Parish Profile
"Growing Together in Faith,
Love and Praise"
St. Anskar’s Episcopal
Church
Rockford, Illinois
Our
new mission statement captures three aspects of
St. Anskar’s identity. We are a faithful
community of Episcopalians who gather from a wide
area each Sunday morning to praise God and share
the Holy Eucharist. Growing in love implies our
desire to build on our: common goals, sense of
fellowship, and feeling of belonging to a large
extended family / community. We look to continue
to grow in our expressions of praise to the God
who created, redeemed and sustains us.
In
discerning God’s call to St. Anskar’s,
we face two challenges: the importance of
accepting who we are and where we have been with
honesty and compassion, and the need for us to
fully recognize the Lord’s abundant gifts
and to use them to become more than who we are.
We embrace the challenge to share the Gospel and
become a welcoming, spiritually vital community
to those who do not yet belong.
Within
that challenge, there are two imperatives for the
life of the parish: the central importance of
worship and a strong desire for renewal and
growth.
Our
worship is the foundation upon which our present
life is built. For many parishioners, the liturgy
provides time for inspiration from which they
draw energy for the other parts of their lives.
This energy can also feed the new and expanded
ministries that parishioners seek.
We
look to continue to enliven our worship through
our present and ongoing revitalization of music
and expansion in the use of various prayer forms
and resources.
We
find that there is a strong belief among
parishioners that St. Anskar’s must grow,
both in depth of spirituality and in numbers of
parishioners. For many, our worship by itself is
not enough. There must be multiple ways of
addressing the ongoing spiritual life of
individuals, and we believe that they need to be
at the heart of what we do as a parish. We want
to expand our social outreach and healing
ministries, provide more Christian formation
choices, expand our youth programs and further
develop our parish life. There are many forms of
evangelism that we can embrace and carry out with
enthusiastic joy such as welcoming people into
our community, sharing a meal, listening to
others’ stories and sharing our own,
discussing what the Bible has to say about our
lives and our connection to God and each other.
This is where we have discovered our energy and
we seek to follow that energy.
This
page prepared by St. Anskar's,
Rockford
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