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The Bay Church has never hammered out and formally adopted 'core values'. But recently I have given some thought to what my personal 'core values' are - at least as far as ministry is concerned. So, for what they are worth, here they are. In my opinion this is the sort of Christianity we need as we carry our mission into the twenty-first century:

i The God-centred theology recovered in Europe at the time of the Reformation. This is helpfully summarised by the famous 'solas' of the Reformation – our authority is Scripture alone, our saviour is Christ alone, we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, all for God's glory alone. I would want also to add to that the Covenant Theology of the Reformed Confessions of Faith. Here is the foundation on which we stand.

ii The 'Revival Christianity' which, in the eighteenth century, ignited the modern missionary movement, and, in the twentieth century, was recovered through the ministry of men like Martyn Lloyd Jones. This vision of the Christian Faith stresses the centrality of redemption in history; the importance of the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit; the need for, and reality of, times of revival when God suddenly comes down and everything changes; the strategic significance of prayer in the progress of the gospel among the nations; and the conviction that, even though it takes the return of Christ himself, God's kingdom will come and 'the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea'.

iii The balanced spirituality of the Calvinistic Methodists. Few things are more likely to turn off the average Christian than a name like 'Calvinistic Methodism'! But it really isn't as appalling as it sounds. Calvinistic Methodism was the name given to the Christianity that flourished in Wales during the Eighteenth Century. They refused to settle for anything less than preaching that was accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit. They believed in serious Christian discipleship and authentic pastoral care among God's people. They believed too in holding both the Word of God and the Spirit of God in a wonderful fusion of head and heart that the church in our generation desperately needs. We can drop the name, but I want to argue that we need to embrace the reality.

iv A post-Christendom missionary mindset that recognises that here in the UK our context has fundamentally changed in the last fifty years. We shouldn't overstate this, but there is no escaping the fact that many of the people around us no longer understand our Christian vocabulary, think in our Christian categories, or share our Christian view of the world. This is partly due to changes in Western Culture over the last fifty years, but it is also the result of changing demograhics. We live in the midst of an amazing diversity of cultures. Within a three miles radius of our Sunday services you could hear maybe twenty languages and meet almost every faith, ideology and 'ism' known to man! Now to people like us who believe in someone who is the Saviour of the whole world that is very exciting. But we cannot simply continue to do things the way we have always done them. The gospel has not changed of course, but the people we are speaking to have and we need to take account of that. Our whole approach needs to be deeper - more thoughtful, more penetrating, more costly, and more patient. We are pioneer missionaries and we need to come to terms with that fact.