Reading: 1.5—A Reached Community

1.5 A Reached Community: Vision is a picture of a desired future; a snapshot of a preferred future. 

In considering the future, we can choose to be passive and simply wait for the future to happen, i.e., we can let the future happen, or we can choose to be proactive and design our future, i.e., we can make the future happen. God has a vision of a church that goes and makes disciples. We can choose to be that church and we can, by the grace of God, make that church happen.

God has a vision of an eternal church, an eternal family, that lives with Him forever. By design, He will be their God and they will be His people. How do we, as a local church, fit into God’s plan and purpose? God envisions a gathered family. We can envision a reached community, a harvest that is gathered from the community that is part of that eternal family. God gives us a glimpse of how He will make His family happen when we look to Genesis and see His mandate to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28). He gives us a glimpse of what He ultimately envisions when we look to Revelation and view God’s gathered family through the lens of the Apostle John. He writes, “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen,’” (Revelation 7:9-12). Once again, we see the two-fold Missio Dei: 1. the salvation of the lost and 2. glory to God!

This might be a good time to assert that vision and strategy go hand in hand. In fact, we might argue that strategy is a part of vision. On the face of vision, we see our WHAT and our WHY. WHAT are we trying to accomplish and WHY is that what we’re trying to accomplish? In short, we are trying to go and make disciples because Jesus commanded that we go and make disciples. The strategic question is, “HOW are we going to go and make disciples?” It’s such an important element that it should be included in the vision itself. So, vision breaks out into three dimensions, 1. What are we going to do, 2. Why are we going to do that, and 3. How are we going to do that? With those questions answered, a vision becomes clear.

In sweeping terms, God is moving from the “multiply” of Genesis to the “multitude” of Revelation. He’s doing so through the regeneration of men, women, and children all over the globe each and every day. That’s where the church fits in. In large part, God is using His visible church to grow His invisible church. As a local church, we exist in an exact place and time with the responsibility to labor in our exact community, our domestic harvest or mission field. This is the community that we are called to reach and our vision is of that community reached. As we project what this will look like three years, five years, ten years into the future, we envision, or encapsulate, our vision. As we describe that vision in full narrative, our vision statement emerges, giving us our destination and influencing the path that we will follow to get there.

Rightly discerning and developing a godly vision puts us in alignment with God’s plan to move from multiply to multitude and focuses our ministry on realizing the outcome priority of a reached community.