Church Mission Statement:

“Reaching All People with the Light of God to Change and Empower Lives”

Today it is urgent to share the Gospel. Eternity hangs in the balance, yet many Christians today feel they are not prepared or are unequipped to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with others.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was sent into the world to take on flesh and die on the cross to bear the penalty for our sins and was resurrected from the dead so that all who believe in Him might have eternal life.

The simple message of salvation has the ability to bring hope to all who calls upon the name of the Lord. Yet how can they call upon the Lord if they never heard?

What we see here is the pattern of Christian evangelism: sending, proclaiming, hearing and believing = salvation.

The followers of Christ have been sent by Jesus to share the Good News in our world. Our proclamation is more than an endorsement, as we share the Gospel our words have a powerful anointing.

First Satanic Strategy: Satan would like to convince you – you who are a follower of Christ – that you are unequipped and ill-prepared for the task. That is an outright lie.

Christ has not only made the message of salvation simple and clear to understand. He has made it straight-forward to communicate – too often we are the ones who make it complicated.

· Just as salvation is as near as our own hearts and mouths – that is if we believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord we are saved.

· So also our ability to share that message of salvation is as near as our hearts that has been transformed by Christ and the words of our testimony that is personal and direct.

· In other words, just tell people who Jesus is and what he has done for you.

Second Satanic Strategy: When the church isolates itself and becomes self-focused instead of focused on God’s Mission, the Proclamation of the Gospel either becomes secondary or the message become convoluted with mixed messaging.

At the beginning of Romans, chapter 10, Paul describes his longing for the Jewish people to know and accept the message of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Paul admires their zeal for God, but adds that their zeal is not based on knowledge. Their zeal was too nationalistically centered, too focused on their being the “people of God” and not based on an understanding of God’s overall mission and purpose to bring salvation to the nations.

In verse 3 the emphasis is on the Jewish desire “to establish their own (righteousness)” rather than submit to the righteousness of God. It is not that they thought they were accomplishing their own righteousness as opposed to God’s, but rather the false idea that their unique relationship with God, as His chosen people made them right.

The Israelites knew God’s grace, but they had failed to recognize why God had chosen them and that His grace would be extended to all nations through a Messiah that would come through the line of David.

The Christian church can fall into the trap of exclusivity through a sense of self-righteousness – aside from grace. What ends up happening, even before we realize it, is we have embraced an identity outside of Christ’s redemptive work in our lives and made it the focus of our religious practice – just like the religious people of Jesus day.

This sort of self-focused exclusivity within the church not only creates barriers to those who “outside” our belief system; it makes the proclamation of the Gospel secondary to these other agendas. This cannot be, because of the urgency of the hour.