Our Mission: To Proclaim God's Excellencies
Our Vision: To Make and Equip Disciples who will Proclaim God's Excellencies
To read more about Galena Bible Church's core commitments, follow the link at the bottom of the page to our expanded notes. This document goes into further detail on WHY we adhere to these 4 commitments and HOW we see these commitments played out in our local body.
By “expository” we mean that it is our goal to “expose” what is there already in Scripture. It’s God’s Word itself, not our own ideas, that is inspired and authoritative over our lives! The main theme of any given text of Scripture becomes the main theme of our sermons. So, we are careful to study any given text of Scripture in its context – both historically and in relation to its place in the larger biblical context -- and then seek to apply it appropriately and enthusiastically to our lives today.
At Galena Bible Church, we are committed to worshipping God in accordance with His Word and in a corporate fashion. Sunday mornings are the most important gathering of our church body. We see these times of coming under God’s Word together and having this fellowship of the Spirit together as absolutely essential for the life of any individual believer. As the body gathers together, our desire is to see each member of the body recognize, revel in, and respond rightly to the glory of God in Christ Jesus through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit (taken from Bob Kauflin’s definition of worship).
GBC sees formal membership as something deep and meaningful and clearly rooted in God’s Word. The local church is a covenant community, committed to loving one another, and spurring one another on to loving, serving, and honoring God. The local church is a family in the best sense of the word. Members are those who have been recognized and received into membership as having been adopted into God’s family through saving faith in Christ. Each member, as part of this family, is committed to Christ, one another, and to sound doctrine.
We use simple definitions. Evangelism is simply teaching the gospel with the aim to persuade. The gospel is the message of Jesus, God’s Son, living, dying, and rising again to redeem a sinful and lost humanity. Discipleship is simply helping others to trust in, and follow Jesus. This starts with introducing people to the message about Jesus, which is evangelism. Missions is crossing cultural barriers to bring the gospel to others, particularly to others who have yet to have the opportunity to hear it. We speak of “engaged” evangelism and missions to emphasize these are things that we, as a church body, don’t just talk about as being good things to do, but actually strive to do them. And we group local evangelism and world missions together in this core commitment because we see them as one piece. What we do locally we want to see “exported” to the “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
