Vision Sunday

Okay, we're gonna um be just opening up in 1 Corinthians.

I want to read this passage um quickly.

This Sunday is what we call Vision Sunday.

It's the beginning of the year.

We did this last year as well, just talking about where we're headed as a church, um, kind of give you a roadmap.

This will be different.

The content from this morning will be different from next week's message or um the next class that we do after service.

That talks more about our DNA and our values.

Um, this is more of kind of plans.

Um so again, 1 Corinthians chapter 9.

1 Corinthians 9 · chapter mention

I just want to set the stage with this passage.

1 Corinthians 9.

Let's stand together for the reading of God's word.

1 Corinthians chapter 9, 924.

1 Corinthians 9 · chapter mention

924.

It says this Do you not know that in a race all runners run, but only one gets the prize.

Run in such a way as to get the prize.

Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.

They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.

Therefore, I do not run like someone running aimlessly, I do not fight like a boxer beating the air.

No, I strike a blow to my body and I make it my slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.

God, as we consider your work in Baltimore, in Southeast Baltimore, in our lives this year, God, we would just ask that you would lead us by your Spirit, that our plans would be authored by you.

That, God, we would be so connected to the vine that we have the wisdom of God, we have the direction of God.

Lord, we just, we, we, we do not want to come up with a plan.

We want you to come up with a plan.

You're wiser than us, you're more caring than us, you know the beginning from the end.

So, Lord, Lord, help us to have our eyes open to what you're doing.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

You may be seated.

So we're gonna come back to that passage.

We're gonna come back to that passage in a little while.

Um, but I'd like for a little bit to consider what the next 12 months holds for us, what it will hold um for you, and just how we ought to be thinking through this new season.

Sound like a game plan?

Sound good?

So um my scope, my scope is both smaller than the church, you know.

I'm thinking about myself, you as an individual, and then my scope is bigger than the church, right?

And which we'll we'll talk about in just a second.

Um but let's let's just talk a little bit for a second about where we've been in the last year.

Some of you, this is like your first Sunday you've been with us, so you're gonna get a real quick recap about of some fun stuff.

Others of you have been with us for a couple of years, and you've seen this kind of grow out of being just a home Bible study off Bank Street to being uh having a Sunday morning presence and um growing from there.

Last uh year on Vision Sunday, there were two things that we emphasized.

Um at that time, just to set this setting, we were not meeting Sunday mornings.

Um, we were meeting on Sunday afternoons at 4 p.m.

in the Compassion Center.

Those of you that know the Compassion Center, you know that the condition of that building is scary.

Uh and it did successfully scare a number of visitors away from our gathering time.

Um the roof is half falling down, there's um missing, there is uh tiles missing from the ceilings.

Um it's just not a pleasant place to necessarily do church.

But that's where we were at.

Um and uh we didn't have a worship leader.

We were um man, what were we doing?

I don't even know what we were doing for worship.

What were we doing for worship?

I think we were um what?

Were we sing?

Oh, that's right.

Okay, we brought in that's right.

Okay, we brought in some guests that led us a few times.

Here's the cool thing.

So at the end of my message last year, I said, next week we have this guy that's gonna be visiting with us.

His name is Nick.

He's coming from California, and he's going to lead us in worship.

Nick came in January, that next week.

He checked it out, and he's like, There's no way I'm coming back here.

And then God changed his heart, gave him a wife, and here he is with us uh now.

Isn't that awesome?

So that's kind of jumping uh jumping ahead a little bit.

But okay, so the last year the emphasis was this that we're gonna begin to gather and we're gonna begin to scatter in a more organized way.

So there is gathering on Sunday mornings, um, which we began March 25th, 2018, Palm Sunday.

And then in September we started our small groups, which was um a lot of fun.

That was just a great experience.

Um at that time, last year, we were averaging about 15 to 17 people were attending um in the Compassion Center.

Um, when we launched in March, we were right at kind of about that number.

Now, we made a when you're kind of fundraising and you're talking with um um entities that are gonna kind of institutionally support a church plant, they ask you for a projection.

Where are you gonna be at the end of 2018?

So our number that we projected was 65 total people.

The most we ever had in 2018 was like 52.

Um our average was around 38 to 40.

So we were a little bit behind, but our giving, we gived as we gave, is the right way to say that, we gave as if there was 70 people in our church.

Isn't that awesome?

So there's just a real generosity that excelled past the projections that existed.

Um, what else?

So we launched small groups in September.

Um that was, and I've I've told you some of this very transparently.

Some of you are veterans in the church.

I'm like a third generation church planter.

My grandpa was a church planter, my dad was a church planter, but I never was a part of a small group.

So I was really scared to start small groups for our church, even though I knew is something that I had heard, like this is so good.

And I, you know, I'm familiar with it, but just hadn't personally hadn't been woven into my life in a deep um way.

I had been a part of big churches that for some reason didn't do small groups.

So we started in September and it was formational for me personally.

I don't know if you were a part of either the one in my house or another group, but um just per like we opened up the one in my house, and I told my group in my house that like I'm a I'm the pastor, but I need this as much as you need it.

Like I I'm not Superman, right?

I I we the the small group setting is a time where we care for one another, right?

So um small groups have been awesome, and I'm really excited about that um over the next year.

Um we added um four interns.

So Derek joined us at the end of January.

He's coming up to the end of his internship, and I'm excited to share some of the stuff that he's gonna be doing uh in the in the future year.

We added um Scott Borgert.

Where's Scott?

Right here.

We added Scott back in um uh late September, right?

And then Nick and Zuki came um mid-October.

They got married, their honeymoon was driving across America and being here like a week after they got married.

Isn't that awesome?

I know.

Incredible.

Their faith, their step of faith is just really inspiring to me.

So, and they're serve serving as volunteers.

I told them you can get paid, whatever you raise.

Whatever fundraising you want to do.

Um, no, so um, we're grateful for their um their help.

We we when we launched here, we were doing worship track, so we had worship music up on the screen and then playing through the system, but we didn't have a worship leader.

So when Nick got here, he began to lead us.

And I said to Nick, I said, let's just start really simple.

Just you, your guitar.

Um, we've got to learn as a congregation just to worship together, and um and then we'll build that out in the year in the year to come and just kind of experiment.

We're and we're still getting a feel for what does it mean to worship in this context in Baltimore, in Southeast Baltimore, does that take on a specific meaning culturally here?

So we're just in the first um two and a half months of having a worship leader, which by the way is a real gift.

You know how many churches in on the east coast just don't have worship?

My dad included.

My dad has been a church planter of the current church that he's pastoring for four and a half years, and he can't even find somebody to pay to be a worship leader part-time in his church.

Nick, you can't leave.

You can't leave.

Um here's one, so seasonally for the church, we launched and we went through three months for me, which was depressing, because we started and nobody came other than our group that was with us in the compassion center.

And I was like, Lord, this is this is hard.

This is really hard.

You know, there's like 12 of us for worship, you know.

And one Sunday, actually, the one week, my wife and Joe came to me and they said, What do you think about just doing more for the hospitality table?

Maybe we should just kind of do more of like a meal, a breakfast.

And um, and I had been saying no to that idea, and they both came to me the same week, and I said, Okay, fine, you know, go ahead and do it.

And they started doing it, and what I what I didn't realize is that through the compassion center, we're kind of woven in a special way into people's lives that are vulnerable.

We're meeting physical needs for people, and when we could say, look, come and enjoy a meal with us before church, it all of a sudden connected people that we had been serving in the compassion center with us here on Sunday mornings.

And all of a sudden, come mid-June, the church began, it just kind of doubled in size.

Um, so that was cool.

Breakfastes have been great.

We've been doing breakfasts ever since, and that just goes to show you need to um listen to your wife and um that the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit can speak through more than the pastor, right?

The Holy Spirit wants to lead all of us, right, in being the church.

It's not about me, it's about all of us having the Holy Spirit in us shaping what this looks like here in Fells Point.

Um, we did cookouts.

So we did what was called um a simple church three times over the summer, where rather than having our full sound system and the projector, we kind of did what that we did this morning with a printed-out song sheets, one of our small speakers, we sang a cappella, uh some hymns.

Um I preached a condensed message, and we did that so that we could do church within 45 minutes, pack up really fast the little bit we brought over here, and then go do a barbecue over the summer at the Compassion Center as an outreach.

And so we put the grill right out there on the street, and I think the last time we did it, we did like 200 hot dogs and hamburgers and just fed people that were walking by, and some of you, that's how we met you.

That's why you're here.

Yeah, Barry, right?

That's how we met you.

Exactly.

So that was a lot of fun.

I think this next year, if we do that, we've got to probably get we're at the point where we need to like let that evolve, and we probably need to get like a um some kind of permit.

I don't know what that is, and if you have backgrounds in permits, let me know because I think that we we reached a point where we could potentially get in trouble for the scale that we were doing it at.

But um, the cookouts were a lot of fun.

We have this close relationship with our elementary school, which is City Spring Elementary.

We did six things for them in the 2016 or 2017-2018 school year, and then throughout the rest of the year we did um some other significant things.

I put down here that we did the teacher appreciation breakfast, um, where we brought in a uh coffee cart to make um specialty coffee drinks and bought um Goldberg's New York style bagels, and those teachers just loved it.

The whole staff was just so blessed by um us doing that for them.

We sponsored the fourth through eighth graders to go and watch the Black Panther movie, um, which was the a request that the uh principal she came to me.

I I stopped in on one day and she I said, What's um what else can we do to help you?

And she said, Well, I just really would love for our students to go see this movie.

And I said, Well, like we're a small church, like we we can't do that on the scale, like where you got 360 kids that she wanted to take to the movies.

And but I said, Look, let me um let's see, maybe the church can put in a little bit, um and maybe a few other people could contribute.

And and I happened to have at that time a wealthy benefactor um who was willing to contribute some of that, and uh it was awesome.

We blessed these 360 kids to go to the movies.

So now when we go and we talk to the kids at the at the school, we can ask them, hey, did you go to the movies?

They're like, Yeah, and they're like, hey, you know who paid for that?

It's our church.

Our church paid for that.

We we we were part of we were a part of that.

And they're like, wow, that's crazy, you know.

Then um back in August, at the last minute, at the beginning of August, um Send Relief, which is the third largest relief agency in the US, connected with us.

They love what we're doing through the Relief Center, and they said, We we we have a vision moving forward to do more stuff in partnership with what you're doing.

You're churching, you're meeting needs, physical needs in the community, and you're planting a church.

That's what we want to get behind.

And they said, we happen to have 817 backpacks sitting in a warehouse in Kentucky.

The church that was going to fill them and pass them out to the local school, they just couldn't pull it together.

Do you have the ability to do it?

And I said, Well, by God's grace, we do.

So we started this campaign to get about$10,000 worth of school supplies in a matter of three weeks, and to fill these backpacks and hand them out August 27th at the school.

That was crazy.

It was a great event, wasn't it?

It was a lot of fun, and it was amazing to see.

Some people bought backpack supplies off of an Amazon wish list, some people just gave cash, some people dropped off stuff at the Compassion Center, and then we did as a community, not just us, but in conjunction with the neighborhood, we filled these backpacks, about 350 of them.

We filled them based off of the age the grades and the shopping list, and then the very next day we gave them away uh to the community.

So that was a crazy, mind-blowing, stressful thing to be involved in.

And and here's one of the cool things, right?

So one of the ladies that participated in that, she's emailed me.

She's never come to church here, but she helped us with the packing of everything.

She emailed me in mid-December.

She says, I'm so excited for this next year.

I've been thinking about this for months.

I've put together all of these notes.

Here's how I think we could do a better job of getting donations.

Let's meet, let's talk about it, let's do it better.

Because send relief is like, we'll start you out with 817 backpacks, but we'd love to give you 2,500 next year.

I don't know how we're gonna do that.

I'm kind of dreading that.

But here's the cool thing that's happening is here's a woman who I don't know where she's at in her relationship with the Lord, but God's intersected our path with hers because we have this shared value of caring for the community.

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

In the Compassion Center, um, we've continued the the Friday food distribution, which is about feeding at least 30, 25 to 30 families a week.

Um it's 600 pounds of food that's donated by Trader Joe's.

I go pick it up, and then um our team assembles those um boxes of food and we give that out on um Friday mornings.

Um the roof, we lost our roof on the Compassion Center, and then it was repaired this last couple weeks.

So that's a huge praise report.

Um we started to pray.

Pastor Steve and I started to pray on Wednesday mornings.

So we have a corporate prayer meeting now at 8 45 on Wednesday mornings.

He came up to me.

I I had this thing in my heart for like two months, and then I met him, and literally the first Sunday, he and I were talking, his first Sunday here, and he's like, I've offered to pray there before.

He he even predates living in the neighborhood further than me, and he had been in the compassion center before I took it over.

And he's like, I'd love to just pray in there more.

I'm like, I want to pray in there more, you know.

So again, the Holy Spirit just laying stuff on people's hearts, and it it formed this little Wednesday morning time of just praying together.

So if you're available, come and pray with us Wednesday mornings, 8 45.

We pray for like 30, 45 minutes together.

Um, and I'd love for that to be longer.

It just kind of goes right into the opening of the compassion center.

Um, we began to engage the community through the I Love Humans podcast.

That was like a more of a personal project where just doing research on the local community and and looking at how vulnerable people are cared for in the immediate, like the immediate 2-1-231 zip code.

And so there's five episodes: how are the homeless cared for, how are uh youth employed, how's uh workforce development, how does that work in the city?

Um just kind of the basics.

Um, and that um led to a number of opportunities, a food accession initiative with the local public school, um, praying at the city council meeting.

Um so those were kind of the highlights of some of the stuff I don't know what I'm missing from this last year, but those were the things that I'm praising God for that he did through you, through us, working together, the Holy Spirit, you know, speaking into us as a church on and causing us as a very tiny group, as this kind of like seed here in Fells Point to be able to do things bigger than we should be able to, right?

We shouldn't be able to give away 817 backpacks.

But yet, I mean this this goes before we even started as a church on Sundays.

This has been the theme.

God just keeps dropping stuff in our lap, you know.

We just paid or what we just paid for the school to take um the up the whole middle school in buses to go watch another movie back this last fall.

But we did it in partnership.

We paid a quarter, and another church paid three-quarters of the bill for the buses that were needed to take these kids there.

So um lessons.

Let me just kind of cover a couple of quick lessons that I think we learned.

First of all, the targeted demographic.

Like who who are we focused on reaching in this area?

Who lives in Fells Point?

Yeah, you do.

Thanks, Gary.

Um you do too.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, so from my from my understanding, about half of our church lives in the um ministry focus area.

The other half um lives outside that ministry focus area.

So we have eight neighborhoods that we consider our ministry focus area.

It's 260 blocks.

Uh, it includes Fells Point, Upper Fells Point, Butchers Hill, Washington Hill, Care, Douglas and Perkins, Um, Harbor East, and Little Italy.

That's more than eight, but anyway, they don't pay me to count, just preach.

Um so inside of that area, you have the vulnerable.

Those suffering in poverty and related challenging circumstances.

We have working professionals, and then we have the veterans.

Those are people that have lived here for a long time.

They're not necessarily homeless or poor or in the projects, nor are they necessarily the upwardly mobile, career-minded professionals working or going to school at Hopkins or working in the financial industry.

So those are the those those are kind of like that's what we've learned is what is around us.

We've learned some rhythms, right?

So coming into 2018, there's a lot you don't know when you're planting a church, especially if you don't live here.

So kind of learning who's here, what is the rhythms.

Again, we started out May.

I didn't know May was such a hard month to be a church in until we had two holidays.

You have Mother's Day, nobody shows up for church on Mother's Day.

That's not your excuse next Mother's Day to not show up.

But let I've learned, I've learned the hard way.

Like you have hol you have like Mother's Day and then you have Labor Day in May, and it's just like, where's everybody at?

Like, let's just circle up here, the six of us, let's have a prayer meeting.

So May was tough, right?

But then all of a sudden, when most churches they get into the summer and things are slow, for us, all of a sudden, people just are showing up.

Why?

It's because people are moving in.

There's about an eighth to a fifth of this neighborhood turns over in residents because you have students coming in to go to school, you have people coming in for career.

It's this crazy turnover of new residents, and those people come, they're looking for church, and our church happens to pop up kind of high on Google search rankings, and um and people all of a sudden started showing up, and and there's this big growth from June through mid-September.

And then things kind of plateau through the holidays, and things are a little bit slower.

So that which means, which is really important for me as we're like scheduling out stuff and planning stuff, like this is our season to really um uh grow and like put down roots and for us to get to know one another and emphasize small groups and not do a ton of outreach right now because people aren't looking for church right now.

Um, holidays are an opportunity in Baltimore City right now.

Baltimore City is not a destination during the holidays, it's it's it's where we leave.

Everybody leaves.

Parking all of a sudden is so easy.

It's crazy what happens here over the holidays.

And that's just um that's whereas like imagine like in the suburbs, you you look at Easter, you look at Christmas, that's when people go to church.

In the city, it's kind of like we're barely hanging on to our core group.

It's interesting.

All these things we've learned in the last year.

Spiritual appetite, just kind of getting a sense of where people are at.

Right now, I would say that that from from kind of our experience, people are not willing to do much more than one or two church events in a week.

Many people attend church maybe once or twice a month.

Um, and that's just kind of where we're at.

If you look at the search, so I'm a nerd, back background in in computer um um online marketing, analytics, and all that stuff.

So I had access at my last church to all the analytics for this megachurch in Orange County, and how many people are searching for church in Orange County, and how many people are searching for church in Baltimore City.

And the difference is like 10 to 20 fold.

In Baltimore City, there's just a low number of people that are looking and searching for church in Baltimore versus church in Orange County.

That search term.

It's just this fascinating difference in numbers.

But here's what that tells you here.

The other people aren't negative about church.

When you talk to people in Baltimore, and many of you have invited friends to church, you've told me about that.

And the interactions that I think a lot of you have gotten is probably um not a lot of hostility, a lot of like warm, fuzzy um, oh, that sounds nice, but very little follow-through, right?

How many of you have invited people to church?

Yep.

How many people have actually showed up?

Very few, right?

Very few.

Yes, you you get you get one.

Maybe I think maybe like out of one out of 40 is what what I'll see uh show up.

It's just interesting.

So one of the cool things is that in Baltimore, it's not such a negative environment, it's not hostile to Christianity, but there's not a deep like spiritual hunger that exists here amongst a broad range of people.

Um many people are generally positive but uh view the church in their view of the church, but a small percent are willing to attend and then commit.

So, how should we think about this next year?

Um I said earlier that we we want to think smaller than the church and bigger than the church.

We're not Haven City Church, the worst thing that could happen is that this is a kingdom that gets built, right?

As Christians, we're called to be about God's kingdom, right?

That's what we're about, about God's kingdom.

The church has a beginning and this church has an end.

I don't know when it's gonna be, I don't know how long this church is gonna last, but it's not gonna last forever.

But God's kingdom is gonna last forever.

So if we ever get into this mode where we're thinking that that the end game is to build the church, then we're thinking wrong.

If we think that the end game is just our own personal priorities and our our goals for the year, then we're thinking wrong.

We have learned as we've gone through the book of Luke that it's Jesus is not talking about the church.

I think in all of Jesus' ministry, he talks about the church twice.

But he comes over and over again and he tells his disciples when they go out, go and herald, proclaim the kingdom of God.

That the kingdom of God is what it's about.

So we do an institutionalized church in the process of expanding the kingdom of God.

So a church that's focused on a church that is itself trying to be a kingdom, has a pastor who thinks and rules like a king, it accumulates territory, people, and resources, it dominates its patrons' time, attention, and resources, and it isolates itself from the rest of society.

Do you see that?

I've participated in those kinds of churches.

Churches that are themselves trying to be a kingdom, that staff are brought on staff to build out the pastor's kingdom.

That's not what we want, right?

We want to be this conduit that's seeing God's kingdom further.

So when we talk about tithing, right, we don't give to the church, we give through the church to the work that he's doing.

Um getting a building for us is uh not a huge priority.

Um if we get a building at some point in the future, we want to use that, we want to figure out a way how it's gonna be used to benefit the local neighborhood, to benefit the local community, and it's not it's gonna be used more than Sunday mornings, but it's not gonna be used to dominate your time.

Because our goal for you as a church is to not do the church's agenda, it's to do the kingdom agenda, and the kingdom agenda is not a lot of um like I don't want to start a Christian Disneyland.

Let's just say that, right?

I I the last thing I want is like something that we all have to maintain, like, oh, we got another concert or we got like another event that we all got to go to.

No, we do church on Sunday mornings and we do small groups.

Like that's how simple it is, right?

That's what our Christian faith is.

And then individually, God leads us into service.

We have some service that goes on through our church, but it you're your the service God's calling to you may not be through our church.

It may be just this loving, faithful witness in your workplace and to your extended family.

Okay, I gotta move because literally that's like a tenth of my sermon this morning.

This is more like a business meeting.

Um, but um, okay, let's just talk about what's at stake.

Okay, so we got we want to be kingdom-minded.

It's not about the church.

The church is a utility in God's overall plan.

What's at stake?

Let's talk about what's at stake, what's our role, and some nuts and bolts.

So God says that we are going to live forever, we're gonna live eternally.

There are two potential conditions for our eternal state: living with God and enjoying all the benefits of a friendship with Him, being the children of God, or living in suffering as eternal enemies of God.

So the 80 years that we have on this planet is this weird anomaly.

Well, I've been really geeking out on this recently, or just meditating on it.

This life is just this weird anomaly in the light of eternity.

It is, in a sense, it's a test, and our performance on that test determines what will happen in eternity.

And so there's some decision, I don't like the word test, but I couldn't think of a better one as I was writing this.

But what we do in these 80 years determines our eternity, right?

So this is what's crazy, and I don't think he's here this morning.

So I wrote all this, and then we walked from the compassion center over here this morning with a guy that was homeless that we invited to church, and um he got to the parking lot and he said he would come back later.

And um he's literally like telling me this.

He's telling me like our life is just a blip.

And I was like, bro, you're like preaching my sermon to me this morning.

Like, where'd this come from?

It was crazy.

Um, but our our life is just this blip, right?

So we are gonna live eternally, we're gonna live eternally, and then we're gonna get rewards.

So I've been talking, some of you like we've been just talking about this.

Like, what does that mean?

Like, and if that if that's really true, if that's really real, how does that shape our life on a weekly basis, the patterns in our life?

What's at stake?

So there is our destiny.

Let's talk about just our destiny.

Jesus talks about storing up treasures in heaven, he encourages his followers to store up treasures versus storing up temporal wealth.

So the question should be what does it look like for me to store up treasures in heaven, right?

So we get our our our destiny right, which we'll talk about in just a second, but let's talk about what our these treasures.

There's the great commission that we're participating, and then there's the social implications of the gospel.

Two things.

As you're thinking, if you're taking notes and you're thinking, what am I going to get treasures in heaven for?

The first is your participation in the mission, which is the great commission that Jesus gave of going and making disciples, proclaiming the good news.

And then the second thing that we see rewards for is the embodying the message of the gospel, the social implications of the gospel.

So caring for the vulnerable because we were once vulnerable.

Uh being multi-ethnic, not just homogeneous, but being about being diverse and caring about ethnicities and cultures other than our own.

That's a demonstration of the gospel being alive in us, right?

Forgiving, not retaliatory, as a people.

That's a social implication of the gospel.

Um, caring about the preservation of life.

More than just pro-life, but literally caring about life as a whole, holding on to a biblical sexual ethic.

Those are the sac the social implications of the gospel.

So there's obviously sharing the gospel with people, but then there's the embodiment of the gospel.

In this focus area where we're at, and I know only half of us live inside that box, but there are 25,000 people that live right here in this neighborhood.

Um, I would estimate that 23 to 24,000 of them are currently heading towards eternal damnation.

That doesn't mean that they will not find Christ upon in their journey, but right now they are not yet born again.

God says that you are going to either live as a friend of God eternally or you're going to be lost eternally.

There is no thought more horrific than eternal separation from God.

It is so awful that some theologians have played with the idea of a second chance after the death, uh, after death to turn to Christ, but that cannot be found in God's word anywhere.

We can hope that that might be a possibility, but we should not bet or count on in any way or shape on it in any way, shape, or form.

Do you get that?

We have to take hell as a reality.

That's that is the stakes.

Hell is the most horrible thing you can think about.

It is um it is horrific, and it it really challenges our concept of God and his love, but really that's the only way to reconcile and and and be okay with the reality of hell is knowing that God is love, that God is more loving than any of us ever will be.

Our longing and desire for hell is only in us because God himself is love.

So hell is a reality to our neighbors.

That is one of, do you know why I why I wanted to plant a church?

I didn't want to plant a church for years and years and years.

I was opposed to this idea, this concept.

There's enough churches in the world, there's 300 church buildings in Baltimore.

Why start a new church?

It's because of this reason.

People come to know Christ through a church plant at an exponential rate compared to an existing church kind of plugging along.

The process of planting a church just tends to result in more people coming to Christ because the people who participate in a church plant are weird.

Who does this?

Right?

It's like the early adopters on an app.

You know how you have that bell curve?

We're like that early adopters, right?

We're these people that are like about the mission.

We're willing to put up with like setting up the church in this way.

And it's just, we're a weird group.

And because we're weird, we're willing to not settle for a status quo Christianity.

Instead, we live out our faith engaging non-believers.

So here we are.

God's planted us in Fells Point.

We've got thousands of people around us that need to know about the hope of Christ.

You just think about this group that's lost.

They're living without God as their friend.

They can pray, but God cannot listen.

They're fully exposed to this destructive attacks of Satan.

As much as they may want to be free, they are bound to their self-interest and the fallen condition.

They have nothing to hope in.

If they could see their eternity from God's perspective, they would melt in utter terror.

And God's placed us here.

God's placed us and other beautiful churches in this neighborhood to be a witness of the hope of Christ.

And we're small, right?

We're small, but yet God uses a small church.

How many, how many disciples did Jesus have?

Twelve, right?

The whole principle of the kingdom permeating this surrounding culture has no problem with smallness.

God picks smallness, He picks the unqualified, He picks the vulnerable to save and to use in a setting like this.

Amen.

So God wants to work.

What's our role?

I mean, that that kind of covers the stakes.

What's what is our role?

Because God God's faithful.

God is faithful.

So God has said in John that He sends His Spirit to So you think for a second of the 23, 24,000 neighbors that live here.

Okay.

If all 24,000 of those people don't know Jesus, they don't have the hope of heaven, what God says in John 16 is that the Spirit of God is working on those people's life to convict them of sin, their sinful state, that God is righteous, that righteousness is a necessity to the human nature, and that there's a coming judgment.

That's the work of God's Spirit in their life.

Without you talking with them at all, the work of God's Spirit is He's just massaging their hearts, helping them to know this is the reality of life.

In 2 Corinthians 4, it says that Satan is blinding those people's eyes to the truth of the gospel.

So there's the the gospel's light that just wants to explode, but there's this blindness that they're experiencing.

But then it says in 2 Corinthians 4 that God, just like at the beginning of creation, when he said, Let there be light, he causes the light to go on and for people to understand this gospel message.

Now there's questions like, does God turn on the light multiple times?

Does God only turn the light on for some people?

Can people reject the light?

I don't know.

That's not what 2 Corinthians explains to us, right?

It depends on how you think salvation itself works.

But we know that it says that it's God that causes the light to come on in somebody's life.

So that's God's role.

What's your role?

What's our role corporately?

Well, in Romans 10, 14, it says that people cannot believe in Jesus unless they hear the message.

Right?

There's how can they believe if they have not heard?

And so people do not mechanically become Christians.

Those 24,000 people will not become Christians.

We know that they're loved by God.

We know that it's not God's will that any should perish, but they will not come to Christ in a mechanical way.

They have to know who Jesus is, they have to become convinced that he's trustworthy, they have to be done with their way of doing life, and they have to believe in their heart and confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord.

Let's close with this.

Let's close with this idea, and then we'll talk about just kind of some of our own plans as a church.

But let me just close with this, I think.

Do you remember in Napoleon Dynamite, the movie, when Uncle Rico is trying to sell Tupperware?

Good.

Okay, so we're on the same page.

Are we tracking here?

For the most part.

Okay, so if you don't know Uncle Rico, it he's this cheesy salesman trying to sell Tupperware, and he sticks the Tupperware bowl behind his van and runs over it, trying to show how durable the Tupperware bowl was.

Now the Tupperware bowl can't handle it.

It breaks, and Uncle Rico is upset and he peels off in his van, right?

2 Corinthians chapter 4 says that you and I are like that piece of Tupperware.

2 Corinthians 4 · chapter mention

That we are this vessel that contains the message of the gospel.

It's we embody this glorious gospel of Christ.

And here's the thing: God pulls an Uncle Rico on us.

Okay?

He puts us through stress tests because he wants the message of the gospel to be credible.

So there are things that are painful that happen in our life.

We get knocked over, we get knocked down, we feel pressed, hard-pressed, we feel troubled.

God allows those things to happen because through you, he wants to make the gospel credible to your family, to your coworkers, to your banker, to the lady at the checkout line at Safeway.

Like God wants to put on display the power of the gospel through your life, right?

So, like Peter says, don't think it's strange in 2019 when stuff goes south and it's challenging.

Why?

Because God allows for his message to be embodied in a very vulnerable container.

You're that container.

God wants to put on display his power, his glory, right?

So with that in mind, with that in mind, be ready.

Be ready for God to demonstrate his resurrection power in and through you.

Be thinking, where does God have me living right now?

What may be the significance of that location?

What career track am I on?

How does God want to use me in that career track for his mission?

Who do I interact with on a weekly basis?

And how am I doing in these stress tests?

Is there space?

Am I making space for God's resurrection power, or am I trying to resurrect myself?

Once you have a perspective and a sense of direction, ask God to fill your heart with love.

All of this flows out of this work of witness flows out of a heart full of God's love.

Some of the things we have planned for this year.

This again, this is a season where we don't have as many visitors coming in.

This is a season to put down roots to grow, right?

You can't go outside a whole lot, although we've haven't, it hasn't been too cold.

So this is a good season of growth.

Next week, again, is the next steps.

Know this.

Like my plea is that we get our systems and our teams built up over the winter, that our small groups are doing even better than they were this last fall, so that when we come to June and we get an influx of people, we can be good stewards and just be ready to welcome people in.

And we can be better prepared, knowing that that is a part of the seasonality of the city.

I would encourage you, commit to a small group.

This is where you will grow and where you will be cared for.

We will be doing them in 10 to 14 week sessions with typically four-week long, four-week breaks.

My preaching this year, we're gonna finish Luke before Easter.

Um we will have a couple of Easter sermons, then we're gonna go through the book of Ezra over the course of 10 to 12 weeks.

We're gonna do Acts 1 through 12, a summary view of Acts, and then we're gonna start 1 Corinthians in the last third of the year.

Um we're gonna begin doing quarterly baptisms.

So I know one person wants to get baptized on February 17th.

Um, if any of more people want to get baptized, that will be the next one, and then we will be doing baptisms on a quarterly basis.

Um, our worship team will be glow um growing under Nick's um leadership and just taking more shape.

We have a big church from uh the Carolinas coming, or no, I think it's Virginia.

They're coming up from Virginia to host a big uh VBS with us.

Um that's in the second week of July.

We want to do more in the Compassion Center, expand that ministry.

Um we want to try to reach more working professionals through the shared value of people care.

So we're gonna do more of the I Love Humans podcast.

We may do more through the Compassion Center because there are people that will not come to church yet.

They're young working professionals that care about vulnerable people in the community.

We happen to care about vulnerable people in the community.

We can do that together, and in the context of that relationship, we can share the gospel.

So we'll do more in that vein.

And then I personally feel stirred to connect more with the projects.

Perkins and Douglas, um, our friends that live there that we care for through the Compassion Center, um, they don't feel comfortable walking over here.

This is just too far.

So we've we've looked at the idea of of releasing um the auditorium from the school on a Sunday afternoon and doing a service there.

Um we might do a couple of of uh just trial runs of just doing a uh a big blowout worship service and um just being more in that neighborhood.

Okay, almost done.

I know this is long, I know this is long.

Thank you for your patience.

Three things I want to just caution you of.

And yeah, you can come up, Nick.

Three things I just want to caution you of just going into 2019, just personally, just keep in mind that economically we've been on this bull run for a while, right?

So things pop.

It looks like right now, so so there's so end of 2019 ended, the markets were down, right?

Things usually, there's usually like a, you know, there's a run and then there's an adjustment.

So this could be a tough year financially.

I don't know, right?

But just prepare your heart for that.

Just know, have that those mission, that mission lens, that perspective of eternity in mind.

The market's correcting itself and going through a tough year.

Who knows?

Just be prepared for that.

Also, 2019, we're beginning a new political cycle.

The last one was bloody and brutal.

It is super distracting for Christians, okay?

The kingdom is more important than earthly politicians.

Don't you can make a decision, you can make an informed decision about politics within the week of the elections, right?

There's a good, godly way to engage civics, and then there's a way that just it consumes you emotionally and it takes, it steals you from being a fruitful person.

So that's that's the year, like this year, things begin to ramp up for 2020, right?

So just um be on guard against that gravitational pull within society.

Everything is it's to the advantage of politicians to make everything political.

It's to the advantage, the monetary advantage of news stations to make everything political.

You do not have to get swept up in that.

You understand?

Not everything is political.

There's some things that can be remain apolitical, and we're of a different kingdom, right?

Let's let's let's stake out that ground and not get swept up in the the the junk that's over there.

And then just know this Satan wants to destroy you.

This year, Satan wants to destroy you.

I don't know what he's gonna throw at you, I don't know what that's gonna look like, but just be on guard.

Be on guard against the attacks of the devil.

Let's stand.

Let's stand and let's pray.

God, thank you for this last year.

Thank you for a new year, a new year to be missionaries in Fell's Points, to love you, to proclaim the gospel, to live like missionaries in our everyday lives.

That's what we feel like you've called us to do.

Well, the fruit comes from you.

Our protection comes from you, the wisdom comes from you, the power comes from you, the salvation comes from you, the provision comes from you.

Lord, we just offer ourselves to you afresh.

We're willing to be used, Lord, where we are unwilling, we pray that you would help our hearts to be soft and moldable, that you give us a humility.

Lord, we can go into this year with great hope, excitement, because we have you as our King.

We thank you for that in Jesus' name.

Amen.