Our Vision

At Eternity Church, we seek to live with a Sure Hope of eternal life in Heaven,
that’s only found through Faith in Jesus.
So, we want to be all about Jesus; Hearing the Gospel from the Bible, Living the Gospel in Loving Community, & Sharing the Gospel in Genuine Relationships.

As you might have noticed, our Vision isn’t very specific. For example, “To be a Church of 150 regular worshippers” or “To become a Church with a thriving youth ministry”. This is because we believe that who we are as followers of Jesus is more important to envisage than what we might look like as a Church, knowing that it’s who we are as a people in Christ that’ll endure through every season & circumstance. We believe that if we strive, by God’s grace, to being a people who are all about Jesus, then God will build his Church not just spiritually but also physically, where we’ll begin to see & experience outwardly the change God is doing inwardly in us as his people.

So let’s take a closer look at this Vision.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
[ 1 Peter 1:3-5 ]

Peter makes some amazing realities clear for us here. We have a ‘living’ hope – it’s real, it’s tangible, because it’s bound up in our living God. It’s a hope that’s alive & active, & it’s kept in Heaven for us. As in it’s a hope that’s not contingent & dependent upon earthly physical limitations. This makes it a sure & certain hope, one we can wager our whole life upon. Peter also tells us how this great hope of Heaven comes. It’s found through faith in Jesus – through faith in his gracious atoning on the cross & his glorious resurrection from the dead, which won that triumphant victory over Satan, sin, & death, which can bring us into right saving relationship with God, welcoming us home to Heaven.

Through faith in Jesus death & resurrection we’re born again as a new creation by the Holy Spirit, united to God’s very nature with a new identity as children of God, inheritors of this living hope; no longer dead in our sin, but alive in Christ, awaiting our new home where we are citizens of Heaven.

This is what our new Vision seeks to capture, that we’d seek to be a people who are living with this Sure Hope of eternal life in Heaven, one that’s only found through faith in Jesus. As we’ve been seeing this year, the Bible’s definition of “hope” isn’t the “wishful thinking” idea that the world uses, but the hope we’re called to have in Heaven is a guaranteed promise that hasn’t yet arrived. So this hope that we’re to live by is a longing for the day when our promise of eternal life in Heaven, that comes through our faith in Jesus, becomes our reality.

So this is to be a hope that drives us, that empowers us, that brings joy & security. A hope that encourages us to live gospel motivated lives, not materialistic self-centred lives, as we continue to grow in faith in Jesus as the only source of that real hope. Many people may say that salvation can be found in other religions or that it’s not needed at all, but we believe that Jesus is the undeniable answer to the unavoidable question of all life, & that he alone can bring us the salvation we desperately need from our sin.
Only Jesus can make us truly whole, complete, & satisfied, & can bring us real life & transforming hope.

So….we want to be all about Jesus; Hearing the Gospel from the Bible, Living the Gospel in Loving Community, & Sharing the Gospel in Genuine Relationships.

“So faith comes from hearing, & hearing through the word of Christ.”
[Romans 10:17 ]
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
[ Galatians 2:20 ]
“and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ.”
[ Philemon 1:6 ]

As a people who are seeking to live with a sure hope that’s only found through faith in Jesus, we want to be all about Jesus.
This is for our sake that our faith would continue to grow & strengthen, but most importantly that others may find this same hope as they come to know Jesus. As we see in Colossians, this means being a people who have the Word of Christ – the uttermost importance of Jesus, as central in our life, & as Philippians teaches us, the next step is to live this out on gospel mission in your life to see Jesus shared & proclaimed. What this all looks like is us being a people who are seeking to Hear, Live, & Share the Gospel message of Jesus in all that we do, that we might be built up in faith & that others might come to find it.

It all starts with Hearing. As Paul says in Romans 10:17, faith comes through hearing – hearing what? Hearing the Word of Christ; the message of Jesus, the Gospel. For us & those we meet to live by a sure hope of Heaven we must come to faith in Jesus, & faith in Jesus comes through Hearing the Gospel. Through hearing & believing those saving words of the eternal message of Jesus, of his death & resurrection, through immersing ourselves in our Bibles. Then how is that faith in Jesus expressed? Through Living the Gospel. As Galatians 2:20 challenges us that it’s no longer our life but Christ’s, living & committing to Jesus as the Lord & King of our life, that everything we do would be done for Jesus, where we’d taste the amazing reality of being saved with our life standing as an example of faith in Jesus to everyone around us. Then how does faith in Jesus continue? Through Sharing the Gospel. In Philemon 1:6, Paul prays that our sharing of our faith would be effective for what reason? For the sake of Christ, for the spreading of the Gospel going out to save the lost. Faith in Jesus continues to spread through followers of Jesus being intentional & unashamed to share Jesus with those around them, that they also may in turn be encouraged in their own faith through hearing it afresh.

Hearing, Living, & Sharing the Gospel are embedded into the life of our Church Community, to see our individual lives as followers of Jesus & the ministries we invest in as a Church Family; shaped by this Vision. In some ways this impacts what we do practically – redevelopment projects, starting new ministries, or what we do on Sundays. In other ways it’ll make more of an impact behind the scenes through how we plan, think, or shape who we are as a Church. It sets the course on what we preach on Sundays, what we explore in our Community Groups, what our Elders & Committee reads, & right down to encouraging & challenging us on a weekly basis about where our heart should be as we live alongside our neighbours & friends.
Amongst the many ways this new Vision will mould & mature our Church Family, our core prayerful desire is that we’d become a people who are intentional & deliberate about Jesus, with a concrete personal conviction about Jesus, that he would be known everywhere as we live for him, to see God glorified in our lives & in the lives of others.

The Gold Coast is alive with big dreams of abundant lifestyles & prosperity, but the people of our city need to hear that the only real & abundant life is found in the giver of life itself – our great Father God in Heaven, through our great Lord & Saviour Jesus, made alive & renewed in our heart by the Holy Spirit. This is the life-saving message we must proclaim to the Gold Coast through us Hearing it, Living it, & Sharing it.

If we as a Church are being intentional about Hearing the Gospel we will be a people who are making it possible for others to as well.
If we as a Church Family are being deliberate about Living the Gospel we will be a people who are speaking & exampling the truth of Jesus, to introduce him to some & to spur others on in their faith.
If we as a Church Family are being genuine about Sharing the Gospel, we will be a people who are a light for Jesus & a beacon of hope in a world that’s desperately searching, amidst the darkness of life without God.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
[ Romans 15:13 ]
As we sit amidst a city that’s booming, we want to pray that God would shape, mature, grow, & empower us as his people, centred on the Gospel, being all about Jesus, firmly fixed & inspired by our Hope of Heaven, to embrace this growing responsibility of taking Jesus to the lost. That by God’s grace & by the Holy Spirit, not through any means of our own, we would have the privilege to proclaim the everlasting hope that we have in Jesus.

Here at Eternity Church we seek to Hear, Live, & Share the Gospel, through local Church based activities (Church Family Ministries), through encouraging us as a Church family to be living, serving, & supporting each other in Christian community (Group Ministries), through local community based activities (Community Ministries), through equipping each other to witness to our family, friends, neighbourhoods, & workmates (Training Ministries), through growing Churches & starting new ones (Church Planting), & through partnering with God’s people all around the world (Those we Partner With).