St Stephen’s church has active mission partnerships with a number of ministry agencies. Like us, our partners are each committed to a world that knows Jesus.
We support two missionary families in particular.
Our mission partnerships reflect our ministry values and priorities, with a balance between ministries that proclaim the Lordship of Christ Jesus and those that actively demonstrate his love, together with those that are rightly considered as being our specific responsibility.
These mission partnerships enable us to: engage personally with mission and justice concerns; think both locally and globally; fulfill our local responsibilities; pray intelligently for the wider world; give financial support to good gospel causes; raise up workers and supporters for our partners; and join with like minded people to achieve common goals.
Our partnerships recognize an alignment of our goals and ministry values, such that it is true that the mission organization can be said to be acting on our behalf. Consequently we seriously examine the organizations we support, ensuring that what they do and how they do it is compatible with our own ministry values.
Whilst partnership rightly involves generous financial support of our partners, it includes much more than that. Effective partnership includes active prayer, ongoing collaboration and keen participation, enthusiastic promotion of activities, and encouraging people to work within the organization, both here and overseas. Personal involvement and interaction with others foster mission support and we maintain active links with missionaries. Both our church and the missionaries gain from these link relationships. For us, link missionaries provide a focus and a human face for world mission and our gospel horizons are widened. For the missionaries, the prayer, financial and pastoral support received is essential for their ministries.