My Church is moving into the city of Dallas!
Prestonwood Baptist Church announced this week that it plans to purchase an existing church campus inside the city of Dallas and open it as a third church campus this fall. Am I excited? YES!!! And here’s why planting a new campus is good for us…
“There are two reasons to plant a new campus: Reaching Unreached People for Christ and Mobilizing Existing Church Members in Ministry” ~ Jack Graham, Pastor
Our campus in Plano is filling up, opening a new campus in Dallas will free up seats in that location as well—challenging all our members to get out into their communities and reach people who need to come to church. It’s a good challenge when 2,000 of your members live closer to the new campus than the current one—hopefully that means we’ll have a lot of people inviting coworkers and neighbors that otherwise wouldn’t make the long drive.
Closer means more people in ministry too. Stacy and I love our church, but we have a hard time making the drive to Plano during the week to serve. We serve instead at ministries at school and here in our local area. We’re excited about having a campus close enough to minister at more often, and a lot of open needs that our members can help fill. We’re never closer to God than when we get the opportunity to serve others!
Aren’t there enough churches in Dallas? “How many ants does it take to eat an elephant?” Keep in mind that Prestonwood does not want anyone to join us from other churches…our goal is to fill our seats with unchurched people…and there are too many unchurched people in any area of Dallas for one church to reach. We are working with the other churches to reach people—we believe that more churches means synergy in their efforts, and a more fruitful harvest for all.
Reaching the lost means reaching the nations AND reaching our neighbors. A Dallas campus gives us an opportunity to fund more than our own comforts. We get to focus our expenses on greater evangelism locally.
Next stop, an area of greater need: South Dallas. Keep us in your prayers.
Our Movement seems good to the Holy Spirit and also to us. We have had a heart to do more in the city of Dallas for a while. Many members have had this in their prayers for a long time. Hundreds drove past the building to look and pray. We’re leaping at the opportunity. Why? God has placed it on our hearts. The desire to minister is definitely the predominant motivation here. We are not primarily motivated by a desire to expand, look bigger, or get more tithers—although these things are certainly attractive and exciting to some of us.
Our opportunity to buy this building is a win-win situation that the Holy Spirit seems to have driven to us. The church that owns it currently is not fading away—the building has become a financial burden to them, and they want to move somewhere else. We didn’t find the building, and we didn’t offer them pennies on the dollar for it. We are sending them away with the money they need to start afresh, and we are getting a facility that fits our needs for a third campus.
The church’s location will be off Hillcrest Rd, just south of the LBJ/635 Loop in North Dallas.
Pastor Graham’s announcement is here if you would like to watch.
A Life-Changing, Paradigm-Shifting Book
It is not often that I read a book that radically changes my perception of my future career, my concept of what a church is, and my perception of the education I am receiving now. But I find myself a changed man—and I find myself in possession of a book that I MUST READ AGAIN in order to understand its implications for my life.
The book is called Church Planting Movements by David Garrison.
David is a long-term missionary who has coordinated the efforts of fellow missionaries through the largest mission board in the U.S. – the International Mission Board.
He writes this book to share the information they have collected about the churches that are multiplying and reaching entire people groups with the gospel. This is NOT a book about planting a church: it is a book about planting churches that plant other churches, that plant other churches, and plant other churches…until they reach everyone in their culture…and that’s REALLY EXCITING to me. If I help plant a church in the future, I certainly want it to reach more and more and more people until it can say that everyone in its culture has heard the gospel.
Beyond that premise, this book has taught me a lot about the proper and improper way to do church. Theologians, missionaries and missions agencies are often the greatest hindrance to churches that multiply—and even if I don’t work to plant a church, I certainly don’t want to hinder the evangelistic growth of one with my work as part of it. Importantly in this respect, it reminds me that the leaders of the church are typically the people who are willing to accept the largest commitment to discipleship, not the seminary students I am in class with. They are not any more prepared to lead than small group leaders when they begin—they are simply willing to grow through mentorship with an existing pastor and grow into leadership.
It has also taught me that the New Testament style church still exists today: casting out demons, healing people, seeing visions, meeting in homes, sharing all their possessions together, etc.
If you want to know what missions is really all about, please, please read this book. Nothing could better shape your perception of what needs to be done across the world today.
Buy it at the IMB website here.
You might know Biblical Hebrew and Greek if…
If you had grown up in the Puritan colony of Boston during the days it was a British colony, you would have entered Grammar school between age six and eight, already having learned to read and write English. Grammar school would have added three languages to your skillset in seven years: Latin, Biblical Hebrew, and Biblical (Koine) Greek.
By the time you went to ‘college’ at FOURTEEN or SIXTEEN, you would be proficient in these languages…why? Because those were the languages that the important books were written in! You needed to be able to interact with the scholars of the past and present, much like I would have to learn German and French to pursue a Ph.D. today.
More importantly, you were taught skills to teach yourself, rather than loaded with information to forget later. The same education prepared you to apprentice as a doctor, pastor, or lawyer. If you could think, then you would succeed.
This is not the philosophy of education I feel that I grew up under, how about you?
Lessons from the History of Worship
Recently I completed a book on the history of worship in the church, and I found it to provide a lot of powerful insights for my life and ministry in the future. I wanted to share those major points with you here. I hope you enjoy and provide your reaction to these short comments…
Church, in the form that I know it, is the product of innovation by Methodist and Baptist leaders intended to reach unsaved people living life on the American frontier (hence the name, Frontier tradition). Choirs, hymns, special music, emotionally-compelling sermons, conference-style meetings, unscripted prayers, small groups, and altar calls are largely the product of evangelistic efforts.
The problem of the Frontier churches innovation of worship was the loss of the church's strong emphasis on the social programs of the church: caring for the sick, reaching out to the hurting, protecting the innocent. In American society, we expect the government to do these things...but historically, the church was unique because it did these things--hence the reason why most hospitals in the U.S. are religious institutions. Without this element of the church, our emphasis on the gospel - an offensive message - has caused us to be characterized as brainwashing our members.
Liturgy plays a HUGE role in the church that I am historically connected to--its the foundation of worship for over 1,000 years...compared to the 200+ years of American traditions. As a leader for the church, I need to understand and experience this element of the church. I should familiarize myself with the Common Book of Prayer.
Worship teaches theology better than sermons. Worship repeats concepts in memorable ways. Most people cannot remember the subject of a sermon after a few weeks, but they can remember the songs they sang! Because of this, our worship needs to teach accurate theology, and it needs to include elements that ground us in the essential elements of our faith.
In our century, the Catholic church and Protestant denominations are drawing near to one another in their worship, paving the way for greater unity between believers than we've seen since the Protestant Reformation. Unfortunately, this unity is thwarted by a generation of Protestants who don't want to be connected to any other church or group of churches (denomination), who don't see any value in coordinating their efforts outside their local church.
Revisiting the Matrix: What were they REALLY talking about?
As an avid movie-watcher, sometimes I find movies coming back with new significance. Earlier this week, I heard someone quote a line from that Matrix that got me thinking. After further analysis, I found quite a few interesting parallels in the movie, but none so striking as this short scene where Morpheus discusses the deception of 'the system'. Sounds to me as if he's speaking the language of Christians. Read it for yourself, and see what you think. Then, if you get a chance to watch this old movie again, look for the use of Biblically-significant terminology like 'Zion'.
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
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