Christ Methodist Church Memphis
Go deeper in your faith with our weekly podcasts. Episodes include sermons by our pastoral team and interviews that guide you through some of our toughest faith questions.
Christ Methodist Church Memphis
Building on 70 Years: Our Church’s New Mission and Vision in Action
What happens when a church looks back at 70 years of legacy and then boldly looks ahead? Discover the Spirit-led vision, new goals, and call to action shaping the future of Christ Methodist Church.
--------
In celebration of 70 years, Christ Methodist Church unveiled a set of measurable churchwide goals shaped by prayer, discernment, and congregational input. The goals focus on 100% participation in daily worship and small-group discipleship, deeper engagement in mission partnerships, and future church planting. Leaders emphasized shared responsibility, a culture of accountability, and the power of the Holy Spirit guiding the church’s next chapter—inviting every member to walk faithfully, together, into God’s calling.
[0:19] I'm Robert Montague, the Vice Chair of the Church Council. Thank you, Josh.
[0:24] Tom Marino and I are here today to share our new churchwide goals. Through a comprehensive planning process, the staff and lay leadership felt it important to establish a goal and measurement culture for our church, to hold ourselves accountable, to coordinate and course correct where needed and identify successes to celebrate God's work. We owe a great thanks to the leadership of Paul, Tom Marino, and Jim Dorman for convening in this process and leading us forward. This planning journey began over two years ago and has included over 30 representatives of the congregation in three distinct and focused efforts. Each of the groups invested a significant amount of prayer, fasting, biblical discernment, and self-evaluation under the oversight of a church council and its 25 lay representatives. Young and old, long-term and new, men and women representing a wide cross-section of members methodically sought God's will for our church by the power of the Holy Spirit. For context and as a reminder.
[1:40] These three defining efforts included, first, the Next Step process affirmed our spiritual legacy and its values. We recommitted to Christ as our cornerstone and the authority of Scripture. The Next Steps Committee evaluated and recommended. The Council, and an overwhelming congregational vote approved our affiliation with the Global Methodist Church. Secondly, we updated our mission, vision, and values as we move into the future. A lay staff team with significant spiritual effort worked to refresh our core tenets. Many of you helped shape this work as part of the 469 respondents to the church survey. Overall, the survey showed we're a healthy, albeit not perfect, church. You rated strong our regular prayer, preaching, growing in your relationship with the Lord, and our stewardship of resources. You rated good with rooms to grow in worship and regular Bible study, and showing room for improvement and engagement as we live out our faith in service and witness. We should be encouraged. The strongest response on the survey was that we recommend our church to others. We are a firmly committed congregation.
[3:00] This cross-section committee of our church labored over every word, then was chosen carefully through much prayer and discernment, and recommended our new vision, mission, and value statements, which the church reviewed and approved. If you'll go to the second to the last page in your bulletin, I'd like to rehearse those to bring them to mind.
[3:23] Let's say them together. Our mission, we exist to glorify God and make disciples of Jesus Christ among all people. Our vision, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we magnify Jesus Christ as we make mature and mobilize disciples locally and globally. We worship passionately, love extravagantly, and witness boldly. We serve by caring for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. We spread scriptural holiness for the spiritual awakening of all peoples. And finally, our values. We, the body of Christ, act in love, move in faith, submit to the truth of scripture, commit to prayer and worship, and live and serve in community. This vision affirms our legacy. As Maxie once preached, we stand on the shoulders of giants. But it challenges us to move forward to meet our future.
[4:19] Now we are here to share the work of the third effort to define transcendent goals, to fully live out our mission and vision, and to establish signpost measurements that help us all be affirmed in where God is moving and where we can cultivate synergies to be more impactful. Again, a third group of lay and staff representatives recommended, and the church council reviewed and approved these new goals. Personally, I'm excited. All efforts represented deep commitment by godly representatives, vetted and broadly approved by leadership, and I believe the work of the Holy Spirit among us. We firmed our biblical call and our kingdom responsibility to worship, to grow, to replicate disciples and servants, and as the Apostle Paul shared in 1 Corinthians 9, to not run without a goal. We can celebrate our rich legacy, but the status quo is not sufficient.
[5:18] We need a culture of seeking the Lord's will and adapting how we reach into a rapidly changing world, challenging ourselves and improving as we grow closer to Him.
[5:30] Finally, we are better together, moving as one, building evidence, and gaining confidence that one day we will hear the Lord say, it is good and well done, good and faithful servants at Christ Methodist Church.
[5:54] Good morning. I'm Tom Marino. I am your lay leader. The lay leader works with the leadership of the church, both the staff and the congregation leadership to launch and strengthen our ministries that build and grow disciples. And that's our goal. So I'm on the church council And I'm on the three church committees And I go to a lot of meetings.
[6:26] Jana, my wife Jana and I Have been here for over 40 years We've raised our kids With many of your children We've worshipped here We've been a part of Sunday school Small groups, We've gone with many of you too. Into our own city through SOS and BDC and Cornerstone School and other ministries. And we've gone with some of you to places around the world to share the love of Jesus Christ. And we have appreciated and we cherish all of those times and memories and people. And our goal, our personal goal, has been to grow ourselves as disciples of Jesus Christ, along with you, Christ Methodist, our faith family. Robert has reminded us of our mission, our vision, and our core values, and is pointing us now to the goals that we're going to talk about here in just a minute. Goals that are, as they should be, very clear and very measurable. The two sayings are true.
[7:44] One, if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time, highlighting the importance of setting and keeping very clear goals in front of us. And then two, if it's worth doing, it's worth measuring. Highlighting, of course, the importance of tracking those very clear goals and the progress and the outcomes. And so we want to do both. We want to be very clear about where we're headed, what we're aiming at, our goals, and we want to know if we're hitting those targets, if we're meeting those goals. That's the measurement part. If you look on the final page of your bulletin this morning, you'll see on that last page, six very clear, very well-defined, and very measurable goals. And there's no surprises here. They fall in three categories of worship and discipleship and mission. Worship, discipleship, and mission. Again, no surprises. These are three core categories, right, of our following Jesus Christ and in our discipleship. And in each one of those, you'll see one, two, or maybe three goals that are attached to those in worship.
[9:13] We have a goal that all of us, not some of us, not most of us, all of us, 100% will be engaged in daily worship through Bible study, through praise, through prayer, through meditation on the scripture and on the goodness of God. We also want, obviously, to gather together, and we do that on Sundays to worship, and we'll be tracking that as well. We want attendance to grow during our worship on Sunday morning, but worship, as we see here, is more than a Sunday morning event in our lives. It's a daily ritual, an ongoing practice of discipleship. In discipleship, we want 100% of our membership involved in their own personal ongoing discipleship. So we're meeting with other believers weekly on a regular basis in Sunday school or in a small group or in a band. And if you're not a part of one of those, we hope that you would become one this year, a part of a small group intentionally focused on discipleship. We also want every one of our members, or a large number of our members, involved in discipling others, whether that's one-on-one or with a small group. So worship, discipleship, and mission.
[10:42] In mission, we have a goal that all of us will be engaged on a regular basis with one of the ministries that our church partners with, either locally or globally. And we've got about 25 or 30 ministry partners that Nathan and Stephanie in our missions department will be telling you more about as we again attempt to engage all of us in this activity.
[11:11] We hope that 20% of us over time will be involved in ministry teams. Again, you may not be familiar with a ministry team. There'll be more on that this year. But a ministry team focuses on really a need of great importance in our own city or in the world, such as housing or education. And then most intriguing and very exciting to me is this goal around planning new churches something that i have not been involved with in the past and i look forward to learning more and being more engaged in this and we will all be hearing more about that over these next few months.
[11:56] As we think about these goals, I want to point out two, I think, key pieces of our work that balance our work as, again, we intentionally focus in and drive towards meeting these goals. One is this.
[12:18] This is our work. This is our work. This is not the work of a few on the staff or in church leadership. It is the work of every member of our congregation.
[12:33] We have work to do, and it's important work. These goals, again, are for each of us, individually and collectively. God, in his goodness and in his mercy and in his wisdom, he thought it was a good idea to invite us to be a part of his work. Sometimes I wonder, I question his wisdom there. Is that a good idea? But he thinks it is. He wants us engaged in his mission, his vision, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that's not a fluff phrase. So let me say it again. By the power of the Holy Spirit, these goals will keep us focused. They'll keep us engaged and pressing on doing our part our part, to build God's kingdom in this church, in this city, and the world. We have work to do. And just a side note here, no one is the goal police here. Yes, we're going to measure this so that we can celebrate when we reach goals, so that we can encourage each other, we can adjust as we move forward, we can keep ourselves accountable.
[13:49] Again, no one's watching you like the gold police. This is our work. And number two, and here's the balance. This is our work. And this is God's work. This is God's work. What we're talking about here, it's his work. We've been preaching through, Paul and others have been preaching through the book of Corinthians, as we know, these last few weeks. And just a couple weeks ago, we came across the passage in chapter 3 of Corinthians, where the Apostle Paul talks about he and others are planting, they're sowing, they're watering the seed, they're working.
[14:32] Planting, watering. But who grows the seed? Who grows the seed? God. God grows the seed. This is God's work. It's our work, and this is God's work, and he invites us to be co-laborers.
[14:47] God has done great work here at Christ Methodist for 70 years, hasn't he? I know many of you, probably all of you, I hope, have experienced God in a powerful way, not just once, but I hope over and over through a ministry, a service, a worship, a relationship, something here at the church that we've met and known God. God has done good work here. I know he has in and for me. So 70 years, we celebrate. What about the next seven? What about the next 70? Paul writes in Ephesians chapter three, God can do anything. So when we think about the next seven years or the next 70, remember these words in Ephesians, God can do anything far more than we can ever imagine in our wildest dreams. So let me say that again.
[15:42] God can do anything far more than we can ever imagine in our wildest dreams. We have a great cloud of witnesses, the writer of Hebrews tells us, a great cloud of witnesses, disciples, believers, faithful believers who have gone on before us, who are cheering us on as we strive to serve the Lord with all our heart and soul and strength in mind. They're cheering us on. And the faithful disciples and believers who planted this church 70 years ago, they too, whether they're present or with the Lord, they're cheering us on as we think about the next generations to come here at this place. A cloud of witnesses cheering us on.
[16:36] 25 years ago, I ran in the Indian Steps race. I probably haven't run since then. I am not a runner. And many of y'all have run in that race. 25 years ago, I ran because our three sons, who were probably 14, 10, and 6 at the time, they all wanted to run in it. Now, our oldest two, they had been running by themselves. They were faster than me. I didn't even try to keep up with them. But the little one at that point, Mitchell, was probably five or six years old. Mitchell, his two big brothers had always been running. His dream, run in the In His Steps race. So that's what we're going to do. So we show up, and I tell Mitchell, look, Mitchell, this is a long race. We've got a long way to go. Take it easy. I'm going to stay right with you. We're together in this, okay? All right, and we're going to make it. And I'm thinking, this may take us an hour, but who cares? We're going to do this. And he's so excited. The gun goes off. Starting line, everybody takes off all the runners.
[17:35] Mitchell, at full speed, like a rocket, shoots off the starting line. And he's running as fast as he can for about 70 yards.
[17:46] And then it's over. Oh, my word. For the next three miles. Well, not quite three. I'll get to that in just a moment. For the next three miles, it's pain. It's suffering it's moaning it's crying it's i'm not going to make it it's struggling so i'm holding his hand i've got my arm around him i'm encouraging him come on mitchell just a little further not just a little further come on you're going to make it so the whole way i mean it is a painful experience we round the corner off of i can't remember what street it is on the grove park where you can see the finish line, or at least it was 25 years ago, the finish line. And there's a small crowd there encouraging the runners as they cross. Mitchell, who literally I have carried for half of the race. When he hears them call his name, they see him and they know him and they say, Mitchell, come on, you're doing great. You can do it. Mitchell leaves me in his dust. I'm nothing at that point and he fires through that finish line because of the encouragement and the praise and the adoration and the clapping and the cheering of this cloud of witnesses.
[19:09] We run this race together, cheering each other on, moving in the same direction, holding hands, linking arms, sometimes carrying each other, always God carrying us. May his kingdom come and may his will be done on earth in our lives at Christ Methodist from Binghampton to Bangladesh and to God be the glory and the majesty and the honor forever and ever Amen, Thank you.