Healthy Church Rx: Reaching

In the previous weeks we’ve been covering the concept of church health as what we want to pursue as a church. Certainly, our overall pursuit would be the glory of God in all things but as a means to that end, we seek church health. What does that look like?

A helpful acronym is “CREW”. This stands for Caring, Reaching, Equipping, and Worshipping. I use that as a memory device to guide my prayers and want to use it here to look again at church health. Last week we touched on the caring church. This week, let’s consider the need to be a reaching church.

We know it is God’s will that we reach out with the gospel. Most Christians are familiar with what we call the Great Commission or Great Commandment of Matthew 28:18-20 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (ESV) There’s a lot here that actually touches on other ideas of church health such as making disciples, but let’s focus on God’s call for the church to REACH.

Faithful gospel proclamation is our task. What does that look like? To borrow from military lingo, we need an air war and a ground war. The air war is our first priority (and that’s not just because we live in an Air Force community). This is the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ from the pulpit and other teaching avenues of the church. Each Lord’s Day, as the Scriptures are opened and preached in a chapter by chapter, verse by verse format, the message of how rebellious, broken people are brought into the family of God by faith in the the sacrificial life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ should be clear.

In addition, we need the ground war. This is the call we have to be salt and light. This is the call for us to love and serve our neighbors. What greater way can we do so than by pointing them to Jesus Christ? There’s no hope in this life or the next apart from Him! One means of doing so is simply by bringing friends, neighbors, and co-workers into the orbit of other believers and to the gatherings of the church. We need to be praying for those we know who need to know and trust Jesus. We need to pray for a burden and for boldness.

Let’s pray that God would make of our church a truly REACHING church. May God use us to see unbelievers brought into a right relationship with Himself. Let’s pray for our air war and our ground war. May God make them both effective! Let’s pray for faithfulness to scatter the seed and trust God to bring the growth!