Our Vision
To reveal God’s grace from God’s Word for God’s people until God’s world is filled with the knowledge of God’s glory.
Our Mission
Westminster PCA exists to be a Gospel-Driven, Word-Based, Church-Oriented, Mission-Minded people who worship Jesus for His glory and our good.
Core Values
As the late Rev. Tim Keller used to say, “The Gospel is not just the ABC’s of the Christian life, it is the A to Z of the Christian life.” Being Gospel-Driven means as followers of Jesus, the only way we grow in holiness is by growing deeper into the message of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection by constantly applying to the various areas of our lives.
Ministry must be focused on, fueled by, and faithfully living out the Gospel. This helps maintain the focus of our ministry on heart-change, rather than mere behavior modification, knowing it is the Lord’s kindness that leads us to repentance. Holiness is only produced when we are truly experiencing the liberating freedom of grace and our new identity in Christ.
Simply put – we never move past the Gospel! Jesus lived the life we should’ve lived, died the death we deserved, and rose to give us new life – and we’ve never gotten over that or grown beyond our need to hear it! The Good News of Jesus Christ is what saves us AND sanctifies us, what grabs us AND grows us, what draws us AND what drives us.
At Westminster PCA, we strive to be ‘winsomely Reformed’, meaning we believe in a big God with big grace for big time sinners like us.
We not only believe the Bible to be inerrant, infallible, inspired, and authoritative – we believe it is sufficient. As someone once said, “What you win people with is what you win them to.” And at Westminster PCA, we simply seek to utilize ordinary means of grace (Word & Sacrament) to point to our Extraordinary Savior. In other words, teaching the Bible is our church-growth strategy. From pulpit to pew, small groups to 1-on-1 discipleship, the Bible is the end as well as the means for us.
We are firm believers in “expository preaching”, where the central meaning of the text is the central meaning of the sermon. Our pastors primarily teach through books of the Bible, believing it to be relevant for our daily lives, essential to our spiritual growth, and containing everything we need for life and godliness. God’s Word is not meant as a proof text to serve our agenda, but as a prophetic text in our lives to align with his agenda.
In the tradition of church Fathers like Augustine and Reformers like John Calvin, we believe the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the Word made visible. We don’t need skits, plays, or dramatic displays – God has given us Word & water, bread and wine by which he builds his Church. As a result, we also take communion every Sunday, believing God spiritually grows and sustains us as we “taste and see that the Lord is good” once more.
Jesus gave his life for his Bride – so how could we take her for granted? We LOVE our church family! In the midst of a culture that de-values commitment of any sort, we believe that our covenantal relationship to a local church is actually essential to our calling as Christians. God never intended life to be a solo endeavor. So our vertical relationship with Him must pour out into our horizontal relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
We aren’t just saved as individuals, but saved into the Body of Christ. This means not only the Universal Church (our Christian brothers & sisters throughout the world) but we also need to be gathering with and committed to a local body – wherein we practice living out the “one anothers” of the Bible, are led & fed by caring elders/shepherds, and share in mutual encouragement, accountability, and service in a variety of ways.
The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. We want to see people come to faith and repentance for the first time, and to see current disciples of Christ grow in an ongoing lifestyle of faith and repentance. Holistic discipleship involves head, heart, and hands.
Head – Growing in the knowledge of God’s Word and theological acumen.
Heart – Growing in loving Jesus and inward motivations toward obedience in response to his grace.
Hands – Growing in living godly lives as reflected in applying the Gospel to how we conduct our everyday lives and engage the culture in which we live. We have to know the Word and know the world, so that we know what in the world to do with the Word.
This is not a ‘me’ job but a ‘we’ job, for the Great Commission was not given to individuals but to the community of faith in order to see more brought into the fold. This involves both a ‘come and see’ as well as a ‘go and tell’. We are collectively joined in this disciple-making mission as we witness to our neighbors and when we bring them to church with us.
Beyond that, making more disciples should also lead to seeing more churches planted in our area and beyond. We want to be a sending church – whether that be sending and supporting missionaries around the world or church planters right here in Southwest Florida. Until Jesus comes back, we want to see the Gospel message spread to the ends of the earth – for his glory and our good!