The Church
The church is of God and for people. It is His creation. Christ is its head. The church is the people of God chosen for a purposeful partnership in accomplishing the will of God on earth. More than 80 metaphors and word pictures relating to the church appear in the New Testament. Each portrays a more profound reality than does the picture it brings to mind. The pictures together make clear the nature and mission of the church. Paul speaks of the church as “body,” “building,” and “bride.” The most inclusive and perhaps the most significant metaphor is “body of Christ.” The redeemed are spoken of as “members of the body.” The New Testament reminds us that the church visible is not the church ideal. Because the church is a divine-human partnership, sharing not only in the holy love of its Founder but in the blemishes of its humanity, it is ever in need of renewal. When the church is acting under the headship of its Lord and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it continues the story begun in the book of Acts. Many are its wonderful achievements since the First Century, and many more are yet to be realized in the unfolding drama of the acts of the Holy Spirit through redeemed people.
Our Denominational Mission
The Free Methodist Church exists to make known to all people everywhere God’s call to wholeness through forgiveness and holiness in Jesus Christ, and to invite into membership and to equip for ministry all who respond in faith.
Our Purpose
The McPherson Free Methodist Church is a worshipping community, seeking to love God and others, and to make disciples for Christ. We desire to know God and to glorify Him by making Him known.
Our Core Values
- To be missional people: We recognize the imperative to GO…that abundant life in Jesus Christ is lived out with loved ones, friends, strangers, and acquaintances in the marketplace, in the home, in the neighborhood, and in the world. We befriend those who are spiritually lost, present and explain the Gospel in culturally relevant ways, and invite them to trust Christ Jesus as Savior.
- To be prayerful people: We choose to speak to God on behalf of a lost world, praying first, acting second. We intercede for individuals, rulers and nations to yield to the ultimate victory of Christ, and listen to the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, we pray in response to God’s movement toward us, wanting nothing more or less than to know the Father better and live like Jesus in any and all circumstances of life.
- To be worshiping people: We understand that the worship of God is the central activity of God’s people, the undergirding reality of all of life. For thousands of years this life of worship has been shaped and nourished by special gatherings, and by daily weekly and personal worship in which God is praised and His saving acts recounted.
- To be disciple-making people: We desire to connect all who wish to know Christ to groups or ministry teams, nurturing believers toward Christ-likeness, obedient love, welcoming them into membership…in a word, encouraging and training them to become by grace what God is by nature.
- To be reproducing people: We value the development of the next generation of pastoral and lay leaders, assist in the establishment and support of church plants, and encourage both men and women to listen carefully for God’s call upon their lives to serve him, clergy and laity alike.
- To be Bible-centered people: We believe the Bible is God’s written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It bears unerring witness to Jesus Christ, the living Word, and has authority over all of human life. God continues, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, to speak through this Word to each generation and culture.
- To be holy people: We seek to live holy lives to the glory of God, to “love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love others as we love ourselves,” (Mark 12:30-31) and to prepare ourselves for greater growth in grace.