Reaching Forward at CCC
As we start the new year, we want to share with you where our leadership believes God is leading Connection Christian Church. But as we look forward to the future, I want to take a quick look back to 2025 and list just a few accomplishments we made last year…
First, I want to commend you for your generosity in giving. Our contributions far exceeded our budget needs.
We had 17 baptisms last year, and 12 new member/partners joined CCC, exceeding our numbers from the year before.
There were over 450 unique guests in worship throughout 2025.
In our youth ministry, we’ve seen growth in our Sunday morning Deep Talks & Donuts time and in our outreach events like the Gingerbread Bash (80+ attended).
We started a Prayer Drive-Thru that we look forward to continuing this year.
We’ve seen tremendous growth in our worship services that gives us an atmosphere where it’s easy to worship God – new sound in the chapel, online presentation is better, and small upgrades in the worship center.
Probably our biggest accomplishment was rebranding the name of our church from Hilliard Church of Christ to Connection Christian Church.
And finally, our staff, elders, and ministry leads worked diligently to develop a new 3-year strategic plan to continue to move the church forward, a plan that we’re calling The One.
And this year, 2026, we’re celebrating 70 years of service and connection to the Hilliard community and the surrounding areas. And we want to continue to serve and connect to the community for the next 70 years as effectively as we can.
A few years ago, we developed a vision, mission, and values that we believe God is leading us to accomplish. So, let me talk about those areas very quickly here – vision, mission, and values.
First, our vision is why we exist. It’s who we are as a church. It’s a picture of the future that produces excitement within the organization. In 1774, John Adams envisioned a new nation, a union of thirteen states being born, a nation independent from Parliament and separate from England. In 1907, Henry Ford’s goal was to make automobiles affordable for every American family. In the 1940s, Billy Graham’s dream was to hold evangelistic crusades in stadiums across our nation and around the world.
The vision for Connection Christian Church is to become a church of real people finding real hope.
We want to become a church of genuine, authentic people – taking off the masks, being real with one another, and being real with everyone around us, our friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. And we want to provide an atmosphere and an experience for everyone who comes through these doors, where we can find real hope in Jesus Christ. This is the vision that has been driving us for the last few years and will continue to drive us into the future because we believe that now more than ever, the world needs some real hope. People are not gonna find real hope in their careers, in their retirement plans, in the economy, in their friends or family, in acquiring stuff, or in politics. We know real hope is found in only one place, or should I say person. And that person is Jesus Christ.
Let’s talk about our mission for a moment. Our mission is how we accomplish our vision. It’s how we make the dream come true. It’s how the picture of the future is pursued, and it’s made up of three statements. We want to become real people finding real hope by…
Connecting people to Christ
Connecting people to the church
Connecting people to the community
That’s a pretty straightforward mission. And everything we do here at Connection Christian Church ought to be centered around those three ideas. This is why our leadership loved the name Connection Christian Church. We realized that these are the areas we need to get better at. And our new name drives us to do just that. Again, we’re not changing our doctrine or our Restoration Church roots. But what we want to do is get better at connecting people to Christ, the church, and our community.
And then finally, we have our values. Our values are just some of the things that we do here at CCC. Values are the attitudes and behaviors that drive us. So, we have four main ideas to focus on that make up the acronym HOPE, H-O-P-E.
H – HONORING one another
O – OBEYING God’s Word
P – PREPARING future leaders
E – EXPECTING spiritual growth
When it comes to the future of Connection Christian Church, we promise that we will not compromise the message of the Bible. We will not compromise doctrine. But what we want to do is look at the mode – or how we preach, share, and inspire people with the message of the Bible. The Gospel never changes, but how we present it must change so we can be effective at our number one job, which is to seek and to save the lost.
Paul says in Philippians 3:13 about himself…
13 …one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead,
As we look ahead to what God has in store, there’s a feeling of anticipation and excitement that God is gonna continue to do amazing things here at CCC. And we believe that CCC will be healthier, stronger, and more alive in Jesus Christ.