is to know and delight in this ‘welcome home’ from God ourselves, to live as if it’s true (because it is!) in all of our common life, and to extend it widely to others around us, as God works in and through us. This aspect of our Vision embodies, above all, a desire to make all we are and do as a church as accessible as possible to people around us – because God has made his life so freely accessible to us.
2
Discipleship & transformation
To be a church where everyone expects to change
To be a place where everyone expects to change – “discipleship and transformation” – follows on naturally from the ideas of “welcome and hospitality”, because when people encounter God authentically, change is the inevitable result. The first part of our Vision invites all – regardless of background or belief – to experience the reality of a gracious God, while the second highlights the expectation that this divine encounter will lead to growth and transformation. It embodies an expectation that everyone – regardless of their starting point – will be challenged, changed, and shaped by the Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. And it reflects a desire on our part actively to participate in the change God is working in our lives: to be a community eagerly listening to God, and constantly learning – and helping one another to learn – the new way of life He calls us to in the gospel.
Our values
Renewing worship
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
Augustine of HippoWe are convinced that to worship God is to live out our central calling as human beings. At the same time, the tragedy of the human condition is that we now no longer seek God as our highest and greatest good. Yet the wonderful heart of the Christian message is that God hasn’t left us lost and far from Him; instead, He has come looking for us in His Son. Our weekly worship seeks to make this wonderful story the liberating, controlling reality in each of our hearts, so that we live it out in our lives across the rest of the week.
Faithful teaching
“For Holy Scripture is the fountain and well of truth: which they that be thirsty, draw and drink from; it is the school of wisdom, wherein the true wisdom of mankind is learned; it is the heavenly bread of our souls, wherewith we be nourished and fed to eternal life.”
Thomas CranmerAt the heart of our worship is listening to Scripture, trusting God to speak by His Spirit as we engage with attentive minds and obedient hearts. Through weekly preaching, small group study, and regular courses and books, we joyfully receive the Bible as God’s Word, honouring it by seeking to be hearers and doers of what we read there.
Honest community
“When the church is functioning as it should, it becomes a family that welcomes the outcast, heals the broken, and loves the unlovable.”
Tim KellerAs the gospel – the message of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ – becomes a deeper reality in each of our lives and in our life together, our prayer is to be and become a place of welcome and hospitality to everyone who encounters us. We seek actively to embody the gospel in our gatherings by giving space to share our lives together, paying particular attention to valuing the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us.
Sacrificial mission
“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”
Martin LutherWe rejoice in the extraordinary freedom won for us by Jesus Christ, and we now seek to use that freedom to serve our world in every way we can. Above all, we accept the privilege and responsibility of representing Jesus as His body, living and speaking the gospel in every way we can so that all those around us – friends, neighbours, colleagues, classmates – might find life in Jesus as we have.
Public faith
“We are not born for ourselves, and the end of our existence is to live for others.”
John CalvinThrough all that we are and do as a church – from our worship and communal life together, through to our individual lives and walks with the Lord – our desire is to live confidently as disciples of Jesus Christ, faithfully and joyfully meeting all the challenges of living for and representing Him in this time and space in which we find ourselves.
If these values sound like ones you’d like to share in – or if anything in them makes you want to find out more – please do join us!
