Bearing Witness: Our Purpose

At Westwood, we want to bear witness to God. That is our goal. We want to see what God is up to in the world—what is God doing in our midst and in our communities. Upon discerning God’s activity, we want to join God in that work! Importantly, we want to honor God and each other by telling people what God has done.

Our hope is that through participation in our church, and in our community, you will learn how to do these three things so that you might be a faithful witness of Christ our Lord (Acts 1:8)

Seeing what God is doing and where God is working

The first step for the believer is to learn attentiveness to the work of the Spirit, learning to discern where God is at work or where God wants us to work in order to experience the Kingdom of God on earth. In this way, we learn to witness what God is doing. To accomplish this today, we must examine the ways that God has been at work in history, through the witness of Scripture and through the story of the church since Jesus ascended to heaven. We seek to understand what God has done, in order to what God is doing in our midst today.

Joining God in that work

Rather than seeking to create new work, programs, or opportunities that we think are good, what if, after discerning (witnessing) where God was at work, we joined God in that work to see what blessings, lessons, and revelations might be found there? In this way, we learn to see more clearly and can take comfort in knowing that the work we are doing is not the work of our hands alone, but the work of God through us.

Telling people what God has done

The correct response to seeing God work and joining God in that work is to tell people what God has done. The temptation is to talk about what we have done at God’s prodding, but with Paul and Peter as our model (cf. Acts 15), we must learn to talk about what God has done through us as God’s work. In this way, we witness to others about what we have seen.

These are the three ideas we want to help you learn and we hope everyone will do!