Video Transcript: A Reached Community

Welcome back again. We're continuing with our course developing great  commission skills. We're taking a look at skill one unit two of discerning and  developing vision today, the focus is on a reached community, and I want you to  pay particular attention to the fact that I'm using a past tense verb a reached  community. We're not going to talk too much about the verb form in this  particular session, but later on, that's going to be very significant. So let's talk  about vision. Let's talk about how we define vision. A vision is a picture of a  desired future. It's a snapshot of a preferred future. I realize that lots of  organizations use different words differently. They use words like vision and  mission and purpose, kind of interchangeably. The way that we're going to use  the word vision has has this definition. Vision is a picture of a desired future, a  snapshot of a preferred future. We're going to project out, say, three years, five  years in advance, and we are going to take a snapshot. Might be more  appropriate to say we're going to take a video. And the question is, what's in that snapshot? What's in that video? What do we want to be in that snapshot, in that  video? If we are effective, if we are successful at moving forward with our great  commission vision. What are we going to see? What do we want to see? What  we'd like to make happen by the grace of God? So I want to call your attention  to a couple of things here as we take that look into the future. So we have a  choice that we've got to make. We can choose to be passive and just wait for  the future to happen. In other words, we can just let the future happen, or we  can choose to be proactive. We can design our future, we can make the future  happen again. I'm relying on the fact that it's got to be by the grace of God that  we do these things. I'm not saying that we all by ourselves, can make these  things happen, but I am saying that trusting the leading of God, the grace of  God, the power of God, the leading of God. We can choose to be passive about  all this, just wait for the future to arrive and see what it brings with it, or we can  project the future that we want to see, the one that captures God's vision of  bringing glory to himself, but also the vision of God rescuing his sheep that are  scattered. God has a vision of a church that goes and makes disciples. I'm  absolutely convinced that the Great Commission is essentially a vision  statement that includes strategic content directives. 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. Now, by  covenant design, he will be their God, and they will be his people. Well, here's a  question for you, went too far. How do we as a local church, fit into God's plan  and purpose? How do we fit? God envisions a gathered family, and 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 this might  happen, how he's going to make his family happen. When we look into Genesis  1, the mandate to be fruitful and multiply. The very first people on Earth, Adam  and Eve, God says to them, Be fruitful and multiply. There's an expectation on 

God's part that multiplication is going to happen. It's going to be biological, it's  going to be spiritual. This is a first hint at God's vision. God is envisioning a  growing population of his children. God blessed them. He said to them, Be  fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of  the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over every living thing that moves on the  earth, Be fruitful and multiply the multiplication mandate. Again, this speaks to  the biological multiplication of human beings, but it also speaks to the spiritual  multiplication of the children of God. That's the beginning. Now, God also 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, the apostle, John.  Now, what does John say, Well, I'm reading here from Revelation 7:9. It says  this. 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 worship God saying, Amen, blessing and glory and  wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen, did you? Did you catch both the evangelism and discipleship  piece there, both the finding of the lost and the growing into true worship?  Salvation belongs to our God, evangelism, blessing, glory, wisdom,  Thanksgiving, honor, power and might be to our God, forever and ever. The  glory of God, Amen. Now we begin with the multiply. The Multiply of Genesis,  and we move to the multitude of Revelation. Now here's a question for you. How will God move his vision of an eternal family from the multiply of Genesis to the  multitude of Revelation? Well, he's going to work through his missio dei, the  mission of God, the vision of God, the purpose of God, and it's twofold. It  includes the salvation of the lost, a great multitude of people who've been  saved, and it includes the glory of God, blessing and glory and wisdom and  thanksgiving and power. And might be to our God forever and ever. So again,  this might be a good time to reinforce this idea that vision and strategy go hand  in hand, we might argue that strategy is actually part of the vision. Now, on the  face of vision, we've got a couple of questions, what and why? What are we  trying to accomplish, and why is that what we're trying to accomplish? Well, in  short, we're trying to go and make disciples. That's the what. What's the why?  Because Jesus said, Go and make disciples. Jesus commanded us to go and  make disciples. Now, inside of the Great Commission, there is a command.  Jesus says, Obey all that I've commanded you. And right there, in the same  group of sentences, Jesus is commanding us to go and make disciples, to  baptize, to teach obedience. Now the strategic question is this, how are we  going to go and make disciples? It's such an important element that I encourage

churches. Include the how as part of their vision statements. We'll get more into  that in another session. So vision breaks out into three dimensions. What are we going to do? Why are we going to do that? How are we going to do that? When  

those questions are answered, the vision is becoming more and more clear.  Now, in sweeping terms, God is moving from the multiply in 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. Now that's where the church fits in. You see, here's what's going on. God is using his visible church to grow  his invisible church, his finite church to grow his infinite, eternal church. Now as  a local church, we exist in an exact place in 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. This is the vision that we have, the vision of a reached community. If we are effective at reaching this community. What is  that going to look like three years from now, five years, seven years, 10 years  now, as we project out into the future and we describe what we are seeing that  is a picture of our vision, and it's out of that full narrative that our holistic vision  statement emerges. It gives us a destination, and it influences the path that  we're going to follow to get there. Now I want to share share a few stories about  my ministry in the past. In particular, I want to share about a church that I  pastored, a church in in Phoenix, Arizona, we were very clear about our vision,  reasonably clear about our strategy. Got more and more clear on our strategy  over time, as things got better and better defined. So let me give you, let me  give you a glimpse of what that looked like. First of all, we we summarized our  large vision narrative with a simple phrase, being disciples, making disciples.  Being disciples, making disciples, four words that said an awful lot, and I happen to know that several churches that I've worked with over the years actually  adopted that phrase for their very own being disciples, incorporates the things  that we're doing in our relationship to God. We are learning, we're praying, we're studying, we're worshiping, we are living, we are believing. We are behaving  according to the biblical mandate. And of course, that includes being obedient to the Great Commission. Being disciples, doing the things that disciples do, being  disciples, making disciples. You know, the multiplication component comes in  when we when we replicate who we are and what we are becoming as disciples  of Christ. You know, we're we're responsible for our own spiritual development,  and part of our own spiritual development is to learn how to spiritually develop  others. In fact, I have a definition of leadership that fits in here. We'll look at this  more closely another time. But in my mind, leadership is taking responsibility for  the spiritual development of other people. That's what leadership in the church  looks like. Now when it comes to strategy, what we did in this particular church  was to summarize our strategy in a simple three part phrase, in reach, outreach, far reach. So you can see that with these two phrases, we were being very  economical with with our vocabulary being disciples, making disciples was, was 

shorthand for our vision. Shorthand for our strategy was in reach, outreach, far  reach. Now we plastered those two phrases all over the place. They were on our business cards. They were on the bulletins that we handed out on Sunday. They were on banners. They were on posters. We used them every chance, every  chance we got. So let me give you a little bit of a definition of in reach, outreach  and far reach. In Reach is the phrase we used to represent the ministry that we  did among ourselves, taking care of each other, teaching each other, supporting  each other, being there for each other in reach outreach was defined As the  ministry that we did in the immediate area surrounding our church,  geographically, our domestic mission field, if you will, we identified a very  specific, What I call a ministry footprint, with street names and diagrams that  describe this is the area geographically that we are going to, you know, put a  stake in the ground. We're going to claim this territory. We're going to we're  going to take responsibility for reaching people that live inside this geographic  footprint. The language we use was this is our geographic target. Now this is not to say that folks outside that target were not welcome at our church. What it did  say is that this is where we're going to focus our strategic attention. This is  where we're going to pour our time, our energy, our dollars, our creativity. We  are going to take care of each other in reach, but we are going to reach into this  immediate community, and we're going to take care of these folks. We're going  to, we're going to try to get the gospel of Jesus Christ into their lives, into their  homes, into their hearts, into their minds. And we're going to, we're going to  welcome them with open arms. Should they? Should they decide to to make our church a church home for them. Of course, at that point, they would cross the  line from being part of our outreach to being part of our in reach and probably  helping us with our outreach to someone else. Far reach was the phrase we  used to describe ministry that we did beyond our own congregation, beyond our  own geographic community, into distant communities. Now, our church was  located roughly two and a half hours drive time from the Mexican border. We  could drive south on Interstate 10 and be at the border town of Nogales in about two and a half hours. And we got involved with a group of churches in northern  Mexico, Sonora, and we made that group of churches our focus for our far reach ministry. Now we use this language all the time, you know, even things like if we  were doing announcements say on a Sunday morning inside of typical worship  service, we might say something like this. We would say, you know, on Saturday the 15th, we're going to be taking a group of folks from our church and  community down to Nogales. We're going to be working with a. The church  there. That's part of part of the group of churches that we support. We've  recently purchased a building for them, and we're helping with the remodeling.  So we're going to go down on Friday and work with them Friday evening and  Saturday and we're going to celebrate with them on Saturday afternoon, and  then we're going to drive back. We'd love to have you with us. This is part of our 

far reach vision, of ministering beyond ourselves, of ministering, in this case,  northern Mexico. So we were making it clear all along the line what the touch  points were, what kind of ministry is this? Oh, this is in reach. What kind of  ministry is that? Oh, that's outreach. What kind of ministry is it? Oh, that's far  reach. And we use that language all the time. We're constantly encouraging  each other to be disciples and make disciples. So let me, let me give you a few  examples of some of the things that happened in terms of in reach. When I  started with this church, it was a church in very, very steep decline. It had  declined down to 12 members, actually, 13, I'm sorry, 13 members, six married  couples and one single guy, and I was recruited as a church planter to come into that church and sort of declare these folks to be the core of something new and  start this church all over again. We called it restart, ultimately, you know, it's a  very long story, and of course, I don't have near enough time to go into all that,  but let me say this right from right from day one, I realized that I was not really  there to just be the Pastor to these 13 people that I was there to lead a  movement of people that would ultimately reach into this community, bring  people to Christ, grow them in their faith, and deploy them in ministries and  ministries in our congregation, ministries in our community and ministries, who  knows where else. I was there for a total of seven years. And every day of that  seven years, we lived that, that vision of multiply, multiply, multiply, reach out to  the community. We're here to go and make disciples. Now we grew internally,  but we exploded externally. So when I left that church some seven years ago, I  left the church that was over 300 and I baptized somewhere in a neighborhood  of about 105, 110 people, as best I can glean from records that I was privy to.  Our in reach was pretty intense. The idea was we're going to really take care of  people when they're part of us. And so as people would come in, and they would find us very welcoming, very attentive and yet challenging them to move forward to maximize their potential. As followers of Christ, they would tell others, and  others would come. And so we, we grew exponentially in terms of outreach. One of the things we did was we, we, we formulated an approach to ministry that we  call champion ministries. The way that this worked is that anyone in the church  that just felt a calling to establish a particular ministry had the opportunity to  essentially apply with our elders for the green light to pursue that ministry In the  context of our church. So there was actually an application process, a person  that felt called to champion a certain ministry, whether it was ESL or perhaps  something working with kids after school, something with, I think there was a  home for battered women that was supported all kinds of different ministries that were out in the community. Folks could come and fill out this application. This is  what I want to do. This is why I want to do this. This is the need that I think we  could address. This would be the amount of people that I would need to help me with this. This is the resource base that we need to develop. And the final, the  final section of the application would be this, explain how this ministry connects 

with our vision of being disciples and making disciples and connects with our  strategy of in reach outreach and far reach. Now, as long as those ministries  met those criteria, they would be approved. Now, a lot of times this was an all  volunteer thing. Oftentimes it took very, very little resourcing. It was just a matter of finding like minded people that wanted to be part of this. And so when I left  the church, there were 18 champion ministries in operation, 18 one final  comment, and then I'll be done when it came to far reach. As I mentioned  already, Mexico was our focus. Now, when we first went to Mexico, the very first  trip that we took, we thought that our vision was to go to Mexico and start a  Mexican church plant, eventually another and another and somewhere along the line, become more and more familiar with Mexican leadership in the area. But  our goal was to establish a network of Mexican churches. Well, the very first  weekend that we were down there, we bumped into a gentleman who was part  of a church in Mexico that was part of a network of church plants in northern  Mexico. And so we made an adjustment. We adjusted the vision from go to  Mexico and start a network of Mexican church plants to go to Mexico and find  this network of Mexican church plants. So we put our energy, our resources, our  prayers, our efforts behind them, and we saw really significant things happen  with that ministry. We provided, for example, a small library of Bible, tools like  dictionaries and commentaries for 28 pastors, we brought a variety of training  into a place that had virtually no ministry training. We brought some dollars to  help out. We bought a building that included a kind of a warehouse that they  turned into a worship center, but it also included a little five room house that the  pastor, his wife and child were able to move into. So things were very, very  exciting, energizing, but that's how we used our concepts of vision and strategy  to move multiplication ministry forward. Now, that ministry in Mexico exploded  with conversion growth, our church in Phoenix. I mean, it wasn't an explosion  like they're going to put us on the cover, you know, of Christianity today, but it  was a significant month after month after month of people coming to Christ, as  God would draw people to us. And I think in part because we were so ready to  share the message of the gospel, and so ready to take care of people. So being  disciples, making disciples in reach outreach, far reach and what was the result? A reached community, at least we did our part to reach some of that community.  Now this completes this particular video next time we're going to be looking at  the skill topic vision in motion, may God bless your ongoing studies. Amen.