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 also envision participating in the education of these planters as well through a seminary partnership where residency contributes to a future planter’s seminary training.

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, we are working to establish microenterprise in Malawi. In addition to micro-business 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), etc. In our initial thrust we were blown away at the generosity of our church. Enough money was raised to start about ninety families on the road to providing for themselves, and doing so with dignity.

In 2006 we dream of expanding our ministry across the border into Mozambique. Our prayer and dream is that God will allow us to change the face of this nation – providing it with a local economy that allows hard working people to provide for themselves. We pray that in the years to come we will be able to follow the economic development with the start of an indigenous church planting movement there as well. We plan to send a team there annually to attend to the people’s needs, and some members of Life are already praying and preparing for long term service there.

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.