Posts Tagged ‘great commission’

Nathan Lewis is a KPIC missionary and assistant pastor at Centrepoint Church in Edinburgh, UK.

Since last summer’s outreach to Cables Wynd (a housing project community in Edinburgh) a group of children from this neighborhood have regularly attended our church.  After months of struggling to reach them with the regular Sunday service activities, we realized our conventional church service was simply not meeting their needs.

So a small team and I have started a Sunday afternoon service specifically targeting them.   This service is designed for the rough and rambunctious and each week draws a dozen children between 9 and 14 years old.

They typically show up early and smoke a cigarette before coming inside.  Week by week we preach the Gospel and tell them of God’s great love.  It seems that every time they look at us in disbelief, often expressing it, yet week after week they come back!

Many of these kids are from abusive homes; few have whole families.  Though young, they are familiar with alcohol, sex, and violence.  Often our service borders on chaos, but this is what it takes to reach children from this background.

Over the past few months we have seen dramatic and noted changes occur in many young lives. They are starting to understand God’s love starting to ask questions, and there is opportunity to pray and have real conversations about life and God.  A 14 year old named Bret came to our leaders with many questions about God and the pain in his life including multiple suicides in his family and a recent murder.  We were able to pray with him and counsel him.  Bret is very close to having a full understanding and faith in Jesus, please keep him in your prayers.

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”  As we minister and reach out I am confident we are interacting with the very heart of God.  Please pray these children come to know Jesus and are delivered from the situations they face.

Thank you for supporting this work in Edinburgh!  Our church continues to grow, as does this new afternoon service for children.  I know God desires to do an amazing work through this humble effort.  Thank you for your prayers, they are effective and powerful in touching many lives!

Many blessings,

Nathan

This is the first of four videos posted on YouTube. To view the full version, click here.

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King’s Park is partnering on the ground with international and Haitian-based relief efforts. We believe that partnering with local, reliable sources will be our best effort to resource long-term rebuilding efforts in this country.

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Every time I leave America’s borders to visit another nation, I am always thankful of the blessings our country offers. It also affords me the opportunity to gain a broader perspective of the sea of humanity in other cultures that carry the beautiful image of God. Having ministered in thirty nations over the years, my latest trip to Uganda was a life changing one.

I am always amazed when in a third world context how the human spirit can be so effervescent, alive, joyful, and engaging in the midst of great hardship, disease, and poverty. Uganda is such a place. Coined the “Pearl of Africa” by Winston Churchill due to it’s lush green foliage surrounding beautiful Lake Victoria, Uganda is at the same time slammed with a poverty and AIDS epidemic that needs supernatural intervention. God’s community, the Church, has been granted His perspective of compassion for the nations. Jesus modeled this compassion as He looked upon the masses as “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”. He graciously fed their hungry and healed their sick.

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Coming up with the title for this column was the only challenging part of writing this. It also could have been titled, “You’ll Never Need a Passport Again to Do the Great Commission,” or “An Idiot’s Guide to World Missions: Step Outside.” Is it the creative strategy of God that has brought the nations of the world to us, or is it the mercy of God because so many of us would rather barbecue in the backyard than suffer through a degrading coach class ticket to Swaziland? Whatever it is, God has brought the world to us and “expanding our tent pegs” has never been easier.

The demographics shaping our cities today are ever changing. Census data released in the middle of 2008 shows that within one generation from now, America’s traditional white majority will comprise less than 50% of the total US population. This shift may make some uncomfortable, but for those of us who carry the nations in our hearts, it is our golden opportunity. We can fire up the grill in our backyard and do world missions at the same time. I have one word for this, “Hallelujah!”

Consider the Hispanic influx. US Census data predict that this population is going to more than double in the next 30 years. I believe that every evangelical church in America should have a plan to reach this demographic for Jesus. At KPIC in Durham, NC, we responded by partnering with one of my good friends who is a great Hispanic pastor from another State. Now every Sunday night, Hispanic and Hispanic-American people are being changed. It’s now a full-blown church plant called Celebracion Hispana. It doesn’t even resemble our church name, but honestly, who cares? People are joining us and most importantly names are being written in the Book of Life. Names like Jose, Carlos, Juanita and other beautiful names that come from the South (yes, further SOUTH than Alabama).

The US college and university systems are a huge attraction to the nations. Increasingly, the world’s parents are making major sacrifices to send their young men and women to America to get a better start. I happened to cross paths with one such student from Taiwan. At first he liked our people a lot more than our God. Eventually he came to a real faith in Jesus. While taking a scouting trip to China together in the late 90s, we “accidentally” led several Chinese to Christ. Right in our hotel room we held meetings and then did baptisms in the bathtub. Disciples were being made and a need for leadership arose. Eventually this man and his wife left behind their prestigious professorships in Taiwan to start churches in many cities of China. With the thousands of Chinese who have since been reached, it stuns me to think how effective this couple has become in Asia. Yet all I did was show him love and answer his questions about the Bible when he was a student in the US.

Finally, more and more the Western Church is being called to engage in global social justice issues. I sometimes feel embarrassed that Bono, and even Madonna, are more up on these issues that we seem to be. AIDS, orphans, and child trafficking are major global crises that can be addressed by even the smallest church with limited resources.

For me it began a few years ago as I received an impression to help the well-known African Children’s Choir find a base home in North Carolina. After a year of rallying our church and city, we now have six acres and two large homes where 25 orphans and multiple chaperones live and take refuge from a busy touring schedule. These children have touched our city and continue to remind us of the plight of millions who have lost their parents to HIV and disease.

The days of associating world missions as a two-month voyage on a ship crossing the Atlantic are long gone. Today’s church is able to impact the world right from where we are. So fire up the grill… the world is waiting.