Pardon the personal nature of this post, but, Summit Church, on the occasion of my 40th birthday I wanted to put out a few reflections about my beliefs for our next decade and tell you a story in case you didn’t know it. Summit Church, I plan to be here, serving as your pastor, until God takes me home–so this is for you. (PS, I hesitate doing this because I am usually annoyed when people find roundabout ways to announce it is their birthday. Rest assured that my family has deluged me with gifts and special attention already this morning, so this post does not arise out a deficiency there. But as it is my 40th birthday, which marks my official transition into adulthood, a few reflective moments naturally arose.)
First, I am deeply, deeply aware of the grace of God in my life. This morning God gave me a glimpse of how wandering and unfaithful my heart has been for these past four decades and how his grace has, at every turn, pursued me, refusing to let me go. In every sense of the word, he saved me. My heart has been dull, proud, and unbelieving, and I have resisted almost every step of the way. But God’s grace has conquered. His grace is my only hope and my greatest boast. I am not confident in my own strength for the future, but I am confident in his grace.
Second, I have asked God to let this next decade be “the decade of mobilization” for both me and for our church. I have asked God to let Psalm 2:8 define these next 10 years: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.” I believe this is the vision the Holy Spirit has put before us.
Which leads me to the story.
If you don’t know, our church was planted in 1962 by a man named Sam James. Though he worked with the launch team for 8 months before they planted, he only preached one actual sermon at the church. On the Sunday they launched, he preached from Isaiah 54:2–3, William Carey’s famous missionary text, in which God commands Israel to “expand her borders” and “lengthen the cords of her stakes” so that they can bring nations on the outside under the tent of their blessing. Sam James told the new congregation that he believed God had appointed this new church to bless the nations. It was what the Spirit had planted in his heart. After preaching that one sermon, he drove to Richmond, VA where he was appointed as a missionary to Vietnam and served there for the next 40 years (though he was kicked out in the late 1960’s for a few years).
Unfortunately, as Sam James related to us, for many years the church lost its way and, like many churches, became focused more on itself than those God had called it to reach. But when I was called as the pastor in 2002, God had already begun to reawaken those old desires in the church. I had never heard of Sam James. But my own calling to ministry had begun as a call to the mission field, and I knew that whatever church I pastored, that needed to be at the core of it. What was surprising was to see how easily the vision took hold in the church. It seemed that everything we attempted on that front was propelled forward by an unseen hand.
College students “discovered” our church a year after I became pastor. College students, if you don’t know, travel in herds. So our attendance basically tripled within a few weeks, while our average weekly giving went up about $13.48. We knew that we might never be a rich church, but we would have a lot of people to mobilize for the nations.
Today, more than 160 of our members live overseas on one of our church planting teams, and we have sent out close to 300 in the last four years to plant churches domestically. On Easter more than 3,500 people attended one of the churches we’ve planted in the United States in the last 4 years. Earlier this month, we commissioned nearly 100 college seniors, who have given their first two years after graduation to serve with our church plants and partnership ministries, spreading the gospel locally, nationally, and around the world.
As I think back on it, I’m not quite sure exactly how all this has happened. Apart from the Spirit of God, I really can’t figure it out—our success in this area has been too fast and too strong to explain it as the result of a charismatic vision or good leadership techniques. We know it is God’s Spirit. He is the force in the church behind this.
When I met Sam James for the first time, several years after becoming pastor here, and heard the story of our church’s beginning—how the Spirit of God had called him and our people to this—a lot of our past ten years began to make sense. It’s been his vision for the church, and we’re just recovering it.
God calls every church to the same basic mission, but through his Spirit he invites particular churches, and particular people, to specific dimensions of that mission. When we follow, we tap into a torrent of power. Psalm 2:8 belongs to all Christians, but he has invited me, and us, to ask it specially for ourselves. I believe God wants us to plant 1,000 churches out of our church in our lifetime. And I have asked God to let us be a part of seeing a major awakening occur in three countries besides the United States.
Now, I don’t know the future infallibly, and cannot guarantee I’ll even wake up tomorrow. Yet I am more confident in this pursuit than ever, because I know I have heard his voice calling, “Follow me.” We are not working for God, but with him. It’s his vision. We’re along for the ride.
The Word details the mission of the church, but the Spirit imparts the vision. And I know this is his vision for us.
While I am deeply grateful for what God has done, I also believe that the ethos of “we must go to the nations and finish the mission” has not yet fully saturated our church. We want all businesspeople to consider how their careers might be used in the Great Commission; every parent to hope this for their children; every seminary student to consider it for their ministry; every college student to ask how their gifts might be used to make his name famous among the nations.
May God give us what we ask! Psalm 2:8
