2nd Corinthians, chapter 1,

23 through chapter 2, verse 4.

But I call God to witness against me. It was to spare you that I refrained from coming to Corinth.

Not that we lord it over your faith. We work with you for your joy, for you stand firm and your faith.

For I made up my mind not to make you another painful visit.

For if I cause you pain, who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have pained?

And I wrote as I did so that when I came, I might not be pained by those who should have made me rejoice.

For I felt sure of all of you that my joy would be the joy of you all.

For I wrote you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears not to cause

you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.

Four years ago, the church expressed its sense of priorities like this.

We exist as a church to enjoy God in worship, to minister to each other, in

nurture, and to evangelize in missions or to reach out to unbelievers in evangelism and missions.

And nothing has changed in terms of those three priorities. We still have those three basic

goals as a church. But now we're talking in terms that are slightly different. Now we like to say Bethlehem is a vision of God and we exist for

three purposes to savor the vision in worship, to instill the vision in nurture, and to spread the vision in

evangelism and world missions.

And the reason for the new terminology is on the one hand

simply to reassert that the philosophy of ministry is alive and well at Bethley

and we still use these criteria to measure our successes and weigh priorities.

And secondly, it's valuable because these words that I've just used draw more closely attention to the centrality

of God not only in our vertical act of worship, but in the horizontal acts of nurture and evangelism.

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