We engage and equip.
The vision of Missio Dei Church is to engage and equip disciples who are on mission to share the gospel. If you think of mission as an answer to the question “where are we going,” then vision answers the question “how are we going to get there.”
We seek to move toward our mission along the path of discipleship in two parts:
Engage
For people lost in their sins, hardened in their hearts, and darkened in their understanding, discipleship begins the same way – the call of the gospel goes out and the Holy Spirit transforms lives through it (Matthew 22:14; John 3:5-8; Acts 13:48; 16:14; Ephesians 2:1-10; 1 Thessalonians 1:4). In this way evangelism and discipleship are intimately connected. In fact, you could say the first stage of discipleship is that an unbeliever becomes a believer through the spread of the gospel (Matthew 28:19). To engage disciples means sharing our faith, spreading the gospel, worshipping our Lord (1 Corinthians 14:16), loving the church (John 13:35), and doing good works (1 Peter 2:12) so that people might come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
Equip
The second stage of discipleship involves the growth in godliness and maturity of the believer (1 Corinthians 3:2; Colossians 1:28; Hebrews 5:12-14; 12:14). This process does not end in a person’s lifetime. The whole of the Christian life is one of sanctification (Hebrews 10:14) – being changed to look more like Jesus (Romans 8:29) through the Word, sacraments, and life together in the community of faith (1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Ephesians 4:11-12). Equipping is not fundamentally or finally a program of the church, but an organic process whereby a person serves and is served in the context of the local church.