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Pastor's Points May 2016

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Dear Church Family,

Recently I have been reading a little book called, Understanding the Great Commission and in this little book it list four practices of a Great Commission church.  Of course, we know that this is a reference to Matthew 28:18-20 where Jesus gave his final command to his followers before ascending to heaven.  Here are the four practices of a great
commission church as enumerated in Mark Devers book.

  1. Cultivate a Culture of Discipleship among its own members.
  2. Cultivate a Culture of Evangelism.
  3. Work to reach the unreached through missions.
  4. Look for internationals in your own city.

 

  • I found this take on the Great Commission interesting because of where God has us right now as a church family. As I shared with you last month we are in the process of evaluating how we as a church encourage our members to “grow”.  And to cultivate a culture of discipleship in our church we need to help every member own the responsibility for helping other believers grow in the faith.  Pastors are to equip the saints for the work of the ministry (Eph. 4:11-12), which means the work of the ministry belongs to all the saints. 

  • Second, we need to make sure that we are encouraging a culture of evangelism as well. You need to be confident that when you invite your non-Christian friends to one of our worship services that they are going to hear the gospel clearly proclaimed.  But also we need to make sure that we are training our church family in evangelism so that you will be prepared and confident to share your faith when the opportunity comes your way.  And finally, the church can also provide resources that you can use to give to your non-believing friends to help encourage conversations about who Jesus is.

  • Third, we need to continue to reach out to unreached people through our mission’s effort. We do this through giving monetarily to our mission offerings.  We need to continue to encourage this giving, but we also need to continue to encourage our church family to go on mission as well.  We have many opportunities to go on mission through our church mission trips in the U.S., but also with our ministry partner Culture Waves Global to reach the unreached
     peoples of the world.

  • Finally, we can participate in looking for internationals in our own city as we work together to support our new Spanish church plant that is starting in June. We are looking to effectively reach out to those who may not speak
    English with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  You can participate by praying for our church planter and his wife Alfonso and Wendy Soto.  Also, if you speak Spanish we would love to talk to you about helping us as we look to communicate through all of the details of the start-up of the Spanish speaking church plant.

 

I am so thankful to be a part of a church that loves the Great Commission!!!  I cannot wait to see what God has in store right around the corner!!


I love you and I love being your pastor,

 Pastor Alan

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April 2016 Pastor's Points

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Dear Church Family,

Wow!!  What a great Easter weekend we had this past month!  The Easter
Eggstravaganza was a great event.  Thank you to all the volunteers who made it happen.  Also, a big thanks to April Sharp our Children’s Ministry Director for giving great leadership!  Kids and parents alike had a great time and I know personally that I was able to have some great interaction with people that are not normally a part of our church!  We followed that event up with our three Easter services the next day.  All of our services were led by our new worship pastor Jared Mitchell, and he did an outstanding job leading us!  We had right at 800 in our worship services and had one person join the church and two people pray to receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord!  We need to thank God because He is the one that brought the people to worship and moved on the hearts of those that made decisions.  He is a good, good, Father and He truly blessed us this year at Easter.

Also, I am looking forward into the future as our good father is going to continue to move among us and bless us with His direction.  I have been seeking hard to know His will for our church family for the next months and years and I feel Him giving me leading in this area.  In May I will have been the lead pastor of Oakhill for ten years.  That just does not seem possible.  We have seen God do many things in those ten years.  We have seen many salvations, people have grown in their faith, we have built buildings together, expanded our worship services and ministries, and seen our budget grow.  Our lives truly have changed as we have worshiped, grown, served and given together!  I am so thankful for all that God has done for us and in us.  And I am very excited to consider what He is going to do in the next ten years of our ministry together.

I shared back in November of 2015 in two separate messages that I know part of what God is leading us to do is to invest like never before in the “Grow” portion of our “Life Change Cycle”.  Our worship has expanded, our service in the ministry is strong, and our people are giving faithfully.  Now we need to invest in our disciple making here at Oakhill.  And we are going to come to understand that the only way to grow as a disciple is to be “counseled” by God’s Word.  So we are going to intentionally set in place a discipleship emphasis that will include a biblical counseling ministry that will help us come to understand that biblical counseling is simply a part of the discipleship process.  Please pray for your ministerial staff as we continue to ask God to show us the details of this emphasis. You will be hearing more about this in the months to come.  I cannot wait to see what God is going to do!!!

I love you and I love being your pastor,
Pastor Alan

 

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