"In Genesis 12, Abram is faced with a similar dawn of something new in his life. God comes to him and tells him that he is to "go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land that I will show you." A calling to journey without a certain roadmap–– an uncertain step into the dawn of a new day that God was dawning. 

This is where I believe we are as we move together into 2025. Some of us step into this new year as a faith community carrying the uncertainty of having left the church that "was" to move forward into the church that could "be" as God has called us forward. Others of us step into this new year as people ready to throw off what was and run full tilt into what will be. No matter which camp you're in, we're all called to journey together. Our path ahead is not yet clear, but God is urging us forward anyway–– to the places that God will show to us. 

All of these thoughts are why we have chosen the theme "ONWARD" for our 2025 church year. Onward is the journey Abram was called to as he stepped out in faith and trusted God's guidance. Onward is the journey that we're called to as we do the same."

- Dr. Lawrence Powers, Senior Pastor

In October 2024, the Westwood congregation cast our BIG dreams for the future. From those collective dreams, came our four guiding foci for 2025's ONWARD journey:

As we move ONWARD together, we'll focus on these areas in the following ways:

• Growth - At the core of what it means to be an outpost of the Kingdom of God is the call to go and make disciples. This is a fancy way of saying "tell others about Jesus so that they might choose to live as he taught us and grow in relationship with him." We're committed to doing this in ways that grow our community in love, faith, grace, friendship, and compassion.
• Outreach - The way you grow is through not keep to the boundaries of the walls of your church building–– and we're taking that even more to heart in 2025. This year will be a year of outreach through serving, sharing, and the way we live our day-to-day lives. 
• Unity - God did not create us to be uniform (like robots with mirrored programming), but to be a diverse community called together to live, serve, worship and grow in unity. This does not mean we'll agree on everything or look, sound, and act the same (we're not robots, after all), but that we will find ways to grow together in grace as we live out a unified mission.
• Vision - If you're planning a road trip, it's hard to get somewhere if you don't have some sort of guiding map. For Abram, this was God's ever calling voice onward–– the same is true for us. Our goal this year is to catch God's vision as we move onward together.