Mission and Vision of ACOP

[Zach]

Extending grace in this local context looks a lot like being willing to engage with people, listen to them and their stories, and be able and willing by God’s grace to extend a fresh invite to them. It seems as though too often people get familiar with each other and categorize one another based on past experiences. Extending grace could mean allowing opportunities to know and be known in fresh, new, and inviting ways. Globally, it could mean being willing to make contributions to support, engage with, and empower those who make God’s love known but who are beyond our immediate sphere of influence, in ways that may never actually materially benefit us at all. The opportunity to participate even financially in extending God’s grace globally, is a powerful opportunity to help mold a culture that looks beyond its immediate environment, need, and even mission field and sees something bigger than its immediate vicinity. A vision and mission bigger than your immediate “area,” can powerfully shape the culture of an organization towards being outward looking, not insular, and prevents it from sinking into self-obsession with its own welfare and the inevitable decline into the self-preserving inertia that ends so many movements.

[Jaylen]

When a group of people who are committed to Christ begin to actively apply God’s call on their lives, the things of God start to happen. When you look at that objectively, it would be considered culture. The ways people are behaving and the types of things people are doing all in all create culture. It isn’t statements made, it isn’t what the preacher preaches, culture can’t be forced or faked, it culture is simply a sign of what is truly going on in the given groups.
So if we are called to be an apostolic group, then it takes each person in the group (or at the very least, the vast majority) to enact such behaviors in order to build and create such a culture. So it’s important that if we are to be a part of the ACOP, we are also of the mind to mimic the behaviors and culture of the apostles in the book of Acts.

[Kimberly]

Extending God’s grace in my community often is how I respond and react to those around me. We have a lot of homeless around us, and my family is also engaged with the special needs community – so we have a lot of opportunity to love those that may be excluded from the general population. We try our best to engage with them in a loving way, and show them that God loves them the same way He loves myself, or anyone else in the church.

[Merodee]

Respond in paragraph format to the following prompt(s):

"ACOP is a global movement of passionate people extending God's grace and igniting hope in every community." What does it mean to extend God's grace in your local context? How about globally?

How do the vision and mission affect the culture of an organization?

Bill Johnson says "Apostolic teams are not necessarily made up of just apostles and prophets. They are a group of people that carry an "apostolic mission" without selfish agendas. They are sent by leadership, entrusted with delegated authority to establish God's rule in their realm of experience and expertise. When they go with that heart they carry an apostolic anointing because they function under the umbrella of apostolic authority." Why are apostolic teams important?

We live in a small rural community. I think one of the significant ways that we extend God’s grace is by living life with others. When the Family lives in the over-flow of Jesus; then their every-day lives become ways of extending God’s unmerited kindness and favour to others and our community. When extending God’s grace to our community becomes our vision then being God’s grace becomes our mission.

People smarter than me have proven that people act from their belief system. We do not act our way to right believing. We believe our way to right acting. If we believe in a godly and community-changing vision and mission then our actions will create and sustain a culture in kind.

Apostolic teams are so important because they are God’s idea. God’s ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. The Biblical model of the Body of Christ is Christ as our head and all believers forming up his Body (an apostolic team). We now just adapt this model in smaller communities to work as part of the larger whole.