Local outreach

As a congregation we are committed to being Missional. Each Home Church has the mandate of regularly reaching out to those who don’t know Jesus in caring and practical ways. We will be serving and loving the larger community in the following ways…

Compassion outreach

We will serve those in need. Projects we have done or intend to do include:

Partnering with Inner City Churches

We will be working with inner city churches to facilitate their ministry through construction projects, service projects, and participating with them in care for those in their area, including feeding the homeless, providing clothing and aid to those in need, and so on. We want to humbly come along side inner city pastors, providing help as they lead, for they know their communities better than we ever will.

Caring for the needs of the poor in our own community and congregation.

Incarnational outreach

We will participate in “Servant evangelism” projects.

Servant evangelism is doing small acts of unconditional kindness to people in our community to show them the love of God. This could include giving away free water at local events, free car washes, community beautification projects, helping the elderly or single mom’s with practical projects, and the list goes on.

Need based teachings in Home Churches

For instance a Home Church might do a video series on marriage, family, or raising children, they might run an Alpha Course, Financial Peace University, or some other series that meets the felt need of everyday people. The Home Church would invite their friends and, for that 6 to 12 week series, turn the entire Home Church into an outreach event.

Relationship outreach

While all outreach needs to be relational, we will, as a regular part of our Home Church gatherings, ask one another what we’re doing to develop friendships with the unchurched people in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and places of recreation.

Foreign or translocal outreach

We desire our foreign outreach to develop organically as missionaries arise from within our congregation and as we make natural connections. We will be actively supporting foreign and translocal missions both through funds, through sending missionaries, and through short term mission outreaches.

Philosophy

The philosophy that guides our missional focus is as follows.

We believe the local church is pivotal to God’s plan for world evangelization, and that we will need to develop our own mission strategy.

We will seek to give strong support to a very few missionaries, rather than weak support to many missionaries. We believe this is better both for the missionary and the local church, for both will have a deeper relationship with one another.

We want to work to establish Church Planting Movements. For this reason our missions efforts will focus on helping to plant churches that will plant other churches. With the commitment to develop new movements, we will avoid creating long-term dependency of the churches we are planting upon our congregation. We are committed to developing and releasing leaders from within nations or people groups. Our goal is that new church plants in other nations might be indigenously led congregations that are self-sustaining and reproducing.

Towards these ends, we will focus the vast majority of missions giving towards people and projects that are working together with indigenous pastors and churches to reach the lost and to expand the Kingdom of God in their land. We will seek to facilitate what God is leading these leaders to do, rather than trying to dictate our own vision.

Short Term Missions

We believe that short term mission outreaches, both for service and evangelism are valuable both to those to whom we are ministering and to the team that goes on the short term outreach. We will encourage and facilitate outreaches to other parts of our nation, and to other nations around the world.