God Call

When my family served as missionaries over in Tanzania, East Africa, we had a fantastic leader named Jon Sapp. Jon now works for the Kansas/Nebraska Convention of Southern Baptist Churches. I will never forget the phrase that he said all the time… “Get to church.” What he meant by that was that everything that we were doing should end in an indigenous, self-replicating church. And we are not alone in that work! Jesus said in Matthew 16:18 that He will build His church. Jesus is in the business of building His church, and if that is what He is doing, then I want to be about that as well.

I had the privilege Monday of meeting a man by the name of Bobby Gupta (HBI Global Partners). He taught a Perspectives class that I have been taking. Bobby is from India and has some awesome experiences related to church building. He is actually a part of a movement trying to see 1 million churches started throughout India. During his talk, he shared some of the challenges that he faces. He said that many preachers love to come to India, because they can share the gospel and thousands of people will respond. He said that he has heard mission teams come back from India and other similar places boasting huge amounts of people accepting Christ. The problem, he said, is that he lives in India and he can never find all of those masses of people who have supposedly believed in Jesus. He claimed that too many Western Christians are focused on the proclamation of the gospel only, when Jesus told us very clearly in the Great Commission to go and make disciples – not converts only. This is a much more difficult work. Planting churches requires so much more time and energy than simply sharing the gospel and leaving, but it is essential to the completion of the Great Commission. Bobby left us all with some great quotes from some top missiologists, and I would like to share some of them with you…

David Womack says:
There is only one way the Great Commission can be fulfilled, and that is by establishing Gospel-preaching congregations in every community on the face of the earth.

Dr. Ralph Winters says:
…it seems to me that we should say a church for every people group in the world and at least one for every 1,000 within those groups.

Dr. Donald McGavran says:
The only way we will get the job of the Great Commission done is to plant a church in every community in the world.

Dr. Peter Wagner says:
The best method under heaven for evangelism is church planting. There never was a better method and there never will be.