Church Planting - The Power of Multiplication
Many of you know that there are 6 aspects of Journey's vision that I pray for every day and that I've challenged our congregation to pray for (see previous posts)...- Tranformation of individual lives
- A fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit
- Community Impact
- Appealing Ministry Environment (facilities)
- Church planting
- Missions
I'm passionate about church planting (#5) for a number of reasons. First of all, the number of churches in the US is dramatically dwindling while the US population continues to grow (we're not even holding steady, we're LOSING ground). Second, I don't think that there is a more successful form of evangelism than launching new churches.
So, last night, I was thinking about Journey's goal of planting churches (conservatively speaking) every 5 years. (Honestly, I'm praying that we can do it in less time than that and that we can do it more frequently than having to wait until year 10 to launch our second.) But think about this in the most conservative terms, if we were to launch a church every five years, and the churches that we launch shared the same intensity of purpose, and THEY launched a church every five years... In 25 years, Journey would have been directly or indirectly responsible for launching 31 churches!
I get goose-bumps thinking about this. If you're a part of Journey, I want to challenge you to start praying passionately that God would enable us to SEE THIS! I'm praying that God will help us to launch churches that will be so much more "successful" than we are (just like I want my kids, Kyle and Kate, to be more spiritually mature and to have more favor--I pray the same thing for the churches that we launch). Anyhow, I hope this encourages you.
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