Next Ten: Vision

Welcome/Series Intro

Hey welcome to Prairie Lakes - and welcome to Week 2 of 2 of our “Next Ten” series where we’ve been looking at the next ten years at PLC - and what we think God might have in store for us.

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DRAWING - MISSION & VISION

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Hey - we rarely do series anymore where one week builds on another like we are in this series—because we know that for a lot of us we’re not here every weekend or when we miss one, it feels like we’re missing a lot. But for this one, there’s really no getting around it.

So, if you missed last week, or if you just need a little reminder, here’s what we said:

2 week series on our mission and vision for the next 10 years (why, what, where)

“No Matter” is still our motto. (1 over the 99); but it’s not a great mission. If it was, mission accomplished… but we’ve still got work left to do

So we’ve adopted some new mission language: “Following Jesus Together For Our Neighbors”

And it’s that word “together” that we need to start unpacking today before we unpack our vision—where we feel like God is calling us to go in the next 10 years.

Together

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DRAWING - MY CIRCLE

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Imagine that this circle is… well… your “circle.”

These are the people you hang out with. At the center of the circle are those you’re closest with—your spouse if you’re married, your family if they live close and you’re close with them, your close friends. Further out might be co-workers, neighbors, and other friends you know, maybe from work or your kids’ school or a church you used to attend… whatever. But this is your circle.

Now imagine this circle is your church. These are the people you know because you go to the same church. Maybe you’re in a small group with them or on a serving team with them. Maybe you used to be. Maybe you just see them on Sundays. But this is your church circle.

Ok. Here’s my question:

How much do these circles overlap for you? How much do they overlap?

Some of you know right away. But if you’re kinda struggling to identify what this Venn diagram looks like for you, let me help you a bit.

Let’s say you’re brand new to church. You walk in the doors for the very first time. And maybe a friend of yours invited you—but besides them, you don’t know a soul.

If that’s you, the circles are pretty far apart.

Let’s go the opposite end of the spectrum:

Let’s say you’ve been at the same church forever, and you’ve sat in the same seat for 47 years, and you’ve made your own plaque to put on the back of the seat so that nobody sits there by mistake, and all of your friends are Christians, and you’ve got a ranked list of your top 613 worship songs according to their theological veracity.

If that’s you, my guess is that those circles are pretty close.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky—and I think probably a lot more relevant.

Because some of us have been going to Prairie Lakes for a pretty long time. I’m on year 26 myself. Some of us have been going a long time. This has been our church for a long time.

But it’s been a long time since we’ve served on a team.

And it’s been a long time since we’ve been in a group.

And maybe we’ve seen some friends come and go over that span of time.

And maybe we’re giving, or maybe we used to be. But either way, it’s not something we’ve thought about for a long time.

Or,

Maybe something happened and we got hurt. Maybe it was at a different church, or maybe it was this one. And what used to feel like home suddenly doesn’t feel as safe anymore.

Or,

Maybe we haven’t been going a very long time, but we’re not rookies. And we like the church. We like the teaching and the music and the environment and the No Matter stuff. But we’ve just never really engaged. Never took a step onto a team or into a group. Maybe we give a little bit here and there. But it’s kinda “set it and forget it.” We’re fans of PLC… we’d buy the merch. If we go to church, it’s where we go. But most of our relational equity and investment lives somewhere else.

How close are those circles for you?

Did there used to be overlap, but now not as much?

Has there ever been?

And how do you feel about what those circles look like for you? Are you content where they’re at? Do you wish they were different?

File that away just for a second. Don’t forget about it, because we’re gonna go right back to it in just a few minutes.

So, I said this last weekend, and I’ll say it again this weekend:

We haven’t done something like this as a church in 17 years. Last time we talked about a 10-year vision was 2008.

And even though I was around back in ‘08, I wasn’t the one up here casting that vision.

Which means:

This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this.

And so as I was thinking about how to talk about this, I thought about saving all of the vision stuff for the very end. You know, some big reveal.

But I’m just not that guy.

I don’t like hype. I don’t like feeling like I’m being sold something. “Big reveals” are more disappointing more often than not, in my cynical perspective.

So I’m just gonna share these vision items right here, right now—

But remember what I said:

Don’t forget about your circles. Because we’re gonna go right back to them after you see this.

Here’s the vision for the next ten at Prairie Lakes. In ten years, here’s where we’re sensing God is calling us to go:

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Vision for the Next Ten:

We make multisite church work for communities who need a church like ours:

12 total campuses across Iowa and beyond

4,000 people across the faith line

3,000 people baptized

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Now, I don’t have time to go through all of the logic behind those numbers. But even though they might seem crazy on the surface, they’re not:

We launched our first multisite campus in 2010. It’s 2025. We’ve got 7 campuses in 15 years. That’s about (2) a year. So, a total of 12 in 10 years isn’t crazy. Just follows the same pattern.

For each of the last (2) years, we’ve seen 300+ people tell us that they’ve crossed the faith line at Prairie Lakes. And about 75% of that amount have been baptized. So those aren’t super crazy numbers either.

Now:

12 campuses is a lot.

4,000 faith lines. That’s a whole Osage or a whole New Hampton plus some. That’s a lot.

The kingdom impact in that vision is just incredible and humbling and so unique—especially in this part of the country. How cool would it be to see God do something like that?

And just so you don’t miss it:

We’re not done with Iowa. We’re still looking for communities in Iowa that need a church like ours.

But in the next ten, we’re not going to limit ourselves to Iowa. Who knows? We might have to stop calling our circles our “Little Iowa”—because people in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Illinois won’t be able to relate.

(You’ll notice I’ve said nothing about Nebraska, and that’s intentional. They’re on their own.)

It’d be cool to see God bring all of this about.

But before we get all hyped up about that, let’s go back to our circles.

Here’s what I know:

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We need a vision not just for which communities we’re going to next, but also for what kind of community we want to be.

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What kind of community can be a unified, 12-campus church that spans across state lines?

We can’t keep launching churches that you can invite your friends to but struggle to make friends at.

We can’t keep launching churches that add to God’s family but that don’t build a sense of family.

Those kinds of churches will crumble under the weight of what expansion requires: generosity. Sacrifice. Not just a common slogan, but a shared heartbeat.

If we want to go wider—and we do—we have to go deeper. We have to build a foundation that can support our expansion. We have to build a family if we’re going to keep adding churches.

Which means we can’t keep launching churches that depend (primarily) on people who (mostly) like to (sometimes) attend. 

Now, we’re still going to be a church for those people. As long as God has me in this seat, we’re going to be a “no matter” church for people mostly like to sometimes attend. If that’s you, you are, in fact, the reason we exist. We exist to be a place where no matter who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you, that you might discover just how much God loves you as you look for him here.

But even though we exist for you, we aren’t going to exist because of you.

If Prairie Lakes is to continue to exist for you, we’re going to exist because more of us decide that place is going to be more than just a place we attend. 

It’s going to be a place where we stop building silos around our earthly families, segregating our kids and our calendars away to all of the things that compete for their attention. Instead, we must lead our families toward building into Jesus’ family—towards becoming part of this church family.

It’s going to be a place where we go deeper with Jesus and with one another.

Don’t get me wrong; Prairie Lakes can exist just fine if we don’t do these things.

But we won’t be the kind of church that continues to launch churches in the unchurched places for disconnected people with the best environments and the simple message of the gospel of Jesus… because if we don’t care enough to make this our church family, we won’t care enough to make the sacrifice so that another community somewhere else might have the same opportunity.