The easy answer to that question is one person or one family at a time.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time– same idea.  But still, it felt overwhelming to me.  This was true until I discovered two principles in the Scriptures, which make all the difference in our God-given task of reaching the peoples of the world with the gospel.  The first principle is that of multiplication.  If God called you to a university campus and you were the only Christian on that campus of 10,000 students, what would you do to reach the campus with the gospel?  You would share your faith with others until one person came to Christ.  You would disciple that one until he or she knew the basics of their faith, then you would have 5000 students to reach and the person you discipled would have 5000 students to reach.  As each of you share your faith and 2 more people come to faith in Jesus Christ, and are discipled, then each person would have 2500 people to reach.  How many times would this process be multiplied before the whole campus would be reached?  The answer is 15.  As this process repeats itself 15 times, every student would be reached.  This is very possible. 

The other key principle which we need to both understand as a church and embrace, is God’s method for evangelizing the nations.  We want to be a part of what God is doing to reach the nations, right?!  And we want to do it God’s way!  God’s way is to plant churches.  Let me unfold for you a couple of key thoughts in the Scriptures, so you can understand how this is to take place.  This sermon is in the context of God’s call on Trinity– to be whole-hearted worshipers, who are healed and delivered, who are equipped to do ever good work the Lord has called us to do, and those who are sent out with the gospel to a lost and dying world.  We are developing this last point of our vision this morning.  And our theme idea is:  The most effective way to evangelize a group of people is to plant churches which are effectively reaching out with the gospel in their communities.

I. The church is Christ’s bride, and His ordained vessel for transforming the world.

Jesus is the first person in the Bible to speak about the church.  In Matthew 16:18, Jesus says, “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”  This is the first mention of the word “church” in your Bible.  Of course, the community of God’s people, called “Israel” in the Old Testament is all over the Scriptures.  The New Testament defines the church in the same way the Old Testament defines Israel– they are both God’s people in committed relationships with one another.  The church, as Jesus and the whole Bible speaks about her, has nothing to do with a building.  This facility is where the church called ‘Trinity Evangelical Presbyterian Church’ meets.  The Greek word for church is ekklesia, which can literally be translated, “called out ones.” 

Why would Jesus choose this term to describe His followers, out of all the terms He could have chosen?  I believe this describes something about who we are called to be. We are not supposed to look or act like the world around us, but as those who have been called out of the world, to belong to the community of Jesus Christ.  We have been called out of darkness and into His light.  When the world looks at Christians, they are supposed to see the light.  They are supposed to smell the aroma of Christ.  Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 2:6 that we smell like death to those who are perishing, but to those who are inheriting everlasting life, we are the aroma of life.  So, it shouldn’t surprise us when people around us reject us for belonging to Christ.

The emphasis of the church in America has been on an individual “getting saved.”  It is a wonderful thing to know Christ, and so be saved from our sin, delivered from death, and to belong to the Lord!  But, the emphasis on salvation in the Scriptures seems to be upon belonging to Christ, and belonging to the corporate community of followers of Jesus Christ.  There is no concept in the Scriptures of belonging to Christ and not belonging to His body, His church.  In Acts 16, Paul and Silas were in jail when God does a miracle and frees all the prisoners.  The jailer is going to kill himself, until Paul prevails on him not to do this.  He comes to Paul and asks what he must do to be saved– Acts 16:30‑33, “He then brought them out and asked, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"  They replied, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved‑you and your household."  Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house.  At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his family were baptized.”  Later, before they left the city, they met with this new group of Christians at Lydia’s house to encourage them in their faith.  When a couple of families came to Christ, it was the beginning of the church in Philippi.  Paul didn’t simply pray with the jailer to receive Christ.  He shared the gospel with his whole family, and more than that, connected them to other who had come to know Christ in that community.

The other thing I want you to see from the Scriptures is how precious the church is to Jesus!  Listen to what Jesus says about the church in Revelation 19:6‑8, “Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:

"Hallelujah!
For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear."
 (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)”

The church is the bride of Christ in the Scriptures.  The analogy used here is not by accident, but communicates how Jesus views His church.  Jesus passionately pursues His bride.  He is in a love relationship with His church!

I used to look at the church, at least my experiences of the church, and want to do ministry outside the walls of the church, because the ministry I experienced through para-church was so much stronger than anything I had experienced inside church.  As I studied the Scriptures, I had to come to grips with Jesus’ love for His bride, His church.  Jesus is going to purify His church and then use His church to transform the culture.  As those who are called out of the world fall in love with their Lord more fully, and His love is experienced by those outside the church, we will see many people give their hearts fully to Jesus.  If Jesus views His church, His bride with this kind of respect and love, how should we treat the church of Jesus Christ?

Jesus is building His church!  I used to think that I and we were supposed to build Jesus’ church, but that isn’t what the text says.  What we are to do is to listen to Jesus’ plan, to seek Jesus’ face and obey anything Jesus is calling us to do.  As we follow His plan whole-heartedly, Jesus will build His church.  Some people may be thinking, “Pastor, you don’t understand the abuses and weaknesses I have seen in the church!”  I have experienced many of these same things.  You see, it isn’t the people who see themselves as perfect that the Lord uses.  It is those who know that apart from Christ they can do no good thing, those who are available for His Kingdom work whom the Lord will use.  Somehow, despite her many weaknesses, the Lord still desires to work through the imperfections of His church to transform the lost and dying world.  This is God’s plan, and there is no plan ‘B’!

II. Paul’s intent was to start a church, a group of Christians who met together in every community.

Not only is the church Jesus’ bride, and His chosen vessel.  She is also the means Paul used to spread the gospel.  Because we live in a culture which is fixated on individuals, we struggle some with this concept.  In Paul’s day, a person’s identity was rooted in their family.  Decisions were made corporately.  If an individual would ever make a decision with which his family unit disagreed, it would be a very bad thing.  This is why the gospel needs to be presented to families as much as possible in most cultures, because the gospel is not good news to most people, if accepting Christ means you are asking a person to be ostracized from his family– that sounds like bad news to them.  Paul knew this, so he often met with families, from house to house, to share the gospel. 

Look at Acts 14:21ff again.  In every city where Paul and Barnabas stopped, they would preach and teach until they were either kicked out or established a group of local believers.  Either Paul, or his companions if he was kicked out of a city, would spend enough time with this new group of believers to ground them in their faith and appoint elders to lead them.  This was the start of the church in each of these communities.  I am sure Paul and Barnabas stayed in each place long enough to spend time with to train new elders to do the ministry.  Their concern was for new believers to have a family to which they could now belong, a community which would embrace them since they would be kicked out of their old community eventually.  The situation in Paul’s day was closer to how we approach Muslims in Islamic nations today.  There must be a complete change in allegiance from another god to Jesus Christ.  And there also must be instilled into the hearer that a commitment to Christ, the Head, must include and involve commitment to Christ’s body, a community of fellow believers, or the conversion will not be complete nor bear much fruit. 

All you need to do is to look at polls to see that this is a huge problem in our own culture.  A large number of people in America today would say they have prayed some kind of prayer to accept Jesus, but nothing has changed in their life.  They have never made the crucial step of realigning their allegiances with Jesus and His church.  This is why the church seems so schizophrenic in America today. 
Paul was committed to establishing a group of local believers in Christ in every city.  This was his strategy.  In fact, one of the things which drew people to Christ was the authentic love the world saw expressed within the family of God.  Christians who are not committed to a local fellowship of believers, submitted to the authority of elders in that fellowship and also covered by their care, are out of line with the will of God.  If a person comes to me asking that we partner in some way with his ministry, the first question I ask is, “What church are you covenanting with?”  If the person does not have a covering like this, then I will not participate in that ministry, because I already know if the leader of the ministry is not a part of Christ’s body, he is out of order, and if the leader is out of order, the ministry is out of order.  We must follow Paul’s example in our commitment to a local church.

III. The way the Lord will win the nations is through His church, which has multiplied throughout the nations of the world.

We need to look at communities around us with the eyes of Jesus.  How do we effectively reach a community?  The biblical answer is that we plant a church there with its own trained leadership, which is able to lead that church in multiplying herself until there are enough churches to reach the community through every day evangelism.  We are going to address what every day evangelism looks like at Trinity in future sermons, so I will leave that thought for now.  As we talk about church planting, let me take a case in point– how do we, as the church of Jesus Christ, effectively reach the Hispanics the Lord is bringing into our community?  First, we acknowledge that God determines the places where people live.  In other words, it is no accident that the Lord is bringing people from every nation into America as students, as immigrants or as vacationers.  In the case of the Hispanics the Lord is bringing into our community, we could have invited Hispanics to join us each Sunday morning at Trinity.  But, with distance from where most Hispanics live, the fact that 1st generation Hispanics do not know English well enough to worship in English, and the fact that their work schedules make it difficult to attend a Sunday morning service, we have established a ministry to the Hispanic population in Florence at a separate time and location from our Sunday morning service.  Many people from Trinity have helped and are helping serve on many different levels.  Ultimately, it is our desire to birth a daughter church, with a Hispanic pastor and trained Hispanic elders, who will be able to effectively reach out to many Hispanics the Lord has brought to this area.  This is the biblical strategy.  There are steps to get to this goal of planting several churches among the Hispanic population of this community.  Right now, we have a team of people at Trinity who oversee the ministry, under the elders’ covering.  We need for Hispanics to be raised up as leaders and need for the Lord to give to us a Hispanic pastor.  As this transition takes place, we will still support this church plant financially, with our prayers and our people until they are able to walk on their own.

What other communities in Florence are not being effectively reached?  I meet with other pastors every month, and none of these churches have really strong ministry for the people between college and thirty.  How do we effectively reach 20-something year olds, who by and large are avoiding the local church?  Do we need to plant a church which will speak to this sub-culture in a more effective manner than the church is currently doing?  A couple of our sister EPC churches have targeted this age group with their churches.  They have music, preaching and even buildings which reflect the values of this group of people in our society.  This is missiological thinking– plant churches which will be able to effectively reach groups of people in the culture.

Where do we as a church go from here?  1. Keep strengthening the ministry to Hispanics which the Lord has given to us, with the long term goal of planting a group of churches among them.  2. We have people traveling to Trinity from Olanta, from Hartsville and Darlington, and from the east side of town out nearer FMU.  Would the Lord have us plant a church in one or more than one of these locations?  When we plant a church, birth a daughter church, this fellowship of believers will have some of the same DNA which makes Trinity who we are, but will also have some unique attributes of the people and community where the church is being planted.  In his outstanding study called “Experiencing God”, Henry Blackaby stresses that we join God in where He is working.  You can discern where God is working by watching for things which only He can do, like placing on the hearts of a group of people the desire to plant a church.  If you live in one of these areas I just mentioned, and there is a group of people in that area who would like to be a part of a church plant to reach that area more effectively with the gospel, I would ask that you would get a list of signatures of these people and bring it to one of your elders.  This will be a sign to us about where we need to plant the next church.  We will prayerfully look at this, asking for the Lord to lead us every step along the way, but also being intentional about moving that direction.  Again, it is our conviction that the Lord desires to plant churches through Trinity.  Your session has made it a goal to have at least one church planted by January of 2010, and have begun to set aside some money to reach this goal.  I don’t know how the Lord will lead us in this exactly, but we do believe this is a part of the Lord’s vision for this church.