How God's Kingdom Grows (Mark 4:26-29)

VISION SUNDAY How God’s Kingdom Grows (Mark 4:26-29) August 13, 2023 OPENING ● Welcome and good morning! I am so glad to be here with you today. ● In 2019 the BBC released an article retelling the tragedy that happened 40 years ago. It remains New Zealand's worst peacetime disaster. On 28 November 1979, a sightseeing aircraft carrying 257 people crashed head-on into the side of a volcano in Antarctica. The tragedy of flight TE901 was a shock for New Zealand, affecting almost everyone in the country in some way, and led to years of investigations and a bitter blame game. And the legacy of the Mt Erebus [air-uh-bus] disaster is still felt 40 years on. 1 ● A two degrees drift doesn't sound like a lot, but even one degree is huge in aviation terms. ● Unknown to the pilots, there was a 2-degree error in the flight coordinates that placed the aircraft 28 miles east of the planned route. ● What’s true for pilots is also what’s true for churches. Even just a degree of drift can cause a church – like a pilot – to end up in a place they never intended to be. ● Today I want to take some time to FOCUS on the mission and vision of our church. Why? Because every church, over time, increasingly experiences the threat of DRIFT. The reason it’s called DRIFT is because it doesn’t happen suddenly! It happens slowly over time – so slowly that you barely even notice it until you have drifted very far from where you originally started! 1 “Mount Erebus disaster: The plane crash that changed New Zealand” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50555046 1 ● And the reason it’s so dangerous is not because of how it will affect us today, but because of how it will affect us NEXT YEAR and how it will affect us in 2 years, five years, or 25 years! Think about it like this: ○ One degree off traveling from San Francisco to L.A., you'll be off by 6 miles. ○ From San Francisco to Washington, D.C., you'd end up on the other side of Baltimore, 42.6 miles away. ○ Traveling around the globe from Washington, DC, you'd miss by 435 miles and end up in Boston if you were one degree off. ○ THE POINT: The longer you DRIFT – the more it affects you. ● That’s why the scripture says this in the book of Proverbs. Proverbs 4:25-27 NLT [25] Look straight ahead, and fix your eyes on what lies before you. [26] Mark out a straight path for your feet; stay on the safe path. [27] Don't get sidetracked; keep your feet from following evil. ● Don’t get sidetracked! Don’t lose sight of where you are headed! ● And today, we want to talk about this vision because we always want to be CLEAR about WHY we are doing WHAT we are doing, and we want to make sure that there is unity in our efforts as we each engage in being a local expression of God’s church. ● Ultimately, I hope to help us understand something Jesus talked about with his disciple in the Gospel of Mark long ago and how it applies to our mission and vision today. If you have your bibles, go ahead and turn to Mark 4:26-29 where I plan to land the plane of this message today. TEACHING ● While you turn there, let’s just talk for a second about why mission and vision statements exist. ● Typically, groups of people like churches, organizations, and even companies utilize mission statements to put in writing what they believe is their Identity and Purpose. 2 ○ For churches, mission statements often clearly explain what a church believes about their specific identity. In other words, it is what they believe God has called them to BE ○ Mission Statement = What God has called a church TO BE ● Even if you don’t know what our specific mission statement is, if you’ve been part of Clarity for a significant amount of time, our mission statement will sound a lot like things we say around here. Here is our mission statement. ○ We are a community of Gospel-Centered people, increasingly learning to submit all of life to Jesus as Master and Savior and repurposing our rhythms to engage in the mission of God in the world. ● A Vision Statement, on the other hand, is what a church believes God will accomplish through them as they engage in the work of living out their mission. So while a Mission Statement = What God has called a church TO BE, a ○ Vision Statement = What God, through a church, wants TO DO ● When it comes to the idea of VISION, anyone who teaches on how to cast a compelling vision will tell you that it needs to be simple and repeatable. Then you need to say it until people are absolutely sick of hearing it, and when they are sick of hearing it – that’s when you’ve just started repeating it! ● So here is our vision statement – what we believe God wants to accomplish through our efforts of being a local fellowship of believers. ○ OUR VISION: Gospel transformation everywhere we go, every day we live, with everyone we meet. ● And as I look over the last ten years, it has been my joy and honor to witness God accomplishing his vision for our church. Here is the story of one person – who all of you should be familiar with – whose life has been deeply impacted by Clarity. ● VIDEO: Kathy Packard and Clarity (3:15) 3 ● Over the years, the power of God, through the intentional use of time, energy, and resources, has allowed those who considered themselves a part of Clarity to help people who were not yet part of this church feel invited and welcomed to experience transformation in their lives through the Gospel. ● And for the first 5-6 years of our church’s history, we were able to see incremental growth little by little. ● But then something changed. More specifically, in retrospect, I realized that I changed. I moved one degree off of God’s vision for our church, and up until recently, I didn’t even notice it. ○ It wasn’t until I recently met with other mentors and pastors I trust that I realized I have been leading this church one degree off. And it was so small that I didn’t even know it. ○ And when I mean one degree, it was something really small. So small that I even discounted the importance of it. ○ But just like a plane off by one degree, that one degree can begin to have a negative impact over time. ● It’s no secret that over the last few years, we have slowly become smaller and smaller as a church. It’s also no secret that over the previous few years, we have not had the honor and joy of seeing people cross the line of faith or proclaim their faith in Jesus through Baptism as Jesus instructed his disciples to do when he spoke these words we commonly refer to as the “great commission.” Matthew 28:19-20 CSB [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." ● And recently, this has been bothering me to the point that I have been engaging in very open and honest conversations with mentors and pastors who I consider much wiser and who have been in ministry much longer 4 than me. And what I learned from those conversations is what I want to talk to you about today. ● To explain it, I first want to take you to a passage of scripture that one of my mentors took me to when trying to help me put some sense together as to why we are where we are and how we could find our way back on course. ● It’s a story Jesus tells his disciples after explaining the parable of the soils. Mark 4:26-29 CSB [26] "The kingdom of God is like this," he said. "A man scatters seed on the ground. [27] He sleeps and rises night and day; the seed sprouts and grows, although he doesn't know how. [28] The soil produces a crop by itself-first the blade, then the head, and then the full grain on the head. [29] As soon as the crop is ready, he sends for the sickle, because the harvest has come." ● When you read scholarly commentaries on this passage, you’ll find similar observations like this that Bruce Barton makes about this passage. He wrote: “Jesus was explaining that the kingdom would grow both in people’s hearts and by adding people to it. The growth would be slow but certain. It would face obstacles but would continue to grow nonetheless. Our job is to faithfully sow the seed, trust God, and wait and look for signs of life.” 2 ● So it makes sense that when I began to ask, “Tell me what it is I’m not seeing…why is it that Clarity Church is not growing?” a mentor would take me to this passage. ● Taking me to this passage, he first tried to encourage me by showing me that – according to Jesus – the kingdom of God grows – not because of the farmer but because of the seed. ○ According to Jesus, the farmer does not make the seed grow, much less understand the “mysterious power of the seed itself to produce a crop.” 3 as on bible scholar would describe in his commentary of the passage 2 Bruce B. Barton, Mark, Life Application Bible Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1994), 115. Walter W. Wessel, “Mark,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), 652. 3 5 ● But then, he asked a question that cut to the heart. In not so many words, He asked, “If the power of the Kingdom of God to grow is in the seed, and not the sower, what is the logical explanation of why a farmer standing over his field sees no crop over time?” ● At that moment, I knew where I had shifted one degree as a leader. But it wasn’t until my lunch this past week with Pastor Ben from Northridge Fellowship – one of the two churches that called Leona and me to start Clarity – that I received some clarity about where I had drifted and unintentionally allowed us to shift one degree from the vision God placed on my heart for this church we started almost ten years ago. ● I told Ben it was my hunch that our church wasn’t growing because we had forgotten to be people who scattered seeds. ○ Over the last few years, we enjoyed the benefits from the growth we saw in previous years of planting seeds. But I was now realizing that a decision I had made several years ago was negatively impacting our church’s ability to grow. ● And to be honest, there was a little bit of pride in me that looked at other churches who put effort into making persuasive invitations for people in their community to attend a weekend gathering and say, “That’s interesting. Well, we’re just committed to the gospel!” ● And as I told Pastor Ben, I’ll confess to you that – in my heart of hearts – I don’t believe that we need to have special events, send out postcards, or invest in marketing of any kind to see more people come to faith in Jesus. ● And like some of you, Pastor Ben agreed with me! In fact, he said, “In the 20-plus years of Northridge's life, I don’t think I have EVER seen any kind of outreach or marketing strategy work to bring more people to Northridge. But I do know that when we engaged in doing those things, those were seasons where God brought visitors, and if you think about Clarity’s history, you’ll probably see the same thing.” ● And he was right. In the early years of our church, even though I felt like many of our efforts at inviting our community to come and be part of our gatherings were ineffective, people visited. They didn’t come because they got a postcard or because of some special event. 6 ● God was at work, and he saw that we were aligning ourselves with his desire to see people connected in Gospel-centered community, learning to increasingly submit all of life to Jesus as master and Savior. And our willingness to plant seeds allowed us to see stories like this. ● VIDEO: Kevin Millard and Clarity (2:44) APPLICATION ● So what am I getting at? What’s the purpose of today’s message? ● The kingdom of God is growing, and we can choose to be a part of it. ○ We have been a Gospel-Centered Community. ○ We have committed to increasingly submit all of life to Jesus as Master and Savior. ○ And in some ways, we are repurposing our rhythms to engage in the mission of God in the world. ● And while I have seen a tremendous amount of growth in many of your lives regarding being the kind of people through whom Gospel-Transformation is made possible everywhere, with everyone, every day you live, what I believe we need to do as a church is course correct and realize that we need to do a better job of engaging in a strategy for being a persuasively inviting and proactively welcoming church. ● And it should go without saying that I will need your help. ● For one, I am asking you to commit to repurposing your resources. ○ For those of you who have given to our Amilfy campaign, I am asking you to shift your giving towards the Amplify campaign for the next year and give that to the general fund. ○ For those of you who already give to the general fund, please increase your generosity. 7 ○ For those of you who have chosen not to include giving to Clarity as a part of your commitment to biblical stewardship, please commit to regularly giving something. ○ Why this ask? Because our current budget does not include any marketing expenses, and we will need seed money if we are going to create and implement a strategy for being a persuasively inviting and proactively welcoming church. ● Second, I am asking you to commit to repurposing your rhythms. ○ Our Sunday gatherings are already part of your rhythms for many of you. But if we begin seeing more people come through the doors of our gatherings, we need to be able to have a fully resourced ministry. ○ It’s no secret that we need more people. If you didn’t know this, ask those that serve in our kids' ministry, or those who serve as a part of our worship team, or help with setup or cafe! ○ And while it’s no big deal for those of us already committed to Clarity to show up to a gathering and ■ find out kids ministry is canceled because we don’t have any teachers, ■ or that there’s no coffee because no one was available to run the cafe, ■ or that the pastor of the church also has to lead worship because too many people got sick at once ○ The truth is that we want the people who may visit us to experience the very best of our rhythms of gathering for worship so that they can stick around long enough to be connected in community and share the joy of ministry with us. ○ So in the coming months, we will ask you to ensure that our Sunday gatherings are scheduled fully. ○ Just like when we started Clarity, we knew that asking people to serve all the time forever was not sustainable, but we also knew that assimilating people into the life and rhythms of our gathering for 8 worship would require a season of making sure we fully showed up for those looking for a church to call home. ○ So once we begin implementing our strategy for being a persuasively inviting and proactively welcoming church, we want to be fully resourced. ○ When the time comes for us to make that 3-6 month schedule, I humbly ask you to repurpose your rhythm and not just attend a church you think is great but make the church you are a part of great. ● Together, let us be the kind of church that faithfully plants seeds and watch God do what only he can do – and rejoice as God allows us to be part of seeing God’s Kingdom Grow. 9