Serve
Fulfilling God’s Vision To Seek, Share, and Serve
In the fall of 2005, First Presbyterian Church of Orlando adopted a vision for the future that centered on three words: Seek, Share, and Serve. These three words, flowing out of the Scriptures, encapsulate the focus of our ministry for the future as we seek to consistently move people along a path toward spiritual maturity, becoming fully committed disciples of Jesus Christ. As we grow in this understanding, we will be enabling our people to seek God through worship and study, share His love through personal relationships and outreach, and humbly serve a broken world by extending our ministry to those in need in our community and around the world, thus becoming a church centered in Christ and obedient to His call upon our lives.
Humbly SERVE a broken world
“Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.” -Acts 2:45
The beauty of the gospel is that it compels you outward. When Christ captures the heart, you cannot help but love and serve what God loves and cares about: the needy, the outcast, the broken, the poor, the widow, the alien. We find these people in all walks of life–rich and poor, young and old, local and distant–we are inherently a global church. We are not merely about our own spiritual growth and comfort, but we are compelled to meet the needs of a hurting world as Christ did.
By virtue of our worship, our study, and our relationships in community, we are empowered and compelled beyond our four walls. As we grow in Christ, we will increasingly want what God wants. We will become aware that our purpose is not to be about our lives and our needs, but to be about God’s plan and purpose–the extension of His Kingdom around the world. That extension begins in our community–in our backyard–and flows on to the four corners of the globe.
We engage in service not as a duty or a moral obligation, but out of a profound sense of humility and gratitude toward God for having redeemed our own sinful, broken lives. Such humble service, faithfully poured out, has the power to not only change individual lives, but our world as well. Throughout the Scripture, we find that God wants His people to engage those in need as Jesus did. God’s heart breaks for those in need and so should ours. This is who we SERVE. We serve those in need, those who hurt, those who are poor, lonely and outcast both in our community and around the world.