Posts Tagged: The Ark Church

Faster Pastor

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!

Introducing Speiro Media Ministries

What would happen if there were a healthy, vibrant, multiplying Adventist church in every city, in every county, in every state in the North American Division?

What if there was one healthy, vibrant, & multiplying Adventist church for every 10,000 individuals in the North American Division?

There would be a lot of churches!

In fact if we had one healthy, vibrant, & multipling Adventist church for every 10,000 individuals there would be 35,000 churches throughout the United States and Canada.

Some one may ask: “Why would we want that many churches?”

The simple answer would be, “Because we are called to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ & His soon coming in the context of the Three Angels Messages with all 350,000,000 persons in our Division (and beyond) Matt. 28:18-20.”

You may ask, “why 1 for every 10k?” I would encourage you to read my blog post by just said title: 1 For Every 10k, but to answer quickly and succintly studies have found that a church of 200 individuals can realisitically only have an impact on 10,000 persons.

So how are we doing with this goal, this need of 35,000 churches?

Well we are a little behind? We currenly have 5326 churches.

But wait at the top we said we are in need of 35,000 healthy, vibrant, multiplying Adventist churches in the North American Division.

Dr. Joseph Kidder in his excellent book, “The Big Four” points out that in Adventism 80% of all churches in North America are Plateauing or in decline. That means that out of the 5326 churches that we already have in existence only 1,066 of those are healthy, vibrant, multiplying churches, while 4,260 churches have stopped growing and are whithering.

Which is why we Jason Lombard–a marketing, web design, creative type–& myself–a pastor, talks a lot type–started Speiro Media Ministries.

To plant new churches & re-plant the churches that have lost their health, their vibrancy, & their ability to multiply.

Speiro Media Ministries is a ministry with a deep commitment to seeing local churches change lives for eternity, a deep belief that God will still do the impossible (even plant 30,000 Adventist churches and revive 4,260 others), and the deep conviction that as believers in Christ we have no other option than to give our lives for the salvation of others!

So how will Speiro work?

The best way to understand how Speiro will work is simply to take you through our intended process & to do that I will use a local town that has been on our radar ever since this conviction and dream began to formulate in our hearts.

Kingsburg, CA.

In Kingsburg, CA a city of 11,537 persons there is currently no Seventh-day Adventist Church. We believe this must change, so what do we do about it?

  1. We establish connections in Kingsburg through media content. How? Through direct mailing, google ads, Facebook ads, hard print ads, and various other marketing techniques. All of these things would direct people to our website. On this site people would be able to hear messages, full length & devotional length. They would be able to read blogs, sign-up for interactive Bible studies, and receive prayer support. In many ways your typical media ministry website content in a new & updated package. 
  2. When, through the analysis of data, we see that we have a decent following within Kingsburg we will then advertise & hold a series of meetings, aka public evangelism, though with a twist.
  3. The twist to these meetings is that almost simultaneously we will begin, through media provided to meeting attenders, & through short training sessions held in conjunction with the meetings train people for what it means to be part of a church. The meetings will not just be evangelistic or doctrinal, but they will be practical as well.
  4. One of the key differences with Speiro is that at the end of the meetings, rather than just baptizing and leaving, we will seek to establish a “permanent work” a church plant in the city of Kingsburg. (This of course will be done in accordance and in conjunction with the local Seventh-day Adventist Conference).
  5. Speiro to unburden the conference will initially provide resources to the local body for a Bible worker to help oversee the church as a local elder.
  6. The evangelist, right now that is me:), will continue to preach to the local body on a weekly basis. How? Through a satellite feed from the Visalia Seventh-day Adventist & or The Ark Seventh-day Adventist Church. 
  7. Continued training will continue to take place in the new church plant, and a continued proactive media presence will remain in Kingsburg to support the new believers as they take on the responsibility of reaching their family, friends, coworkers, & neighbors to grow their church.
  8. End result: A healthy, vibrant, multiplying Adventist church.

Ellen White wrote:

“In every city that is entered, a solid foundation is to be laid for permanent work.”   –Testimonies for the Church, p. 38.

We want to be faithful to that counsel! Our media ministry will not be the typical big coverage, TV, expansive meetings, famous speakers. It will follow more in the steps of the greatest church planter ever, Paul. Ours will be a missionary journey to go from city to city through modern technology seeking to establish churches that the good news of Jesus & His soon coming will be more widely spread through.

One of the other components of Speiro is helping to revitalize plateaued or dying churches. What is our intended plan to accomplish this agenda?

Well it is three fold:

  1. Quality Content–For churches that are plateaued and dead without a consistent pastor, there is often a lack of consistent, cohesive, & quality preaching.  This prevents growth in the local church, because the #1 reason given by people, even in this post-modern world, for why they choose to attend a church is the Preaching! (90%). Speiro through satellite will provide a consistent, cohesive message that was written with the knowledge of that specific church in mind. Some people ask, will people really come to see a preacher on a screen, the overwhelming answer is YES! Hundreds if not thousands of churches are utilizing this method of providing quality preaching, and sometimes even quality worship to other venues.
  2. Experienced Training–Our team will take the things we have learned in turning a plateaued church into a growing church, combine them with the things we have learned through our church plant and provide training for these churches. Simple things that won’t cost money, just a love for reaching people, and a desire to grow. The reason this training is so important is because although preaching will get people to choose your church, if we want to keep them in the church we must love them, care for them, and get them involved! If not they will eventually go out the back door.
  3. Evangelistic Support–Speiro will, like with the church plants flood the area with content, seeking to make connections, and leading them to their local church. We will also in time provide a live evangelistic series, and help offset the costs of Bible Worker that will assist with continued evangelistic growth.

In time we believe that Speiro will provide many levels of content for all people, but these two objectives will remain the consistent focus of Speiro. We are not trying to be big, we are trying to be faithful missionaries, journeying from town to town, leaving a lasting legacy in each town the Three Angels’ Messages are preached!

This missionary journey is already underway in many steps of faith, but to move forward even further we need your support! Speiro is in need of $10,000 seed money. This money will help provide the quality camera for filming and producing content (our one video thus far was filmed on an iphone:)) and the beginnings of the equipment we will need to establish a quality live stream to the churches that are already wanting to join us in this endeavor.  Would you prayerfully ask God what He may desire you to give to this ministry. Please we ask that you not give us your tithe, that should go to your local conference, through your local church, but if God is calling you to give a gift above and beyond your monthly 10% we would greatly appreciate the support.

You can give at our website Speiro, & in advance I thank you for your generosity!

(Speiro is a non-profit 501c3 and all gifts are tax-deductible).

 

The Most Exciting Numbers!

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.

 

 

1 For Every 10k

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


 

 

 

 

People Need the Lord: A Guest Post by Noemi Roman

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

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!

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