MCC’s Vision
Our vision as a church is to be a vibrant community of people from various backgrounds and traditions who are followers of Jesus Christ, enjoy God’s presence together and share His love with others. Working in partnership with the other local Christian churches, our hope is to allow every person in our area the opportunity to encounter, explore and respond to the amazing message of God’s love and grace through His Son Jesus Christ and to play our part in God’s building of his kingdom around the world.
As we ourselves respond to God’s grace, we want our church to be a spiritual family that is:
i. Grounded in the Bible’s Teaching and in the Ancient Creeds of the Church
In common with the Christians throughout the centuries MCC looks to the Bible (Old Testament and New) as our primary source of truth and doctrine, and to the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds as the basic expressions of our faith. Accepting light from any quarter, we want to benefit from all the insight and learning of the Church’s history and present, and to faithfully apply the Bible’s teaching to our context as we participate in shaping the Church’s future.
ii. Centred on the Good News of the Gospel
As John puts it in I John 4:19, ‘We love because God first loved us.’ We want every person in MCC to understand this and to grasp the full breadth of the ‘gospel story’ right through from Genesis to Revelation. Our desire is that all our members (and friends) would be able to see how their everyday lives at home, at work and in relationship fit within that big story of God’s redemptive purposes for the world and to joyfully play their part in the working out of that story.
iii. Focussed on Worship, Discipleship, Community and Mission
We believe these are the four primary areas of response that emerge from the Gospel and from the whole story of the Bible.
In Worship, we want to help people come to know and love the God who created them with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. We want to become more and more a community who does this and which sees all of life as a worshipful response to our God, His amazing initiative towards us and His Holy character.
We want to be always willing to reconsider/retool our Sunday “liturgy”–for a Sunday or a season–to benefit from the differing gifts that God provides through different worship leaders and teams, and be ever more effective at inviting those God might bring to our community to the kind of transformational worship that would cause them to exclaim, “God is really among you!” (1 Cor 14:25).
In doing this want to make space for all the gifts of the Holy Spirit while at the same time keeping worship an understandable and “safe place” for our newcomers.
In Discipleship, we want to help people encounter and become wholehearted followers of Jesus in their lives and to be transformed into his likeness. We want to be a church in which God’s word is known, preached, studied and read, and a people who allow God’s Spirit to increasingly empower and lead us. We want to help people become nurturers of their own relationship with God, utilizing the spiritual disciplines (eg. prayer, bible study, service), life on life discipleship and the opportunity for deep, authentic community provided by various kinds of small groups.
In Community we want to care for and equip one another to live lives that are centred in and glorifying to God. We want to be a place where people are accepted, loved, challenged, equipped and commissioned as a result of God’s presence amongst us. We want to challenge the radical individualism of our culture and to overcome the racial, social and cultural divides that would keep us from being a genuine Christian community.
We want to share and develop our experience of community with the other churches within Maynooth and develop close and mutually encouraging relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ in those churches.
In Mission, motivated by love for God and love for our neighbours, we want to bear witness to all in our community, and beyond, concerning what God has done in Christ and what the Gospel now makes possible for us. We want to see evangelism and mission at the heart of our identity as a church and enable each of our members to see their place within the missionary calling of the wider church. We want to see a culture of ‘missional innovation’ emerge within MCC where people understand and participate in their own personal interests and social networks as fields for authentic mission. We want to engage fully with issues such as poverty, injustice and reconciliation and to use our people and financial resources on behalf of those in most need in our area and around the world.
iv. Empowered by the Holy Spirit
Our desire is to be a community that is empowered and transformed by God’s Spirit as was that of the first Christians on the day of Pentecost. We want to be a church that is enlivened by God’s presence and which listens carefully for what he has to say to us and for what he would call us to do in his name. We want to be a place where people can learn what it is to abide in Christ and to draw from his strength and power in their daily lives.
v. In Partnership with and Accountable to the wider Church
As a congregation we are linked into the wider Presbyterian Church in Ireland and are supported by and accountable to this wider body for our faith, teaching and practice. As we develop we want to build mutually supportive partnerships with PCI congregations around the island. We also want to do the same within our local community and to work in ministry together in North Co. Kildare with all who share our faith in Jesus, whatever their background, nationality or tradition.