As our vision states, we dream of changed people. We want to be people who look like Jesus, leaning into his work of transforming us into his image. If this is happening, it means we will be agents of change as well – living as God’s missionary people in and beyond the South Bay – helping people come to faith in Christ, and celebrating the kingdom of God as it breaks in around us.

If the Lord blesses us with growth, we hope to express that growth primarily through planting more churches. Our prayer, hope, burden, and dream is that God would allow us to plant 1000 churches around the world. In our early years, we hope to plant a church every year, and hopefully even more than that in the years to come (all of which would also be committed to planting more churches). To this end, we dream of establishing positions on our staff for "church planters in residence," where pastors can serve with us while they become more familiar with the nuts and blots of church planting, and then be sent out to plant when the time is right.

We believe that when we pray "your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," that a responsibility falls on us to do our part to make this prayer a reality. At Life we feel a special burden and call toward the continent of Africa. The crushing poverty and AIDS pandemic make it, in our opinion, the crisis of our time that Christians must respond to. Through Opportunity International (www.opportunity.org), we are working to establish microenterprise in Mozambique. Through small loans, those who have no means of supporting themselves are given the opportunity to start a small business and provide for themselves with hope and dignity. In addition to loans, Opportunity provides training for its clients in how to run a business, AIDS awareness, the importance of getting one’s children educated (to break the cycle of poverty before it is passed on to the next generation), basic banking services, life and crop insurance, etc. Our congregation has been extremely generous in this, and to date we have given enough to see about two thousand families given the means to support themselves and begin the journey out of poverty.

Our work in Mozambique has expanded to include support for a seminary which provides much needed training for church planters (Mozambique is the least churched country in southern Africa, and home to three people groups who have no church presence), and an amazing orphanage which is caring for children at risk.

We dream of being used of the Lord to bring change locally and globally, and pray that he will make us the kind of church that if it ever closed its doors the city would rise up in protest.