Our Mission
As believers in Christ in Southwestern Rhode Island, our mission is to make God famous by living and communicating His amazing love, so people will enjoy a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and each other.

Our Vision
We feel that the most effective way to transfer the message of Jesus Christ to others is by developing close and meaningful relationships with those around us.  We also feel that relationships are key to discipling believers out of bondage and into a closer relationship with our God.  For this reason, we believe that the key to church growth in South County is through ministry in small groups.  We wish to form small groups for discipling new believers and reaching people with the message of Christ.  As our small group ministry grows, we will propagate by creating new small groups.

While our ministry will emphasize involvement in small groups, we do intend to meet together as a community of believers in fellowship, prayer, and song.

Our objective is to focus on growth by transforming the lives of unbelievers.  While believers are certainly welcome, we warn you that involvement here is not for the weak at heart and our emphasis will remain on spreading the good news of Jesus Christ.

We are also committed to establishing strong marriages in our communities.  In our time, divorce has become so commonplace that our society hardly emphasizes its significance.  Ultimately broken marriages lead to wounded children, loneliness, and lack of continuity in the life of a family.  One of our goals is to help men and women in the community form stronger marriages, repair their broken marriages, and place their relationships with God at the center of their marriages.

Our History
Our church began with the vision of Pastor Bob Williams of Grace Fellowship Evangelical Free Church in North Stonington, CT to plant a new church in southern New England  in 1996.  In 2001 Russ and Carol Hadley were invited to lead the new church.  In 2002, Russ and Carol focused on Niantic, CT, with weekly bible studies.  As more people became involved from Rhode Island, the bible studies were moved to the Knight home in Westerly, RI in 2003.

In August 2005, a team of nine believers formed a launch team and have been meeting together regularly since.  One of the most encouraging things about the no one was invited or recruited to the launch team.  God spoke to each person and family individually.  The launch team has worked together to establish a direction for the church and to formulate core values on which we base our ministry.  Our Thursday night bible studies have evolved into a time for fellowship, worship in song, prayer, and teaching.  The Thursday night meetings have grown to include as many as 25 people at some times and the Knights have added onto their home to provide more room.  In addition to the Thursday night meetings the group has been meeting on Sunday nights, with one service per month at Cross Mills Public Library up the coast in Charlestown, RI.  In recent months, the White family has purchased a home on Pierce Street in Westerly, RI, where we soon hope to begin a new ministry.

Our Core Values
We are committed to:

1.  The Authority of the Bible

We recognize the Bible as the authoritative written Word of God against which we weigh all our teaching, preaching, decisions and actions. We believe the Bible is culturally relevant, the source of God’s revealed Truth for our lives, and should be considered in its entirety.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

2.  Individual and Group Prayer

We believe that through our prayers in Jesus’ name, God chooses to unleash His power in situations and people, in fact, God has ordered His people to continuous, faithful prayer.

We wish to live out our belief that prayer is the starting point, the sustaining source of power and an important part of everything we do. When we pray, we experience the peace and presence of God in our collective activities and in our personal relationship with Him.

Much as in the military, where all the units must work in coordination with the higher authority to accomplish the mission, prayer connects us to God and makes it possible to hear and understand His purposes and fulfill them. Our Enemy, desiring to neutralize us, will attempt to keep us from prayer at all costs.

God has a way of touching people deeply through prayer, leading to the vulnerability and humility necessary to produce reconciliation with God and others. We believe regular collective prayer makes possible unity, committed friendships and healthy intimacy of relationships.

Isaiah 56:7c • Matthew 21:13 • Acts 1:14; 4:31-35 • Philippians 4:6 • I Thessalonians 5:17 • I Timothy 2:1,8

3.  God-Pleasing Worship

When we come before our living and holy God, we will freely speak the name of Jesus, expect God to speak through His Word read aloud, pray fervently, and express ourselves passionately through God-honoring music. We wish to allow for the full range of human expression, with order and propriety, from the exuberant to the reflective, from the celebratory to the repentant, from the loud to the silent.

We realize true worship presumes we come with pure hearts, offering to God not only our tithes and gifts, but our very selves as a sacrifice, even going beyond the corporate experience to a life of worship, acts of service characterizing our daily walk.

4.  Caring Deeply for Each Other

We wish to care deeply for one another through real, tangible expressions of God’s love. We wish all our inter-personal interactions to reflect Christ. Our treatment of each other, especially in time of intense disagreement or debate, should demonstrate to “outside” observers that we love each other with a supernatural love. We believe that our treatment of one another in the privacy of our own homes should be, and indeed can be, as transparently Christ-like as our “public” behavior and actions.

John 15:12-17 • Galatians 6:10 • I John 3:16-17

5.  Small Groups That Foster Beneficial Relationships

We believe the small group environment fosters the kind of deep and caring relationships sought after by people and presents excellent opportunities for reaching our world and for continuing spiritual growth. We consider it normal for Christians to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ ” their whole lives. We also believe a normal Body of Christ will grow numerically, based on the historical evidence that “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved .” In our growth towards maturity, we experience a deepening commitment to one another and to Christ and His Word. This is shown in how we help each other to stay faithful to God’s Truth and in how that Truth works out in our lives.

Proverbs 17:17; 18:24; 27:9,17; 28:23 • Ecclesiastes 4:12 • James 5:16

6.  Team Leadership

Our leadership team is a group of believers committed to Christ, the whole counsel of God, and to each other. We seek always to lead by consensus and example, to have open leadership processes, and to be able to deal with even the most difficult situations in a way that honors Christ and serves the best interests of His body. Recognizing that God has provided a variety of spiritual gifts for His Body, the church, we strive to have as many of these gifts represented on the leadership team as possible. Members on the leadership team will be required to fulfill the scriptural elder or deacon requirements, depending on their leadership responsibilities. Anyone who wishes to become part of the leadership team, in any capacity, must be well-known to some members of the existing team as well as meeting the appropriate scriptural requirements.

John 3:21 • I Timothy 3:1-15 • Titus 1:5-9

7.  Commitment to Those For Whom Christ Died

We believe that people rightly related to God reach out to all around them, thus partnering with God to draw people to Himself. We wish to live open, adventurous, reflective lives that fully express Christ’s desire to have deeper fellowship with all. We wish to leave behind a continual “wake” of lives touched by God through our actions, informed of His love by our words, and knowing that there is a God who loves unconditionally. We will seek to understand the needs of the communities in which we minister so we can respond to those needs, as God directs, with compassionate, generous, practical actions.

Matthew 28:18-20 • Galatians 6:10 • James 1:27a