We will be starting a new ministry at Life Bridge called "Garden Walk Ministries." Its sole focus will be on empowering one million to walk together with God. I half expected a bunch of people to walk out that day, but they did not. I also half expected people to leave the church. Instead, our weekend attendance, which is usually under 200, reached 248 this past week for the first time in a long time. Maybe people aren't afraid of a God-sized picture. To be sure, we will need to trust God with a picture this big. Let me explain where this is coming from.
One million people (1MM) has always been in my mind, even before moving Valparaiso to plant Life Bridge. It came from my background in business and an understanding of God's Mission for our lives. You see, 1MM really wasn't that big of a number when I was in the business world. Our little division of the company grossed over a billion (with a B) in sales every year. I was used to working with large numbers.
I sat down when I was first going to Seminary, 15 years ago, and started running some numbers like I would do for work. I was teaching a class at our church for the 3-5th graders that helped them receive Jesus as the Christ and their personal savior. This class brought about 20 or so baptisms per year. Praise God! Then I started thinking things through. What if I did this for the rest of my life (teaching a class or two a year). That would bring hundreds of people to the Father through the Son. Again, praise God! I want to reach as many people as I can, so I started to run numbers for adding more classes, adding more people to the class, etc. What I found was this: I could potentially reach thousands and even tens of thousands this way, but that would be the limit of the ministry.
Tens of thousands may seem like a big number, but not when you consider what is happening in our world today. There are currently over 7 billion (with a B) people on the face of the earth. Over 300 million (with an M) are here in the United States. Roughly 1/3 of these people claim to be Christian and the other two thirds are not. I just read another article predicting that Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2050. While I understand the logic they present, I do not agree. You see, the article assumes that Christians will continue sharing the Gospel at the same rate and with the same effectiveness over the next 35 years. This is where Garden Walk Ministries comes into play. It's time to change our approach to engaging and empowering people to walk together with God.
Early on in my full-time ministry, I would hear church planters and other preachers talk about the "shampoo" vision. Some of you are old enough to remember back in the 80's that there was a television commercial about shampoo where you tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on. Preachers would say, "What would happen if you brought one person to Christ and they brought one person to Christ, and so on and so on." The vision was appealing. Not only that, it seemed to match what we saw in the early church described in the book of Acts. So, I checked into it deeper.
Being a computer and business nerd, I ran the numbers and in 20 years this pattern would, you guessed it, reach over 1MM (1 million) people. In 33 years, Christ would be followed by over 8.5 billion (with a B) people. In other words, if we started today, the entire population of the earth would be walking together with God by 2048. All we need to do is bring one person to the Father through the Son each year. Then they bring one person, and so on, and so on.
I've spend the past 15 years developing this approach and testing it out in Valparaiso, IN. I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work. God has taught me through His Word and through practical experiences how to help people live out this vision. Now it is time to start implementing what we've learned. Yes, this approach is different from some of the church, and even church planting, work that has been done over the years. It is not different from the approach taken by Jesus and the Apostles, though.
As I lay out the Blueprints for this approach over the upcoming weeks and months, I hope to help you see that there really is nothing new under the sun. God has always loved us. God has always wanted us to walk with Him. God has always provided a way for that to happen. God has always given us special benefits and blessings when we do. My prayer is that we will learn this approach, begin living it out, and then tell some friends and they tell some friends and so on and so on. Together, we will empower one million to walk together with God.
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