In 2016 God moved in the hearts of several people in our church to ask, “What’s the vision for our church?” We didn’t want to simply copy what other churches had done, but wanted to figure out the type of church God was calling us to be. What were we uniquely capable of offering our community? After many conversations and much prayer, a vision for our church began to emerge. It was built upon the foundation this church was planted on–knowing Christ above all else.

The main theme for our vision is a journey. We are on a journey to know Christ. Our journey has a destination, route, landmarks and supplies. (You can learn more about our vision here.) The supplies for our journey are those areas where God has uniquely gifted our church. We identified four areas: invitation, unity, transparency and joy.

Now that we had our vision we wanted everything in our church to align with it. We identified several areas that could be changed to better align with our vision. One of these areas was the name of the church. Thus we decided to change our name from Jordan Presbyterian Church to Jordan Valley Church (PCA).  This change aligned with our desire to be inviting, unified and transparent. Presbyterian describes our form of church government but it doesn’t specify much about our beliefs, as there are various Presbyterian denominations with widely varying beliefs. Because of the many different ideas of what Presbyterian means, we believe simply removing it from our church name will make us more inviting. We also decided to place our denominational label at the end of our church name to be more transparent about the type of church we are, one in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). We also wanted to emphasize that while we are Presbyterian, we are unified with the whole body of Christ. All those who profess the basic truths of the faith, we consider our brothers and sisters!

In the first few months of 2017 we are making a number of adjustments and updates to put everything in line with our vision. This includes significant renovations to our building. We expect to have everything finished by April 2017, when we will hold a launch service to celebrate everything God has done. We are excited to see how God uses our church in 2017 and beyond. We’d love for you to walk with us on our journey!