best day in 30 years

This month marks my 30th year in ministry, a dozen church plants and four denominational jobs later, today, October 12, 2008 was the greatest ministry day of my life.

30 months ago as only God could design I was invited bythe 18 remaining members of Wornall Road Church in Kansas City to bring the church back from the brink of closing their doors – forever. The faithful band of mostly older adults who remained at Wornall were asked to think and act far beyond the boundaries of their comfort zone.

With a total commitment to the fidelity of Scripture and passion to become incarnational in the community they set out with me on the “ride of their lives”.

In the past 30 months we have stayed focus on the purpose that God gave us from the outset of this task, that focus is communicated in our mission statement – “Loving God and embracing His Word. Loving people and engaging our world.

We experimented with lots of ideas with a variety of results; it was very difficult in the early months. Our worship center can seat 600, and with less than 30 in attendance on Sunday morning, will as I often said –“you could shoot a canon off in here on Sunday morning and not hit anyone”. Still that little band was faithful…and God seeing their faith began to move among us.

We celebrate worship with more than 100 each Sunday morning, and more importantly lives are being transformed and our community is beginning to penetrate with the Gospel. Our church is representative of the diversity of our community. Hispanic, Asian, Black, Anglo, highly educated, uneducated, professional, non professional, at the highest end of the economic scale and at the lowest – and that is just our choir!

One unexpected victory has been the development of nothing less than an “organic” church planting (mini) movement. Our little church has directly assisted with the planting of eight new churches in the past 30 months with more on the way.Today, October 12, 2008 we had a joint worship service with five our daughter churches, each church brought music and message, we all took communion, it wasthe most amazing worship service I have ever led. We saw more than 250people, black, white, Hispanic, Korean, Lao, Middle eastern, East Indian, young, old, new believers and mature Christians all together – one church!

Not that we have planted this churches, God has called out and gifted passionate planters and teams, we simply provide every single resource (including $) to empower these new plants.

Together, Wornall and the daughter churchs are one church with a passion for this city and a burning passion for the Gospel and for sound doctrine. In recent months more than 50 new converts have been baptized by our church and our daughter churches.

How did it happen? How do you move from one dead church of 18 to 6 churches of250 in 30 months? And how do you do it with no financial resources (did I mention that when we began to replant this grand old church, she was broke…no money, after having more than $250,000 in funds just a few years earlier). The monthly cost in insurance and utilities alone was (and remain) more than $3,000.There is one key to this turn around.

The key was the understanding and embracing the supremacy of Christ. From the very beginning we have preached the supremacy of Christ and God has opened the eyes of the people to understand that Christ has power over all. We don’t fear the election, the economy, the dangerous city, we don’t fear the lack of funds or resources, we don’t fear the future, because of the supremacy of Christ we don’t fear giving up are demand for the details in return for the risky journey of faith...wedon’t even fear failure.

After 30 years, a dozen church plants I now realize the teaching and embracing of the supremacy of Christ is often the missing key to it our church planting efforts.

Jesus said, "I will build my church" the key to that statement is tofully understand who the "I" is. It is Jesus Christ who is supreme…to know that and act on that makes all the difference in the world.