This week I spent 4.5 hours at church: 1 hour for worship practice, 1.5 hours for the sunday morning service, 1 hour for leading the preteen group wednesday night, and 1 hour for sunday school.
This week we had a missionary speak at our sunday school class. He wanted to get to know us all a little, so the first thing we did was go around the room and introduce ourselves, and tell him something about us. He then gave us an assignment - to write down all the bible verses about missions that we could in about 10 minutes. We took this time to look them up, then shared what we found. Among these verses were Matthew 25:31-40, and 2 Corinthians 7:15. His main point, however, was the great commission - to go into **all** the nations - all!. His point was that missions means everywhere, not just overseas. Everyone should go somewhere, even if it is close. He was a missionary to Australia, a country where only 2-5% people claim to be Christian or attend church. This is in comparison with the United States with its 75-80% attendence. People told him it was a lost cause, but that sometimes fuels him to to more for Christ. He believes that powers and leaders will come and go, but the word of the Lord will endure forever. His longing is to raise up "but" churches like the church in Acts 12 - Peter was imprisoned, *but* the church prayed. While they were praying, God released him for his imprisonment. The church prayed, and God responded. He wants our churches to be these "but the church prayed" churches.
1. How do you think we can make our churches more of a center of prayer?
2. What can we do to be better missionaries? (as in reaching our nation and other nations)
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This is a response to question #2.
ReplyDeleteThere are many ways that we can be better missionaries as a church and as individuals. The most important step, in my opinion, is realizing the necessity for both faith and works when we live out or lives as Christians. Too often, Christians get too caught up in the debate on whether or not one needs to do good works in order to achieve salvation. I am not saying that this is not a controversial topic, but when we get caught up in a debate, we miss the point. We, as the church, need to stop trying to figure out whether we need to do good things for salvation and just get out into our communities and make a difference. We need to just do it! Why not? If it is required of us for salvation, we meet our quota. If it is not, we do not lose our salvation and others will also be impacted and possibly saved. Where is the down side?
We also need to build relationships with non-believers. Bringing others to Christ is not a casual thing. It is a process. It takes strong, time-committed relationships to bring many people to Christ, or to show who Christ is to the community through our actions. We can't do any missionary work anywhere unless we invest ourselves and our time into making a difference. This is a hard step for the church to make. Not many people in the church are willing to make such a step, but nothing will happen if we do not do so.
In response to question 1:
ReplyDeleteIn order to get a church to pray: give them something to pray about. It sounds kind of selfish but people want to be able to talk to God about something that matters to them. Ok, maybe not, maybe there is more to it than that.. yes there is. I think people just need to see that God answers prayer and that He wants to talk to us. This can happen through journaling prayers and seeing how God has responded to those prayers, or just enlightening people that they have a gift of being able to step into the presence of God.