Making much of Jesus • Being transformed by the Gospel
OUR MISSION: The Haven Church exists to glorify God by making disciples who love God, one another, and the world around us.
Matthew 28:19-20, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
OUR VISION: To be a refuge of the hope and healing of Jesus to the world around us.
The primary ethic that Jesus taught His followers to embody was love, a love that is rooted and grounded in the way He has loved us. After washing the disciples feet in the upper room, Jesus gave them this charge, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35.) The key identifying mark of a follower of Jesus is someone who puts His redemptive love on display in both their words and their deeds.
In order for the church to fulfill the Great Commission, we must also make it our aim live out the Greatest Commandment, “And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets’” (Matt 22:37-40).
At the Haven, it’s our desire that our Lord and Savior would be glorified in how we love others the way He has loved us. Jesus Christ prayed for those crucifying Him (Luke 23:34), feasted with moral outcasts (Luke 5:29), touched and cleansed the leper (Matt. 8:3), washed the dirty feet of His disciples (John 13:1-17), wept with those in grief (John 11:33-35) and the list goes on! Simply put, Jesus Christ welcomed the messy, broken and afflicted to come to Him just as they were, in order to receive the grace, salvation, freedom, and restoration that only He could bring. At the Haven, it is our hope that in us and through us Jesus would continue His ministry of reconciliation and restoration.
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18-19).
In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found.... That is our vocation [as Christians]: to convert the enemy into the guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced. - Henri J. Nouwen