J.R. Briggs

Renew: Sending Capacity

November 6, 2008

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Last night Renew's board of directors had a meeting (it sounds so formal and stuffy, doesn't it? In all honesty, its really just a few dudes hanging out, laughing, praying, planning, processing and discussing what God might be doing and where God might be taking this little faith community of ours. We alternate meeting places between my upstairs office and Third and Walnut, the bar our launch team used to meet in).

We have a lot of fun together when we meet (but don't tell anyone…because I think there is a rule that you are not allowed to have fun at "board meetings"). It really helps that we're all friends first, which provides such rich opportunities to see Renew move forward, as we fight for every missional yard possible. And to do this we push back, challenge each other, process out loud, dream and make decisions together – in addition to catching up on our lives.

Last night we opened by looking at Matthew 9:37-38:

The Amplified Bible translates it well: "So pray to the Lord of the harvest to force out and thrust laborers into his harvest." There is an urgency to this sending out.

We have said often that at Renew we want to be a faith community known more for our sending capacity than our seating capacity.
We want it to be a place of equipping and sending.
We strongly believe that if the church is not about training, equipping and sending out people to be missionaries we aren't doing our job.

Which is why Matthew 9 is so important.
Jesus says that we need to ask – urgently seek God and pray – that he would send more people out.
It may seem obvious but what Jesus is saying is that the harvest is ripe with transformational potential – its ready – and yet there are few willing to go out and work in those fields that are ripe with that potential.
And its his field – he does what he wants with it. We're workers under his direction and authority.

We prayed last night that God would bring people to us, not so we keep them here under our roof, but so we can equip them adequately and then send them out into the world to be missionaries cleverly disguised as plumbers, attorneys, businessmen, students, stay-at-home moms…and even as pastors.
We prayed that we would train people sufficiently to be passionate followers of Jesus.
We prayed that we would train up future leaders and pastors and shepherds to see the kingdom expanded.

We're sending out several house churches that will start officially within the next two weeks.
We also strongly believe that we need to be planting another church out from under Renew within the next five years – whether that's locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.

As Darrell Guder writes, we're trying to cultivate an ethos where we have a strategy for gathering, but we also have strategies for when we all scatter.

Would you pray for us at Renew?
Would you pray for our leadership – that we would have wisdom and courage to follow Jesus who sends us out?
Would you pray that we would be a sending church?
Would you pray that we would be a place committed to consistently, humbly, courageously, faithfully asking God to send workers out into the harvest?  

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