Sunday Sermon | Missions Sunday 2026

Hi, my name is Chad Mason.

I'm the Missions Pastor here at First Baptist.

I'm here with Heather Austin.

She's our Associate Minister of Missions, and we're so excited to be here for Mission Sunday, and uh and so glad that you've joined us today.

We want to tell you thank you for all the ways that you've been supporting Missions here at FBC.

And God has been using your gifts and your contributions and your prayers to do great things among our people.

This year we've seen 14 teams and 180 people go to different parts of the world, and it's something that we never would have even imagined if it wasn't something we're seeing with our own eyes.

We still have four mission trips being sent out this fall.

We have teams preparing to go to Egypt, the Republic of Georgia, the Middle East, and Uganda.

Please join us today, right after Second Service, here in the Worship Center, to learn more about where God is calling us to serve on mission internationally and domestically in 2027 and where he might be sending you.

Let's just give a hand to the Lord for all the good things he's been doing among us.

And through us, it's been amazing to see how God continues to, I would say, capture our heart for what God's been doing around the world.

Uh, he's been at work since the beginning of time.

He's been drawing the nations to himself, and he's invited his people from the very beginning to be a part of it.

And what an incredible thing to witness uh a church whose heart is being captured by what he's been doing and continues to do everywhere.

Uh, even this morning, we have a team uh that landed yesterday in Egypt and they are making their way to a city called Sohag.

You maybe have never heard of that city, but it's the city where legendarily um Joseph and Mary and Jesus um spent those two years while they were fleeing for their lives uh early on.

So our partner who is leading the team, it's a family from our church.

Uh his name is Joseph, he's an amazing guy.

His family's Egyptian, they've been among us for several years now.

Uh he grew up in that city, so he knows exactly what's going on.

They've got a great church they're partnering with, and so over these next few days, if you remember them, pray for them.

Pray for our team that's gonna be in Egypt over these next 10 days uh or so.

Um, you know, I'm so thankful that you came in today.

When you came in, you should have got a magazine.

It's a little booklet.

Uh we've been handing these out, uh, magazines twice a year.

This is our fall um magazine, and I want to just give you a little bit of instruction.

We tried to make it prettier.

Um, when I say prettier, we want it to be a little less text.

Some of the magazines we've given you have been pages full of stories.

So, what we did is we we put an article or two from every report and every every um article in there, and then there's a QR code to connect to the full report online.

Okay, so each page you see has a little QR code on it.

That's where you go to get the rest of the information.

Uh, we we didn't want to hand you this, again, a big document.

So there's a lot of nice pictures, some interesting stories.

It's focused on the unreached, which we've talked about a lot over the last couple years.

Um, so please take a look at that, enjoy that.

Make sure you get one if you didn't.

Uh, they have them available as you walk out, and uh and make sure that you put one on your prayer, your your the side of your table should be praying for it, or on your coffee table.

You can see this uh over the next several months.

It should be a guide for you uh to think through how we're partnering internationally, and that's our goal.

Um today's sermon is is is uh it's a little bit different.

We're gonna jump into some scripture, but what we're one thing we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about how God is using each of you to impact the work that we're able to do around the world.

So I'm gonna read to you some verses.

We find them in Ephesians chapter 4, 11 through 16, and it lays out just some incredible language of Paul talking to these people, the Ephesian church, and helping them get a grasp of what it is that he hopes God does among them.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

And so if you start with me in verse 11, it says that Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers.

When we do missions trainings around the world, we call this apest.

We take the first letter of each of those five different leadership skills and we talk about the apest giftings, where God has gifted the church, uh, or and we believe all the churches, so churches around the world, but the church with these different types of leaders apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers.

And obviously we use the word pastors in our culture for those shepherds, but we keep the S there because that's what we can find there in Ephesians.

And so I want you to know, as we go through this morning, you're I'm gonna use the word apest from time to time, but that that really is just talking about these five different leadership gifting that God has given the church.

But also want you to know, so look at verse 11.

I'm sorry, verse 12.

So he's given us these apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, but look at the reason, verse 12, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people and their deceitful scheming.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ, and from him the whole body joined and held together by every supporting ligament grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work.

Let's pray.

Father, we come before you as your body.

God, at times you know we are messy, we have challenges and problems and difficulties, but God, you have called us your own.

And Father, underneath your Son, God, the head of this body, we pray that you would use us to accomplish your work in this world you've given us.

As we open these words, as we consider how you've called each one of us as individuals and us as a body, we pray, God, that you would open our hearts to your spirit and that we would respond as only we can.

Father, we love you.

We pray that you'll be glorified in us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So look at this progression here.

So, first, it tells us that God gave us a gift.

He gave us a gift in these leaders, these apostles, prophets, shepherds, teachers, and evangelists.

And I want to just take a minute and just recognize that these gifts that God has given us really is a blessing.

Um, I uh it'd be self-promoting for me to say that those gifts are best represented by our executive team who preaches on here up here occasionally, uh Pastor Garrett as well.

But I want to take a moment, I want to recognize that these gifts in our body are much larger than our staff.

Okay, so I'm gonna just take a minute, I'm gonna just give you a couple things.

Um I'd like for you to stand up.

I know this is personal interaction, and that means people are gonna look at you for half a second.

But if you share the gospel, if you're an evangelist, if you're praying for the lost, if you're looking for opportunities to share the gospel, would you stand?

Um if you teach at any level in our church, children, adult, young adults, youth, if you if you teach will you stand, if you counsel and care for those who are hurting in our community, if you're working to pray for those who you know are having a tough time, uh, would you also stand?

Okay, if if you uh if you are working to build churches, to encourage churches, to train church leaders, would you stand?

Now, now here's the thing there's people standing all over this room.

Guys, this is what apest in the body of Christ looks like.

This is what it's everybody's serving in the best way that they can.

And guys, I would like for you to take a minute and give these guys a hand because they they serve.

I think you guys have a seat.

Only a few of those who stood are paid to do this.

Almost all of them do this because they feel called, because they think it's important, because they want to invest in the generations that God has brought to our church.

And I want to tell you, that's a really good picture.

I I think if I defined these things a little finer, probably every single one of you would find that you have some role where you teach.

Maybe it's in your home.

Maybe you have some role where you provide counsel.

Maybe it's also to your children or grandchildren or people in your neighborhood.

Maybe you don't feel like you're a teacher, so you didn't feel good standing up, but I think every one of us has some role to play in these five different uh giftings that the Lord gives.

But but let's move on from who.

Who is important, but why is even more important.

Why does God gift us with these people?

Why does God give it to us?

Well, it says that God gives it so that the body of Christ will be built up.

Guys, it's it's it's not just so that we will recognize leaders.

In fact, the leaders have a purpose that's not about them, it's not for the platform or the recognition, or like, man, that guy's a great teacher.

And that lady, she does a really that's not the point.

The point is the effect of what they bring into the body.

Right?

It's it's the way in which we serve you so that the body of Christ will be built up.

Um what is the body?

We might just, if you think about it, just First Baptist, it's the people that call this their church home.

It's the membership that has committed to one another to love God and love each other in this place.

But the body is so much bigger than that, right?

At the very biggest, we could say it's the global body of Christ.

It's every person who loves and follows Jesus throughout the world, and God is wanting to build that body into the fullness of his son.

Um, you know, FBC is a large body, it's almost 1,200 of us here on some weeks.

I think we've been hitting as high as 1170 some some weekends.

This is a lot of people gathering from one week to the next.

But you know, there are churches that are larger than us.

See, the largest church in the world uh is reported to be in Seoul, South Korea, and has excess of over a million members, and 200,000 gather weekly in their sanctuary on a Sunday.

Could you imagine trying to get 200,000 of you guys in and out of here?

Trying to get 1,000 of you in and out kills our parking lot.

They give out 200,000.

It's incredible.

What does that church look like?

The body of Christ is a wildly diverse thing.

When we look it up in scriptures, uh we can find that the church has been given all these leaders so that the body of Christ we built up.

He mentions there uh several things.

He says, until we reach the unity and faith, he says that we would be built up in the knowledge of the Son of God, that we would become mature, and that we would attain the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

I don't know about you, but when I see that whole measure, it brings other verses to mind, like James 1.4 that says we should be mature and complete, not lacking in anything.

Right?

What does it mean for us together to represent the fullness of Jesus?

Maybe none of us can do that well on our own, but maybe together we can we can show people this is what the kingdom of God, this is what the body of Christ, this is what the person of Christ looked like when you have the combined good deeds of all the people.

Can you imagine if we were to call all of you together and make a list of all the good things that we've done in the last few months, what that list would look like.

Uh in my role as the missions pastor, I feel like I have a unique space where I get to sit among many people doing a lot of great things in a lot of different places.

Maybe it's our missions partners scattered around the world, or that's our domestic partners who we have 22 of that are just here in our community.

I hear stories constantly.

In fact, probably five to ten times a day, I get texts from different people in different places telling me good things that are happening around the world.

It's a really unique space.

If I was to list all the ones that I'm aware of, you would be overwhelmed.

But imagine if I could put all the ones that I'm not aware of from this room just today, it'd be incredible.

And if you said this is what the body of Christ looks like, we'd all say, Man, that looks pretty good.

Now, on the other side, if we were to put down all the things that we don't do so well, you say, Why churches have challenges?

We're people, we're messy people, we have brokenness in our lives, and we're all trying to deal with it some way, another, some way or another.

But if you keep going down, the the the the the writer here, Paul, he says some more things.

So this verse 14, he goes on and says that we'll no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, blown here and there by every wind of teaching and the cunning and craftiness of people and their deceitful scheming.

Guys, these these gifted people who are leading us allow us to have some stability.

Do you know in our world today there's a lot that is constantly being thrown at you?

There are people who claim to be Christians, there are leaders who claim to have special knowledge of what God's doing.

There are people that stand in front of the television screens and the cameras and they tell you this is what this means.

And honestly, guys, some of it's compelling.

And some of it's not.

But if we don't have people helping us understand what these scriptures say, then sometimes we can find ourselves moving off of what would be centric to the gospel.

And so one of the things I want you to do is I want you to know that you're in a place where we put a lot of emphasis on trying to build carefully the foundation on which we pursue what God is calling us to do.

So we keep going in verse 15.

Instead, this is instead of chasing the cunning and craftiness of people, instead, we speak the truth in love.

And we will grow to become in every respect the mature body who is the head, oh, sorry, the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ.

And from him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work.

So this is this is where I want to just end this proportion.

If Christ is the head and we're all connected to him, then each one of us has a part to play.

Each one of us is gifted to be a specific piece of the body.

And as that body works together, the whole body is healthy.

You get that?

Which which leads me to this.

We need you to participate in the work of the body.

We want to craft and shape your heart and mind so that you can be near Christ and you can understand the teachings of Jesus, but we want it to go beyond understanding and knowledge into the active participation in what God's doing.

We represent Him in the flesh.

We we get to be the body of Christ active in the world that he gave us, and we need you.

We need you to be involved, we need you to speak up, we need your voice, we need your heart, we need your resource and time, your energy, we need your expertise.

Sometimes we come to church and we think that our role here is just to receive.

We come in, we sit down, and and if the good if the pastor preaches a really good, encouraging sermon, we walk out feeling like we've gotten something.

And we come out going, Oh, I really needed that.

But there's another side to it is what do you do with it when you leave?

Right?

It's supposed to encourage your heart.

We want that to happen.

We want the Spirit of God to rest and dwell inside you, but we want it to overflow into the things that you do when you walk out these doors.

That's the body of Christ active in the world that we live in.

So, over the next few minutes, what I want to do is I want to give you a picture of how we've created the mission structure at FBC over the last four years, because I want you to see that we want it, we we've tried to make on-ramps so that people can get invested and get involved.

When I first heard about the job opening in the missions pastor, this was early in 2002, uh, one of the things that was sent to me was a link to a sermon that Pastor Jason preached in May of 22.

And it defined who this church wanted to be.

It was it was something about how we as FBC want to be to our community.

And one of the things that he specifically said that I'm gonna paraphrase probably, but he said something to the effect of FBC wants to be a church where every believer has opportunities to use their unique gifts and callings to participate in God's work here in Bernie and around the world.

That captured my heart.

And I said, I think I want to be a part of this.

I want to come alongside a church that wants to equip every believer.

Look at the person next to you.

We want to equip them.

Right?

If you got a mirror, look in the mirror, we want to equip you.

We want you to find your place to engage in what God's doing in this world.

And so we started to think through what it would take and how would it look for us to build up a community of faith that works together to see God's name made famous in this world.

And I'll tell you, when I came to this church, my heart and desire was that we would be able to come alongside you in a manner that helps you grow, that helps you deploy for the work, that helps you understand what it is that God's put in front of you.

He's been working among us in so many ways, and I've been watching for four years, I've watched so many of you take many steps forward.

Some of you I saw the first time, and I thought this person is mature and complete, they don't need anything.

And then I've watched them grow tremendously in the last few years.

I'm thinking, man, there's amazing things that God is doing in the hearts of our people.

But before we jump into this next part, I want you to tell you get out a phone if you have it, or get something to write on.

Because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna describe these teams that we've created as a way to that that we hope will inspire you.

And if you see a slide you like, take a picture of it because we want to hear from you.

If if you like one of these teams we're gonna mention, if you think about something here that I say that's interesting, write it down because we want to follow up.

We want to connect.

Over these last four years, we've asked you to do a number of surveys, we've asked you to help us understand what kind of things God has gifted you to do.

We've connected with some of you who've sent us emails.

We're doing our very best to connect, but we have a long ways to go.

So here's how we we started.

And uh four years ago, we had two missions committee, a domestic committee and an international committee.

And uh and when I first got here, we decided to combine those into one committee, the Missions and Evangelism Committee, and then try to figure out how do we develop uh a way to get more people involved.

Uh at that time we had about 11 or 12 people who'd been serving for a long time, trying to care for all the needs.

When there was not a missions pastor, here's about a five-year gap uh between our last one and the time that I got.

And this volunteer team had been basically leading these areas, making sure that we were making good decisions all that time around.

But in 2024, we launched what we called a new vision, and that vision uh had us empower five different teams.

They were volunteer teams, and each team leader sat on that committee.

Does that make sense?

All right, so the first five teams was the international missions team, which all of you, if you think missions committee, that's probably what you're thinking about.

The team that oversees, don't don't go to the slides yet.

You're you're jumping ahead of me.

I'll get there, I'll promise.

Um, the international team, then there's the domestic team.

Then we we said we needed a communications team, somebody that could help us create the magazines or oversee that podcast.

We wanted to tell stories of what God's doing around the world to our congregation so it inspire your hearts, and you could hear that there are members in our church doing incredible things.

That podcast uh has been a huge thing, and we'll talk about it again in a few minutes.

Uh, the mobilization team, we we we decided we were gonna host things like the Perspectives class, and we needed a team focused on organizing it and getting the leaders equipped for that and making sure we had the right people involved.

Uh, it takes 12 to 15 people to put a class on, so we needed a team to help organize it well.

Uh, they also oversaw all of our gospel conversations, evangelism trainings that we were doing, and we were considering bringing other things like uh when helping hurt seminars or other type of things.

So they were trying to figure out how do we mobilize and equip the church in specific areas so that we can grow our own capacity within the church.

And then we had also the businesses mission team.

And uh and that one is is is this we one of the things that Jason said when I was in interviewing here is that we have a unique ability within our church to start businesses.

We have a uh a really strong group of business leaders within our within our church.

How do we use all that they've known to be an impact for missions around the world?

And uh so we we were thinking about and praying about that.

In 2025, we realized we needed a short-term missions team.

And this was a team that just helped us think through all these teams that are going around the world.

How do we make sure we're doing it well?

We need to create a little bit of policy, some some uh some strategy around funding.

How do we use money that comes and goes?

How do we approve scholarships?

And we have all these questions, and if it was just me and Heather doing all these things, we're just buried under the amount of work that this takes.

So we needed help.

We need to build capacity.

So we added that sixth team in 2025.

And this year, we're gonna add three more.

So now let me show you this.

You're seeing this slide.

I don't know if you can read it.

Um, it I think it's big enough up there.

And so there you see what we have is these new three teams, seven, eight, and nine, that we're gonna start in 2027.

We're starting a prayer team, and we'll talk about it in a minute, the disaster, relief, and recovery team.

And then lastly, you're gonna see the multiplication team.

So let me give you a little description of each one so that you have some idea what this giant mess I threw up on the slide for you guys to think of.

Like nine teams, who can keep track of all of this?

This is why you need a camera or a notepad, okay?

So here we go.

First one is our international missions team.

This is why I would say is your classic uh missions team.

So, what they do is they oversee our international partnerships.

Uh, they have the largest part of our annual budget goes to this team, but over it all about$210,000 this year, goes to support our international partners scattered around the world.

There's 15 of those, and they're doing a lot of great work.

We try to evaluate them, care for them, stay in constant communication with them, and send teams on occasion to go visit them.

So there's a lot of work happening in this space.

Um, and uh and so you can see here I see that they develop and oversee our international mission partnerships, they review potential.

Partners, they evaluate existing partners, and they recommend ongoing funding and one-time financial support for international missions.

It's a lot of work.

There's about seven people on that team right now, and it is a heavy job.

They do a lot.

In the past, they also oversaw all of our mission teams, the short-term mission trips.

And so we broke that away in 2025 so they can be more focused on the partnerships and less focused on the sending, which we'll get to in a minute.

The next one is our domestic missions team.

And the domestic missions team does something very similar, but really on the U.S.

side.

The vast majority of our local partners, our domestic partners, are local.

They're here in Bernie and San Antonio.

There's 22 of them.

Again, so we're trying to stay in constant communication with them.

We're trying to serve them and give some of our funding to them.

This one represents about$135,000 of our budget.

So we're very active both internationally and domestically.

We are inundated with constant requests.

I think the last time I talked to the Chamber of Commerce, there's over 400 faith-based nonprofits in Kendall County.

They all want to be funded by First Baptist.

So we are constantly getting requests and reviewing proposals and saying yes to some and no to others.

We're evaluating the partnerships we have, and we're trying to do this with as much strategy and goodwill and good heart as we possibly can.

And uh and it's a challenge.

This by itself, you could ask Paul Harkelroad, uh, this by itself could drown any one person.

The the work of caring for our domestic partnerships is overwhelming.

So we need a team.

We need a team that's constantly calling and asking and praying for.

And uh, and guys, there's probably three to four fundraisers every month, and on the big months, like October and March, there's probably ten.

And we're constantly trying to fill tables and get people to go to these things.

Uh, it's amazing the amount of work going on, and it's amazing what God is doing in our community through our faith partnerships, both here and all over the United States.

All right, let's keep going.

So the next one is our mobilization team.

I mentioned this one.

This is trying to help our church understand and grow in its capacity to serve the needs in our community.

So this is for you.

We've said we needed a team within our church to help us grow the people within the church.

And so that's what this is doing.

So the perspectives class takes a lot of effort.

Uh, the mobilization team does that.

Like I said, we've talked about bringing in a few different seminars, but perspectives have been so overwhelming that it's been really largely the main thing that we're doing.

But one other part of this is this team has been preparing.

Listen to this.

We told you 180 people go overseas, uh, have been going overseas on these mission trips.

They prepare uh a care package for every person going on a team that includes handwritten notes for every morning of the trip.

So there's a whole group of you, I don't know who you are, um, some of our ladies, there's some guys involved as well, and they're just writing verses on these prayer cards.

So this team that went to went out this week to um to Egypt, every morning they can open a card that says, Hey, we're praying for you.

Here's a verse that we were thinking about when we were writing this card for you.

And think about that.

If you're gone for 10 days times 180 people, that's a lot of cards that people are writing, right?

And packing them in these little envelopes and sending them out to our teams.

So that mobilization team has been fantastic.

They've been so connected and caring for our church so well.

The next team that I mentioned is that short-term mission trips team.

These guys uh are have been really amazing because they've been forming and writing policy.

It's gotta be one of the worst things you can do when you're talking about missions is the policy development.

But when you're talking about the responsibility it takes to take 30 or 40 people to an international community on behalf of the church, it's a big deal, and we have to have some things in place to help us know how we work, how we operate, how do we raise funds, how do we give funds?

How do we ensure that we're not put putting people who are not able to go on a trip into a place where they could be physically exposed in some terrible way?

How are we gonna respond if there's an accident that happens while you're on a trip, or if someone has a uh a medical problem?

The liabilities around short-term mission trips are insane.

That Kim lets us do so much is really an incredible thing.

And uh, you should pray for her heart constantly.

Like uh the the things that God allows us to do in the places where God has been calling our people, some of them are crazy places.

And we pray that God would protect them, we pray that God would use them for his glory, and we pray that God would spend them on his behalf, but we also realize there's a risk that comes with it.

So pray for us, pray for this team because this team is the team.

We we've asked everyone leading teams now to put together an application.

And we work through the application process and we approve the funding and the people leading it, and then we try to work through a process of how we train our teams.

We're still early in this process, but it's a really important process, and we're working hard to get it cleaner and clearer every time.

If you're gonna go on a short-term mission trip, you're probably gonna interact with some of these folks.

They're excellent, and they love our church really well.

And uh, so we'd love to share with you more about that.

The next one is this business as mission team.

And this one has been messy, church.

It's messy because people think business and you put church, and those two things seem to be two different worlds.

But so much around the world is changing, and and what happens is so many ministries around the world are trying to create income streams that are built and funded locally.

They want to be sustained by the work inside their inside their country or inside the area in which they live, not just charitable donations that are coming from the outside.

During the the housing crisis of 2008, and then again during COVID, what happened is the world economy in many ways just kind of dropped, and thousands of organizations around the world shut their doors.

And when they did, their partners were left holding what?

We have orphanages and ministries all around the world that lost funding overnight because economy changes in the United States, and it opened the door to say we've got to find better ways to sustain these things long time, long term, that are not just based on charitable outside gifts.

And so over the last decade and a half, there's been a huge focus within the missions world to develop income streams that are built on local funding.

And guys, if we're really clear, that's what we are as a church, right?

We don't charge you to come into the church.

We pray that God would encourage you to give to what we're doing here.

But if it wasn't for the businesses where you work, serve, open, if it wasn't for your charity, guess what?

We wouldn't exist much less in a beautiful place like this.

Right?

Your generosity is what funds the work here, and we're trying to help those ministries around the world do the same thing on the local level.

Build out strategies that help you be sustained by the work of the believers in your space and the work around you.

So this business as mission team has been working.

Mike Kenshin has been doing, working so hard to try to create strategies to both uh teach and train Christian leaders around the world to start businesses, to try to understand the value of budgeting and it's it's wild.

If you have an interest in this, talk to Mike, because we're trying so hard to keep that team growing, and there's a lot of work happening around the world.

Um, what's been amazing for him over the last couple years, is is invitations.

He wrote an eight-week seminar or eight-lesson training that kind of starts with a business proposal and plan and the heart behind it, and a little simple budgeting, and starting to put these things, and then we're working with leaders over there that have experience in business, that are coaching and caring for these leaders as they're starting.

And then we put aside a little bit of our missions funds, like$25,000 as seed monies to do these little uh little little projects.

And uh we have four or five right on the India border, and we've got some other that are uh happening in in different parts of India right now, and we have invitations all over.

Basically everywhere we work now says, Oh, would you guys bring your missions business as mission guy to do some training?

And we need that team to expand.

So I told Mike his hard his hard task in the coming months is to get the right people around him so we can multiply mics.

We need more mics.

Guys, we know that there are some of you in this room that know this world really well.

And we would love for you to give us access to your expertise as we continue to try to grow this area and learn.

It's a messy space, and there are a lot of messy questions.

I'm sure because I just said all this, you're all gonna come to me and say, Well, what about?

and we're gonna have lots of fun conversations.

But we welcome it.

We need it.

We love we love the conversations that come.

All right, the next one here, uh, I've got to keep moving here, is our communications team.

Um, we realize within missions there's so much happening that it's impossible for us to share all of the stories.

So we're trying to create avenues where we could we could let you know all the good things that God is doing, and it's still not even close to enough.

Just for an example, we took 42 people to Mexico this summer, and they were gone for eight days on this mission trip, and they come back, and every single one of them has incredible stories they want to tell.

If you sat down for each one of them individually for an hour at coffee, they would tell some of the same stories and some different stories.

But that 40 hours you might, 42 hours of sitting with them as individuals, you'd be blessed.

You'd be encouraged.

So we say, hey, if you come back and you'd like to tell a story, we'd love to get you on a podcast.

And so we've had eight to ten of them, sometimes together, sometimes individually, talk talking on a podcast, which gets us seven or eight hours.

Again, one hour apiece from a team that was there for eight days.

That's a lot.

Well, by the time you boil that down, by the time they get here, we can give them like a minute or two on the stage or in a video to kind of give us a summary of what they're saying.

So you take 42 people and they get a minute or two to tell the congregation what God did.

If we're really, really excellent, we might do a uh uh a missions night and give the whole team an hour to talk about, right?

You might get a so what we said is we've got to find ways to communicate.

If that's one example, it's one team, 42 people.

What about the other 14 teams?

What about those people who are going through a prospectives class and God is reshaping their entire heart and life?

They have so many things.

What about our domestic partners, 22 of them, that have volunteers from across our church serving at the Pregnancy Care Center or Hill Country Daily Bread or Hope for Heroes?

There's so many different places where people are engaged.

Where do we tell those stories?

And you're like, Chad, you're killing me.

I don't have no idea.

We're overwhelmed just hearing you talk about it.

Well, that podcast is one of the places, and so the communications team has been creating two magazines a year, which is a lot of work and a lot of resource.

We we have 750 of those little ones that you're handing today.

Those cost about six dollars a piece, all said and done, uh, to get them out to you.

And and we want you to have that information because we think it's important for you to know what God's doing among us.

Why would we put that kind of effort?

It takes four months, roughly, to try to get all the content developed, edited, created in such a way to a designer and eventually to the printer.

And it's a lot of work.

So use them.

These are things we've created in-house for you.

So use them.

That communications team continues to need help.

Uh, when you're talking about missions, people love the idea of going to the unreached, but not many people want to sit and edit articles uh so that people can read them and they don't even know their names, right?

Um, next thing is I want to tell you about these three new teams we're launching in 2027.

And uh and then we'll finish up uh the sermon today.

We have realized over the last few months that the prayer focus of missions is growing.

The interest in it continues to grow in our church.

We have a Thursday night, uh Thursday afternoon women's prayer group that's focusing on the unreached.

And we've had as many as 40 women sign up, and we've had 12 to 15 showing up every week praying for the unreached.

Uh, beyond that, there's many of you that serve that come down here and pray for people uh after the service or during the service.

Um, you're your prayer warriors in the church, and we have other groups that are praying at different times during the week, and and we have other folks who are specifically praying for prayer requests that people send into the church.

And so we're putting this team together to say this is gonna take, we need someone to focus on it so we can do this well.

We want to increase the church's engagement in the in the area of praying for the nations and praying for our community and praying for missions and praying for our church.

And so, if that's interesting to you, it doesn't require you having to go far, but we need people who want to be involved in this.

We're hoping to do a 24-7 prayer focus sometime in 2027 where we line up and pray around the clock with different people signing up to take on different hours.

If we could do that one day for 72 hours, three days, that would be incredible.

So we're we see the need, we see the interest, and now we're asking God to give us the right people to champion that vision within our church.

The next one I want to tell you about is this disaster relief and recovery.

Man, you guys know the last two summers have been overwhelming.

Um, the floods that have really injured our area, uh, that have perked our interests and our hearts, especially last year as so many lives were lost.

It's just become evident there's a pe there's a group of people, again, within our church that are very interested in serving and caring for those who are suffering after a disaster.

We hope that we'll put this team together and never need it again here in Bernie or Kirk County or any of the counties around us.

But if we put this together, we need those of you that have an interest in serving, mucking out homes, um, taking out flooded sheetrock.

Uh sometimes it's helping a family if there's a tornado nearby or a fire that has some sort of disaster.

Uh we're partnering with Texans on Mission.

It's this organization we work with.

They respond to these things throughout Texas and a lot of parts of the United States and even around the world.

And so if we can organize a group of people who have an interest in this, then we can get you trained before the disaster ever happens.

So when it happens, we have a phone tree ready to go, and people are activated almost immediately because they know exactly what their part is going to be.

So pray for us as we get this team together.

Kelly Williams uh has has graciously accepted leading this team, and he's already starting to meet with some of you who expressed interest in the past.

We're praying that this would be a way for our church to be responsive as God gives us unique opportunities to meet the needs in our community.

And the last one here, and one that I'm very excited about, is the multiplication team.

Uh, the multiplication team is gonna take on the gospel conversations trainings that we've been doing.

But they're gonna take it and add a layer to it.

Rather than just teaching you how to share the gospel, we want to teach you how to make disciples.

We realize that the Great Commission doesn't say go and make converts.

It says go and make disciples who know how, right?

Teaching them to obey all that I've commanded you.

So the work starts at gospel sharing and ends when the person is also sharing the gospel with others.

So, how do we make disciples who make disciples?

And so this team is working through, we're partnering with our discipleship community here at the church with Pastor Daniel and other teams to try to work through what's it gonna look like for us as a church to see every one of you equipped as a disciple maker.

That's our heart and our goal with this team.

And so, if that's interesting to you, uh Chris Campbell is leading that team.

It's gonna be a lot of fun in the coming months working through that.

We're hoping to launch all three of these new teams in January.

Okay, did you take your pictures?

You made some notes?

All right, so each team, there's nine of them, each team has one representative that sits on the missions and evangelism committee.

And so I want to just tell you that committee sits as the core responsibility that's been given to us by the church.

So the financial decisions, go to the next slide, there's one that says missions and evangelism.

Um, this this one is the one, this is the group that actually has to make the decisions, the fiscal responsibility.

We have written a large policy that tries to define what each of those teams are responsible for, how they work together.

And uh, and this team right now has these, we'll have these nine chairpersons, these nine leaders uh from these various teams.

And uh and so I want you to know, I've never seen anything like what I just described to you.

As a missions pastor for 25 years, I've never seen a structure that has so many ways for people to jump in and get involved.

And altogether it could represent as many as 80 to 90 people in our church serving on our missions community.

Could you imagine?

Again, if you think about the capacity that that gives us, it gives us so much more opportunity to serve the needs that we see around us.

The challenge is every single one of them has their own good ideas.

So now instead of having 12 people tell me what they think our next best step is, we have 80 to 90 people saying, hey, I've got this great idea, we should do this.

And uh and it becomes the single biggest challenge is listening and hearing what God's doing in the heart of these leaders and trying to honor God's voice and also try to have the tension of saying, we can't do everything, so what is God calling you to do and what is God calling us to do?

That's a big challenge, but it's a good one because again, I get all these stories all the time of what God's doing in the hearts of our people.

It's an incredible blessing.

Uh let me just tell you real quick about the finances.

Uh, when we talk about missions, Jason threw out a number a few weeks ago that we had a million dollars in missions, and some of you are like, why are we saying no to anybody?

We got a million bucks.

So let me just tell you what that million bucks looks like, real quick.

All right, first off, we approved the church business council, approves a budget that then gets put in front of you and you vote for it.

Here in a few weeks, it's gonna be in November.

You're gonna vote for the 2027 budget, and you're gonna see missions has an approved or a proposed amount.

In 2026, this was the proposed and the later approved amount, so just just under$600,000.

And uh, and if you want to see this closer, I can give you, or if it's too far out, you can see again the biggest one is our international missions, the second one is domestic missions, uh, and from there everything is is slightly less because they're they're more focused teams.

Okay, so that totals up to$598,000.

Guys, that is your approved budget, and that's the money that we try to spend every year that you give us.

We try not to save any of it.

We want to send it and give it.

We're not trying to you know put it aside so that one day if we have a rainy problem we can fix things.

We we try to give away what you give to us every year.

It's roughly 13% of our overall budget.

But in addition to that, we have what's called designated funds.

And those designated funds are the funds that you give for other things, maybe they're mission trips, or maybe it's the disaster relief type uh opportunities.

And so let's go to the next slide.

Um, we brought in some funds carried over from 2025.

Monies that we didn't spend, uh spend.

We have an$80,000 reserve that's just set aside for that rainy day fund.

We don't touch it unless we need it.

So it's been sitting there untouched for a couple years in that designated fund.

Uh beyond that, there's some reserves that our our our committees have.

Some of them have extra funds.

So if something pops up that they weren't ready for that wasn't budgeted, they have some resources from which to give funding away.

Uh beyond that, you see the mission trips.

The 14 mission trips raise roughly$168,000 this year for their trips.

This we're running out of time, but I want you to know everyone that goes on a trip is responsible to raise the funds for their trip.

If they need help, they can apply for a scholarship, and we may give them up to 50% for their trip.

And so people that are going, we're not funding their trips.

God is using them in a lot of ways, and that's where those funds go.

So, in addition to our budget, we have these designated funds.

And you put them to you put them together, and what you end up with is just over a million dollars.

That's the next slide.

And uh, and that's what God blessed us with in 2025 for us to go and send and train.

You guys were so generous to give$55,000 towards our scholarship fund uh back in April, and projected, what we're projecting based on people's interests, is that we're gonna spend all of that money to help people go on mission trips uh by the end of April of next year.

Uh what an incredible thing that God has given us such generous people.

Alright, so here's how we're gonna end.

I'm gonna jump to our ending here.

God has given us such gifts so that we can grow the body of Christ to be full and complete, not lacking in anything.

But if you go a few verses earlier, you're gonna go all the way to uh to Ephesians 3.

I have fun things to tell you we're gonna have to miss, but it's okay.

Go to Ephesians 3, and Paul gives this prayer for the Ephesian church, and this is how we're gonna end.

So if the worship team wants to come on up, um we're gonna we're gonna end with this.

So this is what he says as he's thinking about the Ephesian church, starting in verse 14, he says, For this reason I kneel before the Father.

This is Paul the Apostle talking, from whom every family in heaven and earth derives its name.

He's calling the peoples out.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

And to know this love surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Verse 20.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.

To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.

Amen.

So we are God's people, studying God's word, working in God's world, and doing God's work.

Guys, this is the work that He's called us.

So there's two things, a couple things.

If you've never asked Jesus to be your king, today is a great day to start.

There's going to be people down here as we sing in a moment.

Come down and talk to them.

We'd love to pray with you, pray for you.

If you've been thinking about getting more involved, we need teachers, we need apostles, prophets, shepherds, evangelists, and uh, and we need that a pest being worked out.

If you want to learn or grow in that capacity, we want to connect with you.

And then lastly, if you feel that God's calling you to step into this work that happens outside the walls of our church, this missions work, today's a great time to start.

After the second service, we want to invite you to come and hear what God's doing internationally in 2027.

Let's pray.

Father, we come before you grateful for your work.

And we do pray that you would be exalted among us and that your name would be made famous.

That God, all of this effort that we put together, God, would not be impressive by human standards, but God, it would be all for your kingdom.

That God, you would draw the loss to yourself through the people that called this place their church home.

We pray that you would be glorified among us in Jesus' name.

Amen.