greetings from pastor mary

When I first arrived at GraceWay nearly three years ago, the leadership here wanted to BLESS our community. That means that we (B) begin with prayer, (L) listen to one another, (E) eat together, (S) serve our community, and we (S) share our stories of Jesus in our lives with each other and the world.

GraceWay has taken some big BLESS steps this year! And along the way, the Elders of the church have been praying and listening to God to learn what He wants next for us.

Last year, that meant focusing on our mission, and through several Elder meetings, homework, much prayer, and an overnight retreat, we decided that we are: "Loving our community one neighbor at a time in order to develop fully devoted followers of Jesus.

Every individual is important to us, and we will take the time to listen to, learn about, pray with and help individuals God brings our way. But we also know the most important way to love someone is by introducing them to the greatest love of all, the love of Jesus Christ. So we are focusing our efforts on helping our neighbors find and follow Him.

One way we welcomed our community this year was by opening our doors (and our hearts) to Family of Grace (a family-based Mandarin-language ministry), especially inviting their English-speaking family members and friends to join us in church life.

We are partnering with Family of Grace in AWANA, a Biblically-based kids discipleship program, in order to help more children find and follow Jesus.

We offered Christian education like our book clubs for The Reluctant Witness, as we learned the art of spiritual conversation, and our ALPHA course for the spiritually curious.

We faithfully served one another in small groups, youth group, kids ministry, worship, hospitality, our deacon ministry, and so many other areas in the life of the church and the community.

Finally, our discernment process led us to comb through our bylaws to make them more understandable and missionally focused so that we can more easily utilize our resources to change when necessary and focus on the mission.

We organized our systems and our budget around this goal too.

After aggressive organization efforts this past year, we feel we are ready to adopt a new goal for our church this year: for everyone who calls GraceWay their church home to take a discipleship step.

Whether that is making a decision for Jesus, being baptised, learning how to serve others or share the gospel, learning to be generous with time and resources, or perhaps being equipped to step into a leadership role, we want everyone engaged at GraceWay to take a step closer to Jesus this year.

- Pastor Mary