Serving Your City Through Vision
The Book of Acts chronicles the explosion of the church across the known world. It's pretty clear those churches had more in mind than raising money for building programs or worrying about Sunday School attendance. Their vision was far bigger than that. They pictured entire cities coming into the kingdom of God. It's a good thing they did because if they had been self-focused, money-minded, or culturally timid, none of us would know Christ today.
Paul's letters to the church in Galatia, the church in Corinth, the church in Phillippi, and the church in Rome reflect the evidence that those churches understood God had huge plans for their cities.
Two thousand years later, the vision of many of today's church leaders has shrunk down to surviving financially or maintaining a few ministry programs in a neighborhood. It's time for every Christian to begin connecting with God's heart for the area he or she lives in and begin feeling His compassion for the people there. Pray that God will open your eyes and ears to the people who live in your city. Pray even harder that God will give you his compassion for your city. It's out of this compassion that a true vision will crystallize.
-Steve Sjorgen and Dave Ping, Outflow
1 comment:
Not connecting to the neighborhood is one of my church’s biggest areas for improvement. I’m proofing a great article for our next issue, “Being Missional, Going Green: A platform for high-impact community ministry,” written by Brian Brandt. He’s executive pastor of ministries at Grace Community Church, a multisite congregation in Tyler, Texas. He quotes Stephen Wickliffe, their associate pastor of missional life, who says, “We found ourselves going to the other side of the globe, to hurricane-ravaged parts of the coast, and to the other side of town – but we weren’t walking across the street.”
I think that sums it up for many of us today….
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