Our Mission Statement

If a mission statement is doing what it should it becomes like a heartbeat for us, getting to the core of our purpose, why we do what we do, who we are to serve, and why we exist. Knowing this guides the decisions we make. Some time has passed since the pastoral team and I worked on the parish’s mission statement, and I thought it would be good for us to spend a moment recentering ourselves

Our mission is: Encounter Jesus. Be disciples.

It’s all about Jesus.

We are all about Jesus. Acts 4:12 says of him, “There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” For this alone, it is right that he be the center of our attention. We sing of him. We sing to him. We follow his cross in and out in processions. We place his cross as a blessing over our gathered community. We bow to the Good News, the narrations of his life. We place his altar in the center of our gathering where we recall the night before he died, when he gave us the priceless gift of himself. We receive him in that moment of communion – and if we are rightly centered, we make that moment the pinnacle moment of our week...there is no other name.

Too often believers settle for knowing about Jesus. That’s a good thing – it’s just not enough. We need to push through that valuable intellectual engagement of Jesus to the matters of the heart, hoping to become his sisters and brothers (Mark 3:35), even his friends (John 15:15), and not just as a label, but as a real relationship. The Church we belong to isn’t the end. It’s the means to moving through learning about Jesus, to knowing, loving and serving him. That which is true about the Church, will be no less true about the parish. The parish is the means. Jesus is the end, the purpose, the goal and the companion on the way.

​The more we know him, the easier it is to love him, and to see the wisdom of his teachings and the authenticity of his life. When we seek, in sincerity, to replicate his life in our own decisions, actions and words, we become his disciples. It begins with sitting at his feet, listening attentively, sharing our concerns with him, receiving his challenges, bathing in his love. When our hearts reach that point of conviction where we begin to shape our life around our relationship with him, we become our truest selves, made in the image and likeness of God, and truly reflecting that likeness in our choices, day by day. And that is what it is to be a disciple, imitating Jesus’ life, picking up our crosses, feeding the hungry about us, comforting the grieving, strengthening the outcast, teaching the Way, laying our hands on the sick to comfort them, bringing the spiritually dead back to life, and in every gesture proclaiming the Good News of his message:

There is a God who breaks into the world, not to condemn,
but to save, not to lord it over the masses, but to serve,
whose essential command, to love, shapes everything.


Siempre adelante,


Fr. Patrick 

---