A kingdom vision requires a church and its pastors to have a vision much larger than its own four walls or its own two acres. When a church extends its focus, prayer, resources, and strategy to reach beyond their local context into regional, national, and global contexts, then the church is well on its way to embracing a kingdom vision.
For me embracing a kingdom vision means:
I donât have to hold on to my geographical area.
We donât have to give into the idea that a certain geographical area is âour turfâ or is off limits to any other group that wants to reach folks who donât know Jesus.
There are different people groups and cultural and physical barriers to overcome that different types of churches can succeed in dealing with. For example, we have one Vineyard church about 10 miles away from us, yet they reach a completely different group of people who say they feel uncomfortable coming up to our âbig churchâ, but they feel completely at home in their location.
What if instead of thinking about the community you live in as âyourâ area you started to think more about what God is doing and how youâre being invited to participate with him? How would that change the way you think about sending people into the next neighborhood, town, or city?
I don’t have to hold onto people so tightly.
One of the first things I learned in the Vineyard was how to hold people open-handedly. This is so much easier said than done. When youâve invested in leaders and they become an essential part of your team and then they begin to explore a new job or a different kind of ministry, it can be extremely difficult to let them go.
But what if each of our churches became launch pads for some of the best young leaders in our movement? What if they knew that we were going to give them everything we have, everything weâve learned along the way and gladly send them out to spend their lives doing whatever assignment God has given to them.
If young leaders know youâre willing to invest in them and send them out with all the blessing you can muster, not only will you have a much more consistent inflow of leaders, youâll find some great leaders that stick around as well.
I can embrace different models of ministry.
It is easy for ministry leaders to become model centric, mistakenly thinking that there is only one way to accomplish ministry. But really, we should be following the spiritâs leading and be open to experimenting, to exploring new approaches.
For example, in the Vineyard, we are currently starting new Vineyard congregations in several different ways: classic church plants, small and large launch plants, multisite churches, quickly reproducing missional communities, monastic missional communities, and more.
What might change as you embraced the many ways God is leading us to plant churches today? What if we looked at around our communities and worked to establish churches to meet the needs of those spaces?
Embracing a larger kingdom perspective would lead us to celebrate anytime anyone discovered how great life is with Christ at the center, no matter the model or location of the church where it happened. We have the opportunity to develop leaders and send them out to wherever God is calling them to and theyâre bringing the power and presence of the resurrected Christ. And that is a beautiful life to live!
I invite you to join me at the Multiply Vineyard Summit January 8-10, 2019 in Miami, FL to be a part of a think tank of pastors creatively discerning new ways to send out church planters. Join us to envision together how we can continue to extend the kingdom in the future with new Vineyard church plants. If you’re feeling stuck in any part of being a sending church, this is an event you don’t want to miss.Â
[Original Post By Multiply Vineyard]
::
