OUR VISION
Our vision at First Baptist Church is to see our families, our community and our world transformed by the power of God.
OUR MISSION
To accomplish this, our mission as First Baptist Church is to proclaim and display the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In an effort to fulfill our mission, we hold to these 7 priorities:
Clear Gospel:
The gospel is the good news about Jesus Christ. Our goal is to be absolutely clear about who he is, what he came to do and why we so desperately need him. The gospel that we proclaim says that God is infinitely holy, man is utterly sinful and in his atoning death, Jesus was perfectly righteous. Therefore, we as sinful men and women need what Jesus did through his righteous life and his atoning death to be applied to us. This comes through repentance of sin and faith in Christ alone. Our desire is that this message would clearly permeate through every service and every ministry of our church.
Faithful Preaching:
The church rises and falls based on the priority it places on the Scriptures. Ultimate authority and sufficiency are found in the Word of God, therefore what we preach and teach and how we live is derived from Scripture. Therefore, we primarily value the exposition and application of scripture taken verse by verse where the main point of the sermon is the main point of the passage. This is called expositional preaching and it allows us as a people of God to best be informed and transformed by Scripture.
United Worship:
Our main purpose in worship is to contemplate and celebrate the glory of God in Christ Jesus. Our gatherings focus on hearing from God and responding to Him. We know the Lord through His Word, and so we come together corporately to pursue Him through reading, preaching, singing, praying, and “seeing” the truth of the Scripture. As His Holy Spirit leads us in understanding and pondering the seriousness of our sin, we are also reminded of what a great Savior we have in Jesus and the joy of living for His Kingdom in the fellowship of other believers. All true worship is to be grounded in the word of God, as Scripture is our guiding principle and the means by which the Holy Spirit produces a sense of joy and awe before God. This means that worship must be God-centered, not man-centered.
Dependent Prayer:
We long to be a prayerful church that depends on God to work through the Holy Spirit in us and among us. When we approach him in prayer we display this desire as well as his worth and our need. God is sovereignly in control over the course of history and every event on this earth. Through prayer, God uses us to bring about his plan to his people. As a church we depend on him through prayer as we seek him individually and corporately.
Deep Discipleship:
We never want to be a church where our members can be anonymous. Therefore, we desire to assimilate through educating and equipping our members in the Word of God for the work of God. We believe that educating and equipping best comes through hearing the Scriptures preached, through Sunday school/small groups, through one-on-one relationships and/or through Biblical Counseling.
Fervent Evangelism/Missions:
This activity of God works through the preaching/teaching, fellowship, worship and service of the church. It ought to be intentional and focused on the word of God as it is through hearing the word of God that people are saved. Corporately through pursing purity and holiness as a body we communicate the character of God to an unbelieving world. Then through our individual communication we proclaim the worth of God through man’s need of his forgiveness in Jesus Christ. The time is short and there is no other message under heaven by which men can be saved, so we proclaim and display Christ with fervency locally and to the utter ends of the earth.
Complete Care:
In our declaration of God and his great truths of salvation, we must necessarily work out of a demonstration of his grace in our lives for the good of others. Therefore, we seek to meet the needs of the poor, lift up the downcast, seek justice for the exploited and provide for the general good of mankind. We want to be a church that is not only known for what we proclaim, but also known for how we live for the benefit of others to the glory of God.