Our Vision, Values, and Priorities
Our Journey:
St. Philip & St. James, Hucclecote, was founded in 1851. We have been through different seasons through the intervening years, and celebrate all who have been part of that story.
In 2025, we began a process of exploring who God is calling us to be and what God is calling us to do in the coming 5 years. Through prayer (talking and listening to God) and conversation we have come to believe that the vision, values, and priorities below express what we have heard. These are an expression of both where we find ourselves now and who we feel we are being invited and called to become.
Connection and relationship with God, one another, our communities, and the world have been a common thread woven through so many of the conversations and responses. God has given us a heart for connection.
God models connection within themselves in the relationships between the three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Bible and history point to God’s desire for connection with us. We seek to partner with God as we live out these vision, values, and priorities in the years ahead.
Vision:
Our vision of who we are called to be and who we are becoming with the help of God is:
Journeying with Jesus, come walk with us
Each of us is on a journey with Jesus. None of us is the finished article. We seek to share that journey openly.
Values:
We have 5 values which we feel encapsulate who we are and who we are becoming. They are:
· Loving like Jesus
Jesus taught his followers to love God, their neighbour, and themselves. We seek to model our lives after this teaching.
· Welcoming all
We seek to be welcoming to everyone and anyone, expressing God’s love through action as well as word. God has given us a heart for the communities we find ourselves a part of.
· Living prayerfully
We believe that we are invited into relationship by God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. We seek to be attentive to that relationship through a variety of forms of prayer, from those spoken aloud or in the quiet of our hearts, to our whole life being a prayer to God.
· Committed to the Word of God
We value the Bible as a unique source of God’s teaching for us. We seek to take it seriously, aware that it may speak in different ways to different people.
· Encouraging people to become who God invites them to be
We believe that everyone is made in the image of God with gifts and potential, and that Jesus came so that we might all have life in all it’s fullness. We seek to encourage and enable everyone to hear and respond to that invitation from God, through the Holy Spirit, to go on exploring and realising our God-given potential.
Priorities:
Our priorities for the coming 5 years can be expressed as:
· Deeper Connections
God has given us a heart for relationship and community. We are seeking to nurture and deepen our connections with God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and where God is at work in one another, ourselves, our community, and the world. We are also seeking deeper connections with one another, with our community, with the person God made us to be and invites us to become, and with God’s creation.
· Enabling Growth
We want to see people grow in faith and love of God, to see more people experience the love of God for themselves and to encounter God in new ways. We seek to grow in healthy ways and to encourage the flourishing of all.
· Treasuring our Environment
We seek to ensure that both the world and the grounds and buildings belonging to our church can be enjoyed by everyone and are fit for God’s purposes for generations to come.
Vision Prayer:
At the start of our vision process in Summer 2025 our group for secondary-age young adults (Core Group) wrote the following prayer for use during our Vision Process. Please feel free to use it during private and group prayer.
Dear God,
Thank You for walking with us through hard times and for giving us a space where we can be ourselves – where we can share our thoughts, our faith, and worship You without fear or judgement.
As we move forward, help us to listen - really listen – to You and to each other. Give us open hearts and minds. Help us to make wise choices that bring us closer to You. Shape a church that feels like home and speaks to everyone, especially younger generations. Help us build something welcoming and real. Let it be a place full of love, honesty, and purpose.
Amen.
Collecting our thoughts:
A more expansive document with summarises what we felt we heard during this process can be read in the link below, along with a pdf version of the information on this page. We hope that these will not just be documents to file away, but resources to help guide, remind, and challenge us on our journey.