Mission and Values
OUR MISSION STATEMENT
Because of the grace, acceptance, and salvation we find in Jesus Christ, Florida Hospital Seventh-day Adventist Church exists to build relationships with God and people.
OUR VALUES
a work in progress
Below you will discover the shared values we hold to which we have given voice. We know you will benefit the most from your church membership if you are fully informed about our mission and share our values. Please read through the values below. If these values don’t resonate with you, then please arrange to discuss your concerns with an elder or pastor. If there’s still not a match you may want to investigate other church options in the area that will better match your needs. This is who we are at this point in time and we’d love to have you join us on our spiritual journey as we continue to develop what we value.
We Value Grace
We are people who have received grace and who seek to be grace extenders. Salvation is of God and his grace from beginning to end. There is nothing about our justification or sanctification for which we take any credit—it is all a work of God’s amazing grace.
We Value Being a Place of Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness
While our church’s beliefs are important, we believe Jesus’ teaching that the whole law is summed up in love to God and love to one another, and that the world will recognize us as followers of Jesus by the love we have for one another. This requires us to love, accept, and forgive one another.
We Value Being Nice
Most of the time this may be really easy, but even when we disagree, or are hurt, we still insist on being nice. Not being nice is always inappropriate. We respect one another and seek to be nice to everyone with whom we come in contact.
We Value Realness
Honesty and openness about who we are and our opinions, understandings, appreciation, or disappointment are important. We don’t like it when members of our church family try to be something they aren’t or seek to “impress.” We like people to be authentic and when this causes challenges, we work things out.
We Value Our Children
Resources are allocated disproportionately in the direction of our children and youth. This is why we support Orlando Junior Academy, Children’s Sabbath School, Children’s Choir, Puppet Ministry, Kings Kids, Family Night, Children and Youth in the service, and Student Renewal. This value is why we have a fulltime Youth Pastor and fulltme Children & Family Ministries Pastor.
We Value Seventh-day Adventism
There are positives and negatives about most everything on earth, and we seek to focus on the positive parts of our denomination. Even when we don’t agree with something in Seventh-day Adventism, we still value our culture, heritage, history and mission. Together as a world church we are accomplishing more than any individual church might alone. With honor we practice Christianity in the framework of the Seventh-day Adventist understanding.
We Value Tolerance for a Wide Spectrum of Religious Thought
Each person is at a different point on the spiritual journey. Movement in the right direction by each one is more significant than everyone lining up at the same point.
We Value All Common Ground With the Larger Body of Christ Inter-denominationally
We seek to work in harmony, rather than competition, with Christians of other denominations, knowing that we can learn from one another, and accomplish more for the kingdom together than we can alone. This is one of the factors behind our intentional celebrations of Christmas and Easter.
We Value Reaching Pre-Christian People by Christ’s Method
Christ mingled with people as a person interested in them. He met people’s needs, sympathized with them and won their confidence. Then in the safety of that relationship he invited them to follow him. That is how we seek to evangelize—every member is responsible to Jesus’ commission in Matthew 28. There is no waiting on some “professional” to do it for us. We are each individually responsible.
We Value Well Planned Seeker Friendly Worship
This value drives our current practice of providing two different styles of worship—contemporary and traditional. While worship is “for” believers, we intentionally work to make it easy for a pre-Christian to attend without feeling overly awkward.
We Value Active Member Participation
Every member is to find a place of service and to financially support the ministry of the church. We therefore recognize that a non-serving, non-giving “member” is an oxymoron. While a person may still have their name on our membership roles, their non-serving and non-giving identifies them as an attendee rather than a member.
We Value Trying New Stuff
We despise those dreaded words, “Its never been done that way,” as an excuse to abort an idea. Instead we gravitate toward doing things and trying ideas, especially because “it’s never been done that way.” Creativity, originality, and experimentation all support this value along with permission to fail. We really don’t ever “fail” when a new thing is attempted-we simply learn what doesn’t work in that situation.
We Value Sermons
We want Biblical, life-impacting sermons primarily delivered by our pastors. They should work to be in touch with the members’ lives, world events, local church issues, and be able to bring the Bible’s teaching to intersect with life. We are more interested in a life application message than in rhetoric. This is in keeping with our value of realness.
We Value Music and Creative Expressions of Worship
Just like people enjoying the taste of different foods, we value allowing a wide variety of tastes in music without unnecessarily irritating one another. We like to remind our critics that if they don’t care for the music in our worship service this week, come back next week and it will probably be different.
We Value Well Kept Facilities
We believe the place we assemble and hold public meetings reflects for or against our God and our teachings about God. Well kept they serve as an asset to our mission.
