Where are we going?

So this part of our service is going to look a bit different to what a normal church sermon looks like. Today while sharing this message, I will be sharing some of the data from the survey we asked everyone to fill in and talk about how that we will change things up as a result of your feedback.

On that, I wanted to thank you all for providing feeback through the survey. We got 88% of our active adults filling in the feedback, which means that we have a very good idea of exactly where people are at and what we need to prioritise. So thanks for that.

So yes, we will be sharing some of that data together today and talk about what that means for us in the year ahead.

As I have indicated a number of times now, our plan is going to focus on what we believe the best way is for us as a congregation to take the next step in sharing the gospel with people outside our congregation. How we are going to strategically help other people take their first step toward Jesus.

So as we do that, I want to reflect on a number of scripture passages that have shaped how we have moved as a congregation.

So firstly lets reflect on Acts 2:42-47

Acts 2:42–47 CSB

42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. 44 Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. 45 They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

This is a picture of what the new testment church was all about.

They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer… then jumping to v47, and Every day the Lord added to their number, those who were being saved.

This is a vision of how the church should ideally work. This is how the early church functioned, and this, I think, is how we have come to function as a church too.

Let’s take the apostle’s teaching first.

Apostle’s teaching

The early church devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching. That is a kind of short hand for studying scripture, sitting under the teaching of the apostles and the elders of the church at the time. It is prioritising God’s word. It is making God’s word central to the lives of the people within the church community.

Now this is a historically strong point for most Reformed churches, and I think Wonga Park too. We stick to the Word of God. We want it to be the authority by which we live. We want it to shape our lives.

And our survey results showed that too.

I don’t know how well you can see this slide, the text is probably too small for you. But the top line there is the desire for 2 thirds of this congregation to hear preaching on God’s Wisdom for our lives. We want to know how God wants us to live our lives and we want to be taught that.

The three items that follow are God’s heart for people, how to practice forgiveness, and The Reformed Confessions.

The people of this congregation want to devote themselves to the apostle’s teaching, and to the implications that has on our lives.

And that’s great!

So how are we going to be doing that?

Church council talked about this at some length this week, and what we decided we will do with our Worship service teaching is that each month we will preach on 4 things, focussed on Head, Heart, Hands, and Holy worship.

Each Lord’s Supper sunday, we are going to tackle a deep truth of what we believe, using our reformational documents, like the catechism, like the confessions and we will think about what we believe and how it impacts our lives. This is “Head” stuff.

Then the week after we are going look at the heart stuff. How does God’s word instruct us to live? Here we are going to tackle the various parts of scripture that deal with say Forgiveness, or Relationships. We will be preaching through proverbs and through other sections of scripture that deal with these issues - so this is still firmly “The apostle’s teaching”, and it will come straight from scripture.

So that’s the heart stuff.

Week three will be “hand” stuff. This will be a bit different to what you might be used to. The idea here is that we will use these weeks to grow in our Christian skills.

For example, we might focus one week on “How do I invite someone to church?”. OR “how do I answer someone when they say: “If God is good, then why is there so much evil in the world”.

The aim here is to help equip you all to face the arrows that the Devil want to shoot at you. If we are going to be a church dedicated to helping people take the next step, then these skills will be critical to helping us do that.

The final week, week 4, will be Holy Worship. Here I will be preaching through the book of psalms. Psalms is a wonderfully devotional book that gives us a language to pray to God with, and it covers the vast majority of life’s disappointments in the context of worship songs.

We want to prioritise prayer, and prayer songs, inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, seems like a good way to do that.

So that how we want to stay devoted to the apostle’s teaching this year. We will monitor how we go as we go, because obviously, particularly the hand stuff will be new, so please give us your feedback as we go.

To the Fellowship

The fellowship in the new testament was a way of talking about gathering together to be Christians together. Notice the text doesn’t say - we devoted ourselves to a fellowship, but rather the fellowship. This particular fellowship is supporting one another, building one another up in faith and in the word, and discussing the things of Jesus together.

Bringing that forward to today, we have to realise that fellowship is more than simply sharing coffee after the service. It is something deeply fundamentally different to talkiong about what you did during the week, while at church.

It is the ministry of speaking God’s word TO each other.

Because we are committed to being a new testament church, a church that is committed to THE fellowship, we have been doing this through the discussion questions in each worship service.

And as your feedback indicates, this has resulted in spiritual growth in your own lives.

81.5% of you say that the discussion question have value to your own spiritual growth. And in fact many of the comments said that you want more time in the services to discuss the questions more fully. Something I was very encouraged by.

But even more than personal value, as we have devoted ourselves to THE fellowship of speaking God’s word to each other, our community strengthened. Significantly.

Most of you feel that the discussion questions are very valuable or extremely valuable in building up the church community. Not surprising if we see that speaking God’s word TO one another, is part of what it means to devote ourselves to THe fellowship.

However, we do have to recognise and respect that the discussion questions are not for everyone. Not everyone feels this positively, and we do have the 12% who feel that these questions are of no value.

Church council had a long discussion about this, and in the end we decided not to make a decision at this stage.

We had differing opinions as to how we can best manage these competing views, and so we have decided to take a month, and to pray about it. We want ask you to also pray about this, because we want to be a church that is dedicated to the fellowship, but in a way that recognizes how God has wired each person.

So will you pray with us?

The other part of devoting ourselves to THE fellowship today is participation in growth groups.

Now, again, we need to think about just how far we have come as a church.

As our culture here has shifted to outside, as we have continually turned our eyes toward those around us, as we have started asking ourselves the questions in our every day life “How can I help them take their next step toward Jesus”, we as a community have changed.

A couple of years ago, we essentially had two functioning growth groups. Two groups whose express purpose was to help the people in teh group grow spiritually and take their next step.

Today, 80% of our active congregation members are either in a growth group, or want to be a part of one.

Just so you know, that is considered by church health people to be the gold standard of participation.

No church will have 100% attendance, but this is 80% of the church, who take the word with them through the week, and who can encourage one another with the word, outside of the church service on a Sunday.

Notice, that all but one person who was in a growth group described their growth group as valuable to them.

This is massive. So I want to take a moment here, just to first of all that God for the massive shift he has accomplished in our congregation in this regard. To him be all the glory.

And I wanted to also recognise the growth group leaders, who incidentally are all part of our pastoral care team as well, for the care and input they give each week.

Praise God.

So that is The fellowship.

So we have seen how we hope to be committed to the apostles teaching this year, and how we are committed to the fellowship this year.

And that also is the feedback we wanted to share with you from the surveys, because those things have a direct impact on how we do church on Sundays and during the week.

But now, I want to tackle the other things together as we now share the plans for this year.

Those who were being saved

The Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Do you see it there? This is a process. It is the process of discipleship. Those who were being saved. It is a process of learning to be like Jesus. It is a process we call discipleship - taking one step at a time towards Jesus.

You know it has been a great pleasure for me, to see how this church has embraced this vision to disciple people. To help people take the next step.

This is THE task Jesus has given to the church. If anything is to characterize a church that wants to follow Jesus, then discipleship will be that thing.

Matthew 28:16–20 CSB

16 The eleven disciples traveled to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted. 18 Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

What a privilege and a joy it is to be able to be here together to commit together to what God calls every believer to do.

To make disciples.

This is the command he gave his disciples before he left earth, and this command still governs the church.

This is a journey we as a congregation have been on together for a number of years now. And we have grown massively in having this as our focus.

Each week, or at least many weeks, when we start our worship services we say that our church is a church that is committed to making disciples, that is helping people take their next step toward Jesus.

You might wonder, why we say that every week. We do so mostly for our visitors - this is our purpose, this is what we exist for, and we want to help you all take your next step.

And friends, as our culture here has shifted, as we have continually turned our eyes toward those around us, as we have started asking ourselves the questions in our every day life “How can I help them take their next step toward Jesus”, we as a community have changed.

What has happened is that we as God’s people, have become less and less OK with it that those around us remain lost.

As we have devoted ourselves to the apostles teaching, to fellowship, to the breakign of bread and to prayer, God, through his Holy Spirit has been working on our hearts.

Let me ask you this: Are you comfortable with teh fact that the person sitting in the office cubicle next to you, or who goes to school with you, or is in your family, whoever it is, are you comfortable with the fact that he or she is facing an eternity in hell because they reject Christ?

If you said no - thats because the Holy Spirit has been preparing your heart.

The more we have grown, the more connected to Jesus we become, the more concerned we are about the outsiders.

After all,

Jesus himself said,

that he came to seek and save the lost.

And so that is what we want to do this year. Is to reach the lost, so Jesus can save them.

So what do we think God is calling us to do here? We have prayed about this plan, worked on it with the deacons and with the growth group leaders, and with outside consultants, because we believe God has given us things like strategies to serve him.

And so this is the strategy we think God has called us to.

[Slide] - Sandra to move to to the prezi slides

Now let me walk you through this.

So what sits underneath this is that this is a real partnership between the members of the church and the church as an organisation. This will not work if we don’t work together on this, so this is a real community effort.

Now let me go into some of the detail here

[slide - evangelistic sundays]

So the whole plan revolves around these two evangelistic sundays on the 29th of October and the 5th of November.

Now you might be wondering why we have 2 evangelistic sundays back to back?

The reason for this is because the average person will be able to think up an excuse to not come to something once, but if you invite them twice they are much less likely to say no. So in other churches where they have used this strategy, the first week tends to have only a handful of newcomers, and the second week has way more.

So we want to invite people two weeks, back to back so that we can share the Gospel with as many people as possible.

Now notice the partnership - the church organisation will do the work of actually sharing the gospel, explaining to people what it is they are missing in Jesus and how he is the bridge that will reconnect them with God.

That is our job as a church. But we need someone to preach to - that is your part of the partnership. You will need to invite them, because you know them.

Now our target here is to invite 100 people. We have roughly 100 people who are church members here, and so this figure of 100 is 1 person invited for each one of us. This includes the kids - parents and kids together. This is a community outreach initiative.

Now 100 seems like a lot doesn’t it? But here are the realities.

Now the stat in Australia is that 1 in 4 people will accept an invite to come to church if they were invited.

That is staggeringly high. Think of 4 people you work with, or go to school with. If you invited all 4 of those, 1 would come.

that means, at least statistically speaking, if we invite 100 people, 25 will come.

Can you imagine just how wonderful it will be if there were 25 new people here on one sunday, hearing the true gospel preached, perhaps for the first time ever?

now 1 in 4 is the kind of basic, latent, invite-ability of people. But we want to strengthen that even further, so that it is more than 1 in 4. And we will talk about how we will do that next.

So if we want to do better than 1 in 4, we need to do some more work.

That is where the rest of the plan comes in.

So working back from the evangelistic sundays, we want to increase peoples chances of saying yes to an invite to church - and the best way to do that is to break down the barriers people have to coming to church and the best way to do that is through social connections.

Basically what we want to do is build such strong friendships that people are much more likely to accept an invite, and at the same time we want to make people more and more comfortable with being around Christian people, and being in a church building.

[slide][slide]

So this starts with the personal Social

Now the aim here is to invite someone to your home, but when you do let them know, “just so you know, at our home we pray before and after meals. would that be ok with you”?

And 99 times out of a 100 they will say yes, and then you have permission to be a weird Christian.

Now notice, the aim is for them to realise that you are a chrisitian and to see something uniquely christian. But that’s it. That is their next step.

The aim is not to convert them around the dinner table, but just to build a relationship. If it goes well, you have the option then of having next steps for that person.

They might have some questions about the faith - great, invite them to coffe. Maybe they are ready and just want to see what church is like, great - invite them to church. Maybe you can invite them to your growth group, or the parents group that runs with youth or whatever.

There are these natural next steps built in.

So that’s the personal social.

[slides]

Then, we move to a group of christians together - so they have managed to survive the encounter with a single christian, now we want to make our christian friends their friends.

And again, notice the aim is to have fun and socialise. IT’s not to study the bible together on that night, or have extremely deep faith questions, although if that happens, its fine of course.

But the aim is to build friendships with more and more christians so that more and more barriers are broken down in this person’s mind. And again, the same next steps apply - if it goes well, maybe they actually want to join the growth group or the church or whatver - great. Maybe they want to talk more over coffee- again great. Maybe there is abook you htink they need to read, give it to them.

All these are great next steps.

So then after the growth group social, we move to a whole church social event

[slides]

Again, notice the aim. The aim is for these people we have been inviteing, to now come and have fun with the church as a whole. But specifically to do it in this building.

PEople have a weird feeling about church buildings. They often feel as if God will zap them if they walk throuhg the doors. So we want to provide a non-threatening environment to help people take yet another step.

Now notice, we have some strategic steps here too.

We want to have an info booklet available to give to people with info about the churhc, and what we believe for them to look through on their own time.

We will be praying togehter on that night to open and close, and so this may be the first time our new friends may have ever prayerd.

We want to have the option available for them to somehow connect with us via the newsletter or the devotions. So when they sign up, they get constant Christian teaching delivered to their mail boxes. This sort of pre-evangelises them. Getting their hearts ready for the evangelistic sundays.

[slide]

And then there is an additional step - we are now all friends together, and so we want to invite all these contacts we have to come on the church camp with us. Again this is a social camp, but with a church service included.

And at the church service, we will also be inviting them to the evangelistic sundays the two weeks following.

Now the aim here is for our non-believing friends to hear their first sermon, to spend lots of time with us christians, and to biuld up our church community.

And the next steps here include inviting them to the evangelistic sundays, to follow, or whatever that looks like.

[slide].

Then coming out of the evangelistic sundays, we want to be inviting people to sit one on one with us over coffee and to ask - what did you think of that.

We want to invite those who are ready into a intro to christianity course - someting like “Just for starters, or mini Alpha or something”.

We want to have books available for people to explore more on their own - books like “the course of your life”, or “the thing is”.

We want to invite them back to church the week after for sure.

Get them to sign up for informational stuff. and so on.

[slide back to the big picture]

Now this all sounds really linear, and very clearly thought out, and very next steppy, and in reality its not going to be as linear as this. Things will be a bit more messy, and some of our friends are going to say no, and that sfine.

But it is part of us being obedient to the calling we believe God has given us.

Now.

Here is the big question.

Now where are we going to source the people we are inviting from?

We are asking everyone to be praying for 2 people each, who they can invite to this evangelistic pathway.

Where will we get 2 people each from?

Well these people will come from your connections - it can be any person with whom you have regular contact. It could be a family member who has dropped out of church, or has given up on the faith.

It could be your hairdresser who you see every 6 weeks, who you have gotten to know.

It could be your next door neighbour who you see when you put the bins out.

Right now, God is probably putting a picture in your mind of someone who you should be inviting, should be thinking about. Work on that person.

Family, friends, co workers, school buddies, soccer club friends, whoever.

And the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. That is how we think we need to partner with God to achieve the great commission.

BUT

Did you notice, we missed one of the most important parts!

They devoted themselves, to the Apostle’s teaching - tick, to the fellowship, (tick), to the breaking of bread (well that is probably Lord supper and spending time togehter - so tick). And to prayer.... And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

We need to pray about this, to cover this whole thing in prayer.

[slide to prayer]

What we are asking you to do is to commit to praying for these two people you will be inviting to things.

Prayer is the foundation upon which all evangelism is built. Let me share a truth with you - we can have the best strategy - and i think we have a pretty good one, but it is God, who through his Holy Spirit needs to work in people’s hearts.

And the only part we can play in that is to pray for our friends.

So prayer undergirds this entire thing.

That is why in our growth groups, we have dedicated the opening 15 minutes to praying for our 2 people.

We will be praying as a whole congregation each week, from now on, until those evangelistic sundays.

We are asking you to pray individually for your two people at least weekly, but eveyr night would be better.

Because what that means is that by the time we get to our evangelistic sundays, we will have covered these people in prayer for at least 10 months - and that has to do something - right?

So will you commit to pray with us?

[slide 2024]

And that is the plan. We will review in 2024, and see where we made our mistakes and tweak for future years.

But that is basically it.

Realities

Now before we finish this morning there are a few other realities we need to face.

Reality check no 1: how are we going to measure success.

What if, we do all this, and no one shows up, or 100 people show up and no one ends up coming to faith?

Is that a failure ?

no. Not if we have been faithful ot God’s call. Our measure is not the number of people who come, it is the number of people we invite.

It is not conversion, but intention.

It is not other people’s faith, so much as it is our faithfulness.

If we have been obedient to the call, then we have succeeded and that success will be celebrated, even if no one comes.

That’s the first reality check.

Reality check no 2:

For this to work, the church needs your help. Obviously this involves the actual people to be invited etc.

But a more immediate issue is that the church need much more financial support for us to keep running.

Our offerings and pledges are lagging behind by about $600 a week. We need roughly $2400 each month more to sustain what we are currently doing.

But this plan, this outreach work, is too important to let it stop because of a lack of finances. So I am asking you, for the sake of the kingdom work we plan to do here, to dig deep, to rethink your offerings and spending. To sacrifice somewhere, in order to invest in the kingdom here.

It could be 12 families who increase their weekly giving by $50. It could be one business person who wants to invest the whole $600 each week into the kingdom. I don’t know - God knows.

But we have moved to the front lines of the spiritual war that is raging as a church, and I don’t think any of us here wants to fail, simply because we don’t have the money to do it.

Will you pledge today, to invest $50 a week more, $20 a week more, $100 a week more, in order to enable us to keep working on this stuff?

That’s reality check 2.

The final reality check. No 3.

Fear.

I think, whenever we tackle something big, whenever we move from what is “normal” to something different, we can be pretty fearful.

I will be honest with you - I am scared. What happens if we fail, what happens if this comes crashign down, and no one comes.

I am scared, because as I said we have positioned ourselves on teh fronline of the spiritual battle. Every time a church does this, Satan is not happy.

But he is not the king is he. We serve a higher king.

A king who is calling us into battle. Who has given us his word, and his truth, and who promises to go to war in front of us.

So what do we have to be afraid of?

This world? Which can only kill our bodies?

no.

We serve a higher throne, than all this world has known.

So let’s not let fear stand in our way.

So then.

Shall we do this?

Let’s pray.

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