Welcome to SMB!
Welcome to the St Mary Bredin website. It’s great to have you with us. Thank you for reading this intro, which we hope will give you a good picture of who we are.
In terms of our vision, we hope and believe God is making a diverse group of people into a community where everyone can ‘Worship God, build His Church and love the world’.
We are committed to transformation. We aim to be a community of people whose identity and purpose are being shaped by the person and work of Jesus Christ.
We also hope that as we serve the community in Canterbury and this area of Kent, others will experience change through the unconditional love of God.
We would love you to join us.
In a nutshell...
So that you have an idea of where we are coming from, here are our three core beliefs about church:
church belongs to God
We believe that God must be allowed to do with his church what he wills. He's protected us and he has caused us to grow. We seek to follow God's direction as he works through us.
church belongs to the people of God
Obviously people are very different and this always poses a challenge for anyone wanting to bring them together for a common purpose. We aim to establish a community life which diverse people can own and where everyone can play!
We have come to believe that some people are motivated above all else by such values as risk-taking, impact-making and stimulation and we call them 'adventurers'. Others are more motivated by relationship, friendship and acceptance and we call them 'carers' and there are those who value integrity, honesty and authenticity and we refer to them as 'truth-tellers'. We believe that people reflect these important drives or motivations in different balances and although we are all meant to grow up into mature expressions of the lot, we tend to identify more readily with two out of the three sets of values. We believe these drives reflect real differences of temperament and that it is important to understand what motivates you because it is indicative of the kinds of gifts you have, the aspects of spirituality you will find easier and the kinds of people you will find more difficult!
Generally, churches don't reflect all of these drives properly and tend to turn their distinctive visions into the drives with which the leader is most comfortable. Hence some churches are evangelistic and some are more pastoral etc.
In our view church is church. This means that we must give full expression to adventuring gifts (apostolic and evangelistic), caring gifts (pastoral) and truth telling gifts (teaching and prophesy). None are optional. The absence of the right functioning of any one causes the church to remain immature.
We are an immature church. But we are trying to grow up.
church must be religion free
We aim to do church in a religion free way on the theory that religion is the height of our rebellion against God. We believe that the content of the Gospel should remain the same whilst the ways in which it is proclaimed, celebrated and lived out must change according to context. This has led us to a radical attempt to lower or remove the boundaries of traditional church culture so that people who don't normally go to church or those who have been disaffected by their experience of church can find what we do to be as accessible as possible.
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