I’ve been thinking about what it means to plant a new church. How should we spend our time? How should we determine with whom to invest valuable hours?
I definitely don’t have this figured out yet, but I have learned a few things. First, we’ve been asked a million times where we “do church.” “We don’t have a building yet, and we haven’t started services yet,” I tell them. That usually throws people off, but we’ve thought this through and think that it’s better to wait before launching with public services. We are focusing on trying to reach new people with the gospel and not just pulling people from other churches. If we launched now, we’d probably get a few new people but more than anything we would just take people from other churches.
This said, we’ve determined that our focus will be to try to befriend people, initiate Bible studies, and in the future start home groups. At this point, we have a number of contacts, but how should we determine with whom to invest time? This is very difficult because we’ve seen that a few people said they were interested because they wanted to sell us a product or service. Other people are only mildly interested, and others are truly interested. I met an American a few months ago who said he was interested in a Bible study. He lived in Taganga, which is a town to the north of Santa Marta. In all honesty I had other priorities, he lived a little farther away, and I figured that some day I would go visit him. I decided to visit him today, so I called his cell number to see if he was around. With sadness in her voice, his wife told me he had died five days ago. As I think about this, it fills my heart with sadness because I could have visited him and shared the gospel with him, but I didn’t do it.
What lesson do I draw from this? I need to go after the contacts God gives me and not necessarily look for “better” contacts until I’ve exhausted the ones God has already given me. As I mentioned above, this is difficult because when you decide to visit person A, you have decided not to visit person B in that same window of time. Since your time is limited (especially with a family of three small children), you must make wise decisions and pray that God guides you to people who are truly interested in learning more about God’s Word.
(photo courtesy of jamiegerig on flickr)
