Becoming A Gospel Epicenter

Well, good morning. If we've not met, my name is Josh and I'm glad that you're here today. Maybe you are new here or you've been around for a little while and you've never really connected past attending a service. And I just want to invite you to more. I want to invite you to more.

There's so much more that God has in mind for his gathered church that we would be a body of believers who are connected, interconnected in community, who are serving one another, who are proclaiming the gospel, growing as disciples. And if that does not describe you today yet, maybe today's the day to take a next step. We'd love for you to do one thing today. Go to the information desk out in the foyer, introduce yourself to them and tell them that you're ready to take a next step. They can help you find your people in community.

They can help you find a place that you can share your gifts and passions inside of the body for the good of the church and to honor God. And they can help answer questions that you might have. So I hope you'll step into more today. Today we're going to shift gears from our eight week, verse by verse study through the book of Colossians. If you missed that man, go back and listen online.

Study through the book together with us. It was such a rich experience and I'm so glad so many of you took part in reading through the book week after week as we did that together. But today we're gonna look at local and global impact and we're gonna look at kind of the vision and philosophy behind where we are as a church and where we want to go. And we're gonna look at the biblical standard for what God establishes, local and global impact at all. And we're going to look ahead and look back, celebrate some of the things that we've been able to do and look ahead at what we hope to do in the future.

But before we talk about what we did and what we're going to do, let's talk about a biblical view of local and global impact and why we're called to take part in any of this. To begin with. The call for local and global impact comes from the biblical standard of what we call the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. The Great Commandment we find in Mark 12. Somebody asked Jesus, hey, Jesus, what's the greatest commandment?

We got a lot of stuff that God asks us to do. Of all the things that God asks us to do, what's the most important stuff? And here's what Jesus says. He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This would have been very familiar to the people.

But he adds something. The second is this. Love your neighbor as yourself. Then he says, there is no command greater than these. That's the great commandment.

Love God and love others. But it's very important to note this isn't just loving others for the sake of loving others. It's not just loving others because Jesus was loving, and so we should be, too. Jesus was nice. We should be nice, too.

It's love that's on the way to something. It's love that's on the way to the most important thing, which is described in the Great Commission which we find in Matthew 28. Jesus says to his disciples, it says, then Jesus came to them, the disciples, and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always.

To the very end of the age. Jesus says, this is on the way to something. Go and make disciples. And where were they to go? Well after his resurrection and just before he ascends into heaven.

He describes this in more detail. Acts 1:8. He says, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. So where are they to go? Well, Jerusalem was the city where they lived.

That's home for them. Judea was a region, we might think of a state. Samaria was another region that was different geographically, ethnically and religiously. So God is saying this is not just go further and further out, but also go out to different types of people. And the ends of the earth, of course, encompasses the whole planet.

So, in short, as Christians, our job and calling is to love God with our whole lives, heart, soul, mind and strength. Love others as we love ourselves. And all of this is loving them on the way to helping them have faith in Jesus, become and grow as disciples, and then in turn take on this love of God and take this love of God out to others so that they would become disciples who make disciples, who make disciples. This is the model. And Jesus says that this should be done from near to far, from people like me, like you.

To people unlike me, unlike you. Now we've simplified this down recently to this phrase. We want to make more and better disciples, both here and not here. To help us visualize what I'm talking about, we'll lay this out on quadrants. Somebody told me this looked like a TED Talk from last service.

I promise we'll stay in the Bible. So more and better on the left side. More makes sense. It means more better if we think of maturity. So a better disciple is a more mature disciple, one who is more like Christ.

Up at the top, we have here, I think everybody knows what here is, and that's where you are, and not here is where you aren't. Okay, Clear. Got it. Perfect. Okay.

In the western church context of the last hundred plus years, we have understood and lived out this calling of being the church by putting the church on this chart down in the bottom left hand corner. And the way that we think of church growth is that we have people who are here in this area and we put on services. We have them at nice times that are convenient for people. We make sure that the music's good, that the coffee tastes pretty good, that our guest services experience is really positive, we're really friendly and, and entertaining. And then we attract people here by having a building or we invite people here.

So that's coming from the top. They're here, they're just not quite disciples yet. And so they start coming. And another way that the church grows is from the other side, which is people who are not here, but they're already mature disciples and they come from other places. They might move into the area or they might start coming to our church from another church.

And to grow the church. This is how we've been thinking for the last hundred plus years. And with the aim of church growth, then we do stuff that we call local impact. Most often it plays out as outreach, what we've called outreach. So it's meeting physical needs in our community, what we would call also being the hands and feet of Jesus.

And we provide food or shoes or coats in the winter, or bags of food for kids in backpacks, or we bring in a medical bus so that people who don't have access to medical care or can't afford it can come onto that bus and receive the care that they can't get to. And all of this is fantastic. And we absolutely need to be doing all this. We do a lot of this stuff. It's all really good stuff.

And our community needs this stuff. And the hope then from a church growth standpoint is that the people that interact with this stuff would find out that people who love Jesus are the ones that provided it for them. And then they would think, well, I like people who like Jesus. And so maybe I'll start coming to their church. And so we bring those people in, and a lot of them do.

And then we'll pull this back up and all of these things on this chart here. If you notice right there, we got one more go. One more. So this is all the local outreach stuff. Notice where all the arrows are pointing.

Inside, inside. And this is what happens, and this is what we do.

So this turns the church into a giant black hole that kind of sucks everything inside of it. So that we basically believe that the greatest expression of the Great Commandment and the Great Commission is that what they all show up to Whitewater, and that's where you bring your friends so I can fix them.

So there's a problem with this. And about 25 years ago, Christian leaders began to cry foul as all the energy resources and efforts of many churches were all flowing inside. And so they began to call for a shift. And this became known as missional living. And here's what they meant by that.

That the gathered church shouldn't be the final destination of discipleship, but the launchpad for discipleship. Rather than asking, how can we get people to come to us, we start asking, how can we bring the gospel out into workplaces and homes and businesses and out as we go where everyone else lives, works, and plays? In quadrant terms, the idea was we just flipped the arrows. We flipped the arrows back to the outside instead of everything pointing back towards the gathered church at the bottom left. Now it's all pointing out to homes, neighborhoods, soccer fields, coffee shops across the ocean.

And they argued that instead of everything funneling in, everything should radiate out. Now, the most passionate people on the front lines of this missional shift placed a huge emphasis on meeting physical needs, engaging in social justice, and embodying the love of Jesus in tangible ways. And rightly so. Rightly so. They saw a huge gap between what the church said it believed and how it lived.

And they were convicted to fill that gap. They were convicted that our faith shouldn't just be proclaimed. It should be actually practiced in real life. That love without action is just noise. So they flipped the arrows.

They ran into under resourced neighborhoods. They partners with schools. They launched nonprofit organizations. They listened, they learned, they served. They made it their mission to be the hands and feet of Jesus out there, not just trying to get them to come in here, because the institutional church was Silent in those places.

In a lot of ways, and in many cases, the church became known for the first time in a very long time, dignity and equity and restoration and justice. But here's where some of that movement started to drift. In an effort to right the imbalance, that flip of the arrows began to emphasize social impact without any spiritual clarity. The gospel was assumed, but it wasn't always spoken. Jesus was demonstrated, but not always declared.

Sin and salvation got a little fuzzy. Truth took a back seat to presence in a lot of ways. And what started out as this outward focus, gospel fueled compassion, quietly became a humanitarian mission with a little bit of Jesus sprinkled in. The traditional church remained an attractional black hole. And many of the Christians who were passionate about flipping the arrows began to deconstruct the church gathering itself, the Sunday morning thing, viewing it as nothing more than a holy huddle of the already convinced people.

In their eyes, Sunday worship and church activities were secondary at best, or in some cases, completely unnecessary. And the conclusion was that real discipleship and real ministry can't happen in this stuffy place with all of us. It can only happen out on the ragged edge of more and not here. And while their critique exposed some absolutely real problems in the church, consumer Christianity, passive spectatorship, an inward obsession with comfort and control, their solution at the end of that corner is incomplete too. In their zeal to push the mission outward, they unintentionally begin cutting themselves off from the gospel and from actually the very center of gravity that gives mission its power, which is the gathered people of God.

See all the people and support and resources and dollars and training and teaching to help reach more disciples, all the way out in the corner of not here has to come from somewhere. It comes from the gathered church. It turns out both corners, when they are left to themselves, fall short of the biblical call of being the church. And so if we've become a black hole of attraction where the saved become fatter and happier and where we just write checks to the few people who are willing to go out to the other corner and do local nice things to kind of salve our conscience and to get people to come back to our black hole, and we're nothing more than a spiritual country club.

And if we go out to the ragged edges, living and loving and accepting everyone, meeting physical needs, advocating for justice, serving generously, but we never speak the name of Jesus. If we never preach the gospel, if we never call people to repentance and resurrection, then we're not being the church either, more like a hospital that takes in cancer patients knowing that their real cure is radiation treatment. But because that kind of stinks and it's uncomfortable and people don't like it, we say, well, we don't want to have to actually bog them down with the real cure to their problems. Let's just become a spiritual hospice care unit. And while they're dying, we'll make them as comfortable as we possibly can.

And either corner is broken. So what is the better answer? It's something I want to call gospel epicenter. The church needs to be a gospel epicenter. This is something that came to me this week through lots of prayer and through some great conversations with people who don't think anything like me.

It's pretty wonderful.

I think this can unlock a better way of kingdom living and thinking. So what's a gospel epicenter? It's just two words, gospel and epicenter. So it needs two things. It needs the gospel, and it needs expansion.

The simplest form of the gospel comes straight from Ephesians 2. It says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. I can't talk. It is by grace you have been saved.

And later on he says, it is by grace you have been saved through faith. As for you, you were dead, but God. This is the simplest form of the gospel. In fact, the true gospel is really offensive to sinful human beings. It's bothersome to be dead right?

And you can't remove the offense of the gospel without removing the gospel altogether. What do we need Jesus for? Good behavior, Generosity, Feeling better, Being nice to people? No, we don't need Jesus for any of that. Lots of the world does lots of that.

We need Jesus because we need a savior, because sin equals death. And the only solution to death is Christ Jesus.

So a gospel epicenter requires the gospel message. As for you, you were dead, but God. Now, the word epicenter describes the point from which energy radiates outward. If you throw a rock out into still water, you will watch that ripple across the pond. If there's an explosion, then waves of energy ripple out and expand from there.

An epicenter of an earthquake is where the energy erupts. This is what we're talking about as an epicenter. A gospel epicenter requires the gospel and energy expanding out in every direction. So if the gathered church is to be a gospel epicenter, then it must flow outward, not just inward, into the Black hole. And as it flows outward in every direction, it carries with it the gospel truth.

Or it's nothing more than a rebranded group of nice people trying to help other people have a better life. We are not just one of many ways for people to get help and hope. We are ambassadors of Jesus Christ. We're ambassadors of reconciliation. And the only people who need reconciliation are those who have been unreconciled, those who have a broken relationship that needs mending and healing and reconciling.

Otherwise, what is reconciliation for? So let's pull out our quadrants again. Let's look at this again. If the gathered church is a gospel epicenter, and we believe it is, then as we grow as mature disciples, when we gather here, all the arrows, you should begin to flow outwardly. So instead of spending all of our energy simply trying to get more people to attend Whitewater Crossing Christian Church right here on Route 128 so that I can fix them all, or even just reaching out as far as we can to meet physical needs, what if our true aim was to see the gospel ripple out from here so powerfully that actually new gospel epicenters were born?

And then those gospel epicenters were birthing new gospel epicenters in new neighborhoods and homes and schools and businesses and communities over and over and over. One gospel epicenter giving birth to another. How amazing would that be? You seem so excited. Someone told me this looks like the old Windows operating system where all the windows.

Okay, sorry. Lost you there. Listen, this doesn't diminish the gathered church at all. This doesn't diminish the gathered church. It multiplies its impact.

The church gathered is the biblical model we read in Hebrews 10 to not forsake meeting together. God designed the gathering of the church on purpose, with a purpose. And we won't stop meeting together. We all need the church gathered to worship together in a corporate environment, to be formed together, to serve one another, to be accountable to one another, to hear the word together, to be equipped and sent. This is the model of the gathered church.

And here's another shift I want us to make today. What if instead of just viewing the church in that bottom left hand corner as a gospel epicenter, what if you started to view yourself as a gospel epicenter? What if I was a gospel epicenter? What if your home or your workplace or your dorm room or your lunch table, what if you're here, wherever God has you, has placed you, was the starting point for the gospel to ripple out in every direction? We've talked about this.

We're ambassadors of reconciliation, which means wherever we're standing is the center of the epicenter for the gospel. How differently would you live if you believed that you not just Whitewater Crossing Christian Church, but you were the beginning of someone else's transformation story? How differently would you pray? Who would you actually go after? Who would you pursue?

Where would the arrows flow out from you? The movement of the gospel was always meant to begin wherever God's people are and expand out from there without expansion. We're not the church. So when we talk about local and global impact, we're not just talking about events and programs or budget lines. We're talking about the real ripples of the gospel flowing from one gospel epicenter to the next, to the next, to the next, from here to not here.

This is how we want to measure local and global impact now and in the future. And when it comes to partnerships with ministries and people and programs, we'll be looking for gospel epicenters, true gospel epicenters, to send our outflow of prayer and resources and people and dollars in the future. I'll tell you about some of the investments that we plan to take to make in the future in just a minute, but I want to look back on some of the great partnerships that we've had over the last year in the local and global impact that your generosity has funded. Together, we invested $25,000 to what's called the Hub in South Asia in partnership with Denise and Laminda Ube Awansha. And the hub is an evangelism center that's pushing the gospel forward in a place where Christ is still unknown.

This is not just missions. It's multiplying gospel epicenters where they've never existed before. This is beautiful. Here are some other investments. We gave $5,000 to the Briscoe family for them to travel to to Sri Lanka to do some training for their future ministry.

We gave $4,500 to the Giamara family, who became a gospel epicenter in the country of Albania. And they're spending the whole year there proclaiming the name of Jesus. We give $5,000 to support Nuevo Church in Columbus. It's a church that you all helped plant. And now hundreds of young people are gathering there every Sunday.

We also gave some smaller gifts to ministries in Japan to youth with a mission, to Mosaic Church in Los Angeles for wildfire relief. Most recently, we've gathered some money to send to Texas for the flooding. Locally, we gave $25,000 to the Life center at Whitewater Supporting everything from senior care to Hero on a Mission, which is this incredible program where we partner people up in relationship hungry people who want to change their lives. And we connect them with another human being in a beautiful relationship, help them with physical needs and also help them with spiritual needs. It's beautiful.

We support everything from food distribution to prayer and relational support for hundreds of families each month. We've supported the Community pantry through donations and volunteer hours, serving over 175 families monthly. And our mobile pantry now reaches out to Elizabethtown and Hooven. And when people come to shop at the pantry, they get partnered up with a human being, a gospel epicenter, who's building relationship with them and showing them the love of Jesus. This is beautiful.

You might know. Also on the edge, outside the edge of our parking lot, we have a community garden. And we're not just growing food out there, but we're growing connections and relationships. We gave $9,600 in change inside of baby bottles. Change.

How Great is that? $9,600 to reach out pregnancy center. We gave $1,000 to Levi's house which is through Reset Ministries as they build out a new faith recovery house for men in Lawrenceburg and through Matthew 25. Clothing bins in the parking lot, you will drive right by them. They're always overflowing with things.

We send clothing and shoes out to local communities and across the globe. And as we look forward, we're preparing for a future that expands our kingdom impact by funding and partnering with other gospel epicenters to help with this, we formed a Global Impact team. And the Global Impact team is working together to build a stronger sustainable global impact strategy. And soon we're going to launch a local Impact team to do the same for Local Impact Strategy. And we just, you might have heard, we just hired a full time local and global impact director.

You saw her just a few minutes ago, Jerika Humphries.

Jerika actually starts tomorrow morning, so everything will be perfect by next week, I'm sure. But Jerrica is going to help us to really focus in on local and global kingdom impact and partnerships with Global Epicenter or Gospel epicenters. And we're so excited that she's going to be on the team. We're committed to expanding our financial investment too. We'll be increasing our budget over the next few years.

Increasing our local and global impact budget by 1% of our whole budget for the next several years. This year that was $25,000 that is being increased in our budgeted giving. And we're going to do that over the next few years until we reach at least a tithe of everything that comes in. 10% of everything that comes in will go out to local and global impact. We're committed to expanding our impact in the years ahead.

We're becoming, by doing all of this and thinking like this, we're actually becoming the kind of church that we described in our vision, our 36 month vision less than a year ago last September. I want to read part of that today. Amen.

Let me read this to you and tell me this doesn't describe exactly what we're talking about today. We view our gifts, resources and spheres of influence as tools for expanding God's kingdom and share them generously. We each feel a personal call to evangelism and boldly embody share the gospel. Starting in our homes and extending into our neighborhoods, workplaces and communities. We generously collaborate with local and global individuals and organizations that share our values and mission, offering financial support, resources and volunteers to advancing kingdom work in other places.

We're becoming the kind of church that we said we want to now. I told you last week, this is just the beginning, church man. I've been a senior minister for a whole 25 minutes or something at this point. Okay. Like this is just the beginning of what God is doing through this church.

And as we jumped into prayer so deeply last week, we're gonna watch God do even more as we fix our eyes on God's kingdom expansion. So thank you. Thank you for making this happen. It's not just resources and money that make all this happen. It's people and it's prayer.

Without people and prayer, we're just a bunch of nice people. Maybe.