Purpose and Mission

We believe that Jesus has made the purpose and mission of every Christian and every church clear in Scripture, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

Our purpose and mission can be summarised by The Greatest Commandments (Matt 22:36-40) and The Great Commission (Matt 28:19-20). As a church we strive to live our lives around the Commandments and the Commission.

• Love God (Matt 22:36-40)
• Love Others (Matt 22:36-40)
• Make Disciples (Matt 28:19-20)

Core Values

As a church, we seek to live in accordance with our core values. This means we seek to be a community that is:

Gospel Centred

Tim Keller says that the gospel is not the ABCs of the Christian life but the A-Z of the Christian life. The gospel is important not just for our justification at the moment of conversion, but also for sanctification, becoming more and more like Jesus until the day we die and go to be with Jesus in glory.

That means that we never “graduate” from the gospel. It is always central to the Christian life.

The gospel is the fountain from which all doctrine and Christian practice spring. We aim to keep the gospel the main thing.

A Transcultural Community

The glorious, ultimate picture of the church that we see in Revelation (7:9-12) is a people of God from every nation, tribe, people and language. The amazing thing is that we don’t lose our unique culture and language and become assimilated into a heavenly monoculture. Each tribe and people’s culture and language is preserved in the midst of a mosaic of heavenly culture.

We see unity in diversity.

We believe that the local church should be a foretaste of heaven. If the ultimate church in heaven is a movie, then the local church should be a trailer. To this end, we want to pursue a transcultural community. A community that reflects and embraces the diversity of its context, but the power of the gospel transcends it and creates one new community in Christ. This is particularly relevant in our context which SBS names the most ethnically diverse suburb in all of Australia.

Missional

Charles Spurgeon famously said, “every Christian is a missionary or an imposter”. This does not mean that every Christian should quit their job and travel to a faraway land to proclaim the gospel. Instead, it means that every Christian should be obedient to the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations.

Every disciple of Christ should be a disciple maker.

It is our hope that as we proclaim this gospel in the city of Monash that many would repent and put their faith in Jesus and be reconciled to God.

Beliefs

We are a Christian church in the Baptist tradition. Our beliefs are summarised in the Baptist doctrinal basis.

We believe in:

• The divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
• The existence of one God in three persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• The deity and incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity.
• The fallen, sinful and lost estate of all people.
• The salvation of men and women from the penal consequences and power of sin through the perfect obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ, His atoning death, His resurrection from the dead, His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and His unchanging priesthood.
• The immediate work of the Holy Spirit in the regeneration of men and women, in their sanctification, and in their preservation to the heavenly Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.
• The necessity, in order to know salvation, of repentance towards God and of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
• The resurrection of the dead, and the final judgment of all people by the Lord Jesus Christ.
• The two ordinances of the Lord Jesus Christ, namely Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which are of perpetual obligation: Baptism being the immersion of believers upon the profession of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and a symbol of the fellowship of the regenerate in His death, burial and resurrection; the Lord’s Supper being a memorial, until He comes, of the sacrifice of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.