01 Sep Recap | 20 Years | A Look Ahead
This past weekend Matt Williams walked us through the second half of a special look back on the twenty-year anniversary of Grace Church. Part two of the series gave us a chance to look towards the future.
Perhaps no better example exists of an uncertain future than that of the closest followers of Jesus as He prepared to ascend to Heaven. In His final remarks in Matthew 28, Jesus instructs His disciples to simply reproduce themselves, to train people to go and live how Jesus lived. This charge came to these men through someone who was given all authority with which to issue it. The question we have to ask as a church body is what this commission looks like corporately. How do we do this as a congregation of believers so that it has a sustainable and generational impact of life change?
What we cannot do, for starters, is simply take a snapshot of our numerical growth. Attendance and offerings are important, but these metrics alone do not validate a church. Plenty of businesses increase production, sales, revenue, and hiring. The church is about something more. Further, this assessment is not about emotional hype. We have to examine ourselves through the lens of Scripture and not through experience.
Jesus calls us to the central command of making disciples. Disciples of Jesus are called to go out and bring in new converts, baptizing them as a symbol of their allegiance to and identification with Christ. Further, we are to teach those disciples to obey God’s commandments. A chronic failure of the church has been in the area of training disciples to reproduce themselves. Most life change comes in subtle, incremental shifts over time to looking more and more like Christ. The compelling element of church should be the person who is in a dramatically different place than he was two years earlier. This should be the purpose of teaching. This takes a commitment to faithful communication of the Scripture and faithful ears to hear its truth for our lives.
And at the end of the day, God promises to be by our side. Matthew says even to the ends of the earth we can expect the faithfulness of God to be our strength.
So what does this look like in a church body? Everyone, wherever we are on the spectrum of our faith and walk with the Lord, is gradually moving towards God. This means we are called to be thoughtful and strategic in owning our faith. It takes work to grow. And as we learn to grow, we naturally pour out what we are learning into others so that this process replicates itself. This is something Grace Church has strived for since the beginning, so much so that the logo for the church symbolizes this concept.
As we look towards what God has for us in the coming years, we are finding new areas to focus our ministry towards making disciples:
1. We are re-evaluating what resources are made available to the church body.
2. We are expanding various ministries to aid in the toughest trials of life to help care for the hurting.
3. We are continuing to place a heavy focus on the developing and maturing of our leaders and staff.
4. We have placed a renewed focus on the necessity of church membership, calling the church body to a strengthened church covenant and desire to be under the authority of the local church.
We now have a renewed clarity on what we’re doing corporately as a church, but we cannot be sure what the future holds. What we can be sure of, however, is that God’s vision for His people has not changed. We are called to humbly trust and obey.
-Nate Emery
To listen to, view, or download this sermon, visit our website here.
Worship Songs from the Weekend
- Our Great God: 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18, Deuteronomy 31:8, Psalm 118:5-16
- God of the Redeemed: Psalm 10:17-18, Ephesians 1:4-6, Romans 8:23, Romans 9:4
- Thank You: 1 Chronicles 29:13, Psalm 30:12, 1 Samuel 2:2, Psalm 31:16
- God You Are My God: Zechariah 14:9, Isaiah 2:2, 1 Peter 1:18-20
- I Am Not the Same: John 16:33, Psalm 107:13-15, Mark 13: 24-26, 1 John 5:4-5