Greetings Y’all–
Here is a little project my friend Albert Handal, Pastor of the Stonehill Seventh-day Adventist Church in Austin, TX came up with and invited me to be a part of. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn through collaboration and to help network folk which are working towards & for the great day of Lord’s soon return! I hope everyone will enjoy and be blessed, especially our fellow Pastors!
I look at a lot of numbers. If you follow this blog, you know that “Church Growth” is the most tagged topic, and that naturally is about NUMBERS.
But of all the numbers I have written about I believe the numbers I am going to share with you in this blog are the most exciting thus far.
At the end of 2011 we decided to be a host site for the John Bradshaw/It Is Written evangelistic meetings being broadcast from Las Vegas.
One of our prayer warriors came to me with the idea that we get folk from in our church to pray for every single name on our membership roster and any others that we have in our “friends” list. That was a list of over 750 persons. I thought it was a great idea and so we went to our Prayer Director Kristin to see if something could be set-up. The decision was made to call folk to see if they would take a list of names to pray over.
After much calling & some emails Kristin had 7 individuals, not the number we were looking for :), that agreed to take a list of names to daily pray for. So they started with praying for all our active members.
But maybe more importantly, we began to pray for more prayer warriors!
That is a prayer we knew God wanted to answer in the affirmative, and He definitely has!
Today (ALL) just shy of 800 folk connected with our church are being prayed for daily by at last check 60 prayer warriors!
We started with 7 and we asked God to send more prayer warriors and now 5 months later we have 60 folks hitting their knees daily for their church & their church family!
I believe we have seen the difference. Between the Visalia Seventh-day Adventist Church & our northside church plant The Ark we’ve had 20 baptisms, 2 Professions of Faith (so 22 new Adventists), & 7 rebaptisms. An entire family is attending our church because they were led to do so in a dream, and 12+ more are in Bible studies.
In the past those are the things we have primarily prayed for, this year, while we have still prayed for decisions for Jesus, without much forethought our primary prayers and emphasis in church have been, “Jesus give us a greater spirit for prayer.”
The numbers the conference will look at & the numbers church growth statisticians look at are nice, but I believe that all those numbers are a direct result of the most exciting number of this year–SIXTY–60 interceding on behalf of the names on their lists.
I am so thankful for those 60 and I praise the Lord for the many more He will convict to be warriors in prayer for His people and for the city of Visalia.
Where do you live? What do your prayer warriors pray for? What would happen if you started praying less for church growth and more for prayer growth? Would your church grow anyway?
“It is a part of God’s plan to grant us, in answer to the PRAYER of faith, that which he would not bestow, did we not thus ask.” –Ellen G. White, The Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 4, p. 348.
That is not a 10k race…for those runner friends out there. I am writing of 10k as in 10,000, & the 1 is representative of 1 church.
We need 1 church for every 10,000 people, to be precise we need 1 church of 200 active members for every 10,000 people. This is the conclusion many have come to, including those in the North Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Why? Well let the folks at NPUC explain:
“A typical church of 200 active members will impact a maximum of 10k people (200 members x 50 contacts = 10k if there is no overlap).”
Now let me throw in this caveat that I believe to be absolutely 100% truth, and definitely verifiable through the stories of scripture. God could reach everyone with just 1 person. I don’t know how, but He could do it. And although that is true that is not the way God seems to work. In fact He seems to work in the way we would typically think of working, at least when it comes to numbers.
More people reach more people!
“The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” –Matthew 9:37-38
The idea is MORE laborers MORE reaping!
So yes God could reach everyone with just 1 person, but He has chosen to use people and to call for more people to help Him in reaching everyone. Which is the very reason why the statistic above is significant. For a church to truly impact 10,000 people it must have 200 soul winners, engaged members in its midst.
In most communities where there is an Adventist church of 500 or more folk will often ask, “Why do we need another church?” It doesn’t matter if the city is 20,000, 50,000, or 100,000+. A church of 500 or more is usually quite satisfactory to folk and again people ask, “Why do we need another church?” How do I know this? Because we have recently started another church (in my mind it is a campus, but to the community it is another church) The Ark a Seventh-day Adventist Christian Church, & because there is already a significant size church in our community, The Visalia Seventh-day Adventist Church, (740 members and growing) I have heard many times, “Why another church pastor?”
My answer is this:
Because 1 church cannot reach 125,000 people quick enough with the Adventist message (and yes I do believe in proselytizing) That is how many people there are in my city. Which would mean we need at least 12 churches of 200 soul winners to reach all 125,000+ people in our community.
What about in your community? How big is your city? Does your city have a population of 10,000 or more?
And if so…
Do you have an Adventist church? Are there 200 engaged–on fire, Jesus loving, people serving, Good News spreading–members in your church? Do you have enough churches & or enough members if your city is 20 thousand, 30 thousand, 40 thousand, 100,000, 500,000 people?
For most of you the answer will be NO!
How do I know? Because in the United States the mean size of a typical Adventist church is 215 members. That is good, except…there are only 4950 churches which in comparison to the population of the United States computes to just 1 church for every 63,267 people.
(Even if we took our total Adventist membership in the U.S. and divided it by 200 we would still only have 1 set of 200 people for every 58,900 people. Now probably wouldn’t be the right time to mention that only about half of all professed Adventists are “active” in their local churches right? Yeah that would be a much more dismal picture, so let’s at least let something be rose colored:)).
Back to our situation. In order to have 1 church for every 10k in the United States, we need 31,317 Adventist churches of at least 200 in the United States. So roughly, 26,350 more of our mean size (215) church.
So do we throw-up our hands and say impossible? Can’t be done? Do you remember that God that could reach everyone with just 1 that you were defending earlier when I was throwing-out numbers? Yes, He is still on the throne and He can very well do this! And He can very well do this through us!
Based on some quick adding and some quick math on my part. Let us state that there are about 750 churches with 300 members or more.
What if every church with at least 300 members, encouraged, taught, made a part of their culture, a membership tithe from the church. In other words if a church has 300 members they would ask 30 members to step out in faith and plant a church. If they have 400 members, 40, 500, 50…600 they plant two churches and send out two groups of 30.
What if a church such as Loma Linda University church made the decision to tithe their members. To call for 600 members to step out in faith and plant churches…what if they sent out 6 different teams of 100 to plant a church. 6 churches in 1 year. The same could be true for Pioneer Memorial Church, Pastor Dwight Nelson if he were to stand-up every year and teach every year his congregation to tithe themselves? Could they plant 3 churches of a 100 members every year? Why not? On faith they could!
Here is what I know about tithing financially. With an honest tithe I am never found in need! I believe the same would be true for our churches. If we stepped out in faith and said “we will not be satisfied with the inability to reach more people; we will not ignore the call to pray for more workers, we will actually send out more workers.”
If we were to do this, our churches would never be found wanting and the Adventist message would spread like wildfire!
Are you a Seventh-day Adventist believer? Then the above scenario is not something nice to throw around it is your calling!
“Upon ALL who believe, God has placed a burden of raising up churches.”
–Ellen G. White, Medical Ministry, p. 315
Noemi Roman is the Bible worker of the Visalia Seventh-day Adventist church and she is also working with our team to plant our new campus/church The Ark. Yesterday she was out inviting community people to The Ark’s Cookout, a connecting event this Sunday. The following is the story of an encounter she had with a lady by the name of Victoria:
Last night my sister and I while knocking on doors inviting people to the new church, knocked on a door of a lady who was on the phone. Not wanting to bother her, I was about to just leave the flyer on the door, but before I could pull it from my hand, she motioned for me to open the door and come inside. By the time we were through the front door, she had us two cold Pepsi’s and a apple apple juice (for Isaiah) in our hands motioning for us to sit down on the sofa. As we talked she told us that she needed to be saved and was scared she was lost. She questioned what was different about our church and said that even though we were nice, she probably wouldn’t attend because she felt like such a sinner, and had no knowledge of God. All she knew of Him was from what she had seen from The Passion of the Christ, she told us that if any of that was true and if He was willing to endure all that for us then she really wanted to be saved. We told her that God loved her and that it was by Grace alone, through faith, to the Glory of God alone that we are saved. Yvonne was so loving to her and asked her if she had ever considered bible studies. Her answer was no, because she felt embarrassed because she hadn’t read the bible and didn’t think she could understand it. She explained that her life had been spent making bad choices and that if we only knew, it would make us think different of her. WOW! I told her that God loved her and despite OUR failure, His love continues and will always continue. She looked at us so puzzled and said she had never heard such things. I thought how could someone not know that God loves them? God loves us so much and yet the Devil tries to blind people into not seeing who God really is~ A loving compassionate Father who at the thought of not spending eternity with us, jumped off a throne and land on cross just to save us and show us how much He values us. Giving up His life shows us our value. I praised God that she had seen The Passion of the Christ, that if that was the only knowledge she had of Him, PTL because that is the Gospel! (Despite some of the different portrayals of Christ in the movie vs bible).
As we were leaving she walked us out and I felt impressed to ask her if I could pray with her. Her eyes began to fill with tears and she asked if we could go back inside just the two of us. We went to her room and I grabbed her hand and prayed for her, I asked God to pour His Spirit on her and show her that He died to save especially her, that her name Victoria is engraved in the palm of His hands and that despite whom she sees, God sees a beautiful daughter whom He loves. I poured out my heart because I wanted her to know that she was loved and that we weren’t there by chance, God had led us to her house specifically. She cried the entire prayer. As I was leaving she hugged me and asked what she could bring on Sunday.
God is so good and meeting Victoria yesterday reminded me just how much God loves us. I left so blessed and so encouraged. There are so many people out in this world that don’t really know who God really is and how much He loves them. Thank you God for leading us to Victoria yesterday. Our group knocked on over 100 other doors and personally invited each of them. Please keep this Sunday’s event in prayer, pray for the last 200 invitations that were personally asked to come in prayer.
The Ark exists to impact EVERY life by boldly calling people to follow Jesus, transparently loving others (as Christ does!), obediently serving the community, faithfully teaching the full truth of the Bible, and intentionally training witnesses for the Kingdom.
Please pray for this movement! Our first preview service is this Sabbath/Saturday at 4:30 p.m.. if you are around feel free to join us it is at the Willow Glen Elementary School in Visalia, CA.
Thank you for your prayers!