Church Planting and the Great Commission – Part One

 

A Church Plant in Florida

I was seventeen when I remember first hearing about the concept of church planting.

A young, energetic family had moved to the area, and started a church which met in the cafeteria of an elementary school.

A good friend of mine was recruited to play drums for the worship team. And after hearing more about this new church from him, I decided I would go check it out.

After attending the service, I got to know the church and the church planter more. And I was impacted by the vision which the church had for serving the community, helping other churches, and planting more churches. 

I had lived in the Bradenton-Sarasota area of Florida for my whole life, and I knew it as a place with many churches, and what I had assumed were many Christians. But this church plant had research pointing to the fact that 490,000 people in the two counties of Bradenton and Sarasota, Florida were lost and unchurched.

This was a staggering amount of lostness. And it led to the church plant casting a vision of planting more churches to reach the 490,000 in the area. The church realized that if the 490,000 were going to be reached, then it was going to take a lot more than just one church plant.

The Global Need

If we scale out from this small area of Florida and turn to the world, the number quickly becomes overwhelming. Joshua Project currently reports that there are 3.28 billion people in the world that are unreached by the gospel. According to its data, that is 41.8% of the population that is unreached by the gospel.

In other words, four out of ten people one may see in their daily life may have never been reached by the gospel.

If 490,000 was too much for a single church in Southwest Florida, what is there to do with this 3.28 billion?  

What Can We Do?

In the space remaining, I want to propose three actions we can take in light of the lostness surrounding us in the world today.

Pray. Make Disciples. Plant Churches.

I will be the first to tell you that I do not often practice these three actions considering the urgency of lostness that surrounds me. But if you will allow me, an imperfect vessel, to point to biblical truth; I hope we can walk away with encouragement in the task, and a heart for the lost to come to Christ.

Pray

The first and most important action we can do is to pray.

Before we put our hand to the plow.

Before we create our theological vision and consider how we can uniquely contextualize the gospel to the people were trying to reach.

Before we come up with a name for a church and clever slogans and vision statements…we need to pray.

This helps us to rely on the Spirit of God, and trust the Spirit of God who is needed to do the work of bringing lost souls to Christ. Without the salvific work of the Holy Spirit reviving lost souls to life, it doesn’t matter what actions we do. Therefore, we start by praying.

Consider what Paul says in Ephesians, that Christ is able to do abundantly more than we could ever ask for or think of (Eph. 3:20). Abundantly more. Therefore, as we consider an abundantly great task of reaching 3.28 billion unreached people with the gospel, shouldn’t we look to him who is able to do abundantly more?

Additionally, Christ modeled the importance of prayer for us in his own life. Christ retreated to pray (Mk. 1:35). Christ taught the disciples how to pray (Mt. 6:7-15). Christ instructed the disciples to pray for laborers to be sent out into the harvest of lost souls (Lk. 10:2)

Therefore, we should join him in this prayer. We should pray “earnestly to the Lord (Lk. 10:2)” for the lost souls, praying that the Holy Spirit would bring life in them. And we should pray in a Luke 10:2 and Romans 10:14-15 way, for laborers to be sent out into the harvest.

Next month, we will continue with part two, as we explore making disciples and planting churches to the end of fulfilling the Great Commission (Mt. 28:18-20). 

To learn more about Church Planting, check out GCN’s Incubator. The Incubator is an eight-module training conducted over the course of eight months. The first module is freely available to preview on The Greenhouse. There you can explore the course material, including a newly published book by Redeemer City to City entitled Am I Called to Plant a Church?