Vision Casting

Vision Statement

To be a church that proclaims the love of Christ
by serving and building personal relationships with our community.

Vision Casting Process

Center Church has embarked upon a revitalization journey. We have a renewed commitment to seeking the Lord's calling for our church, so that we can redefine our priorities and focus our efforts to increase our impact.

Part of our journey has been to establish the vision above. In January 2020, church leadership commissioned a Vision Team which was tasked with prayerfully discerning God's will for Center Church.

The process used by the Vision Team to determine that vision is detailed below.

Focused on prayer and fellowship and trust in God's guidance.

When the Vision team first started meeting, we began by establishing the importance of trust on God's guidance through prayer and the holy spirit.

We proceeded to learn about one another through the sharing of testimonies and personal stories. This strengthened our dependence and open-mindedness with one another and trained us to listen for God's guidance.

Finally, we selected prayer partners to aid in openness to God's calling for our church and to personally support us.

Sought God's wisdom to establish the Vision Team's end goals.

Rooted in prayer, the Vision Team established a set of goals for the outcome of our work.

Our vision should enable us to:

increase our church's focus on reaching beyond the four walls of our church
reach un-churched and non-believing people in our community
build relationships with people as we serve
go beyond transactional or one-time events and interactions

Defined our focus and identified the needs of our community.

Realizing that our world, nation, and community have an abundance of need, we set our focus to an 8 mile radius of Grove City. Through a survey of religious and communal demographics of the Grove City area compiled using data from US Census information, we conducted data analysis to understand the make up and attributes of our community.

Through the course of several weeks, we prayed and evaluated the information contained in the survey and established themes and common attributes and characteristics of the community.

Refined our focus for our community engagement.

Through prayer, discussion, and survey information, we selected specific areas of need in the Grove City community where we felt Center Church would be able to have the greatest impacts through service and evangelism.

We determined that the needs appeared to be greatest in these two areas: spiritual yet un-churched individuals and resource deprived Grove City community members.

Evaluated local organizations to facilitate our goals for our church family.

We identified an extensive list of potential partner organizations that serve the Grove City community.

Once again, rooting our efforts in prayer, we discussed and refined the list of viable partnerships.

The selection process for the organizations included specific considerations, which included service of the Grove City community, openness to sharing the Gospel, and the ability to build long-term relationships with people.

Met with local organizations to align goals and openness to long-term partnerships to share the gospel.

Always starting with prayer for God's direction, the Vision Team met with a handful of potential partner organizations to discuss their openness and willingness to support Center Church's ability to serve, share the Gospel, and build relationships with people in the Grove City community.

Developed mutual purpose to use the strengths of our church family and reach the un-churched.

Bathed in prayer, the Vision Team further refined our list of potential partners and engaged in additional conversations and evaluations to leverage the strengths of our Church Family to serve, share the Gospel, and build relationships with people in the Grove City community.

At the conclusion of these conversations, the Vision Team was confident that our church was being led to partner with YoungLife Ministries to accomplish these goals.

Developed a draft vision statement to facilitate a way forward with refreshed focus.

Through prayer and conversation, the Vision Team established a working vision statement for Center Church to communicate focus and clarity on our refreshed way forward and to align our partnership with YoungLife Ministries to serve, share the Gospel and build relationships with the Grove City community.

Proposed a Plan For Implementation and Church and Community Engagement.

To complete the Vision Team's role and process, we made a recommendation to the Center Church Session that included the vision/focus of the way forward for Center Church and initiated the identification and engagement of an Implementation Team.

The resulting Vision Statement is: to be a church that proclaims the love of Christ by serving and building personal relationships with our community.