A Winning Vision

By / Jul 11

Editor’s note: This summer, we’re sharing articles aimed at encouraging pastors, ministry leaders, and church members in living and serving in light of Christ’s coming Kingdom. To hear more on this topic from Dean Inserra and other key leaders, register to join us for the 2025 For the Church National Conference, “Kingdom Come: Ministry in Light of Glory.”

The following article was originally published at FTC.co on June 21, 2017.

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Reflections on 10 Years of Church Planting

“I’m just not very good at this whole ‘vision’ thing,” a discouraged pastor shared with me over lunch at Chick-fil-A. He asked, “How do I even cast vision?”

As a church planter getting ready to celebrate my church’s 10-year anniversary, I must have been associated with “vision casting” in this pastor’s mind. But, as I took a breath and prepared to impart all of my apparent wisdom, I froze. What is our vision? I thought immediately. Do we even have one?

I fumbled over my words as my mind went back to a weekend “boot camp” for aspiring church planters. Those of us in attendance spent the majority of our time there talking about vision. We had to craft a vision for our future churches that would correspond with our “mission statement,” by writing clever and catchy sentiments with purple markers on the large tear-off sheets hanging on the wall. I’d had a hard time coming up with something then, and here now at Chick-fil-A, sitting across from a pastor who sought me out to discuss this very topic, I had nothing.

People in our city speak of the “vision” of our church often, and I claim to be the unofficial guardian of that vision as the lead pastor. Yet there I was, unable to cast vision about casting vision. I couldn’t even articulate the vision of our church when asked directly.

So I circled back to the reason I knew I wanted to start a church in the first place.

When I was a twenty-something trying to become an actual church planter, all I knew was that I had a passion for a place and for people. I wasn’t sure how one went about starting a church, but I knew my hometown of Tallahassee needed more gospel-preaching churches, and I wanted to reach my friends for Christ. I wasn’t sure if that counted as a vision, and I had no idea how to make that into a catchy statement. But I had a mission; I knew that for sure.

I remember holding that purple marker in my hand with the “Church Planting Catalyst” looking over my shoulder as he asked, “So, what’s your vision?” and “Do you have a mission statement?” I glanced at the words being written by the guys on my right and left and started to wonder if I was cut out for this. These guys had each written statements that I would need a hired creative wordsmith to craft. I was just standing there with a purple marker, trying to come up with something that would sound okay and not be lame.

. . .

Coming back to the table at Chick-fil-A, I finally formed my thoughts and knew how to encourage this pastor. “What is the Bible’s job description for us as the Church?” I asked. He immediately answered as I’d hoped, and pointed to the Great Commission. In that moment, I began to realize that I actually was cut out to coach someone on vision, and that every Christian is equally qualified to do the same thing. We remind and point people back to the vision Jesus gave His Church. “Don’t worry about vision,” I said. “Your church doesn’t need to be preoccupied with vision; it needs to be serious about the Bible.”

Years ago, with that purple marker in my hand, I wound up with the least cool statement on the big white sheet of paper: “I want to reach Tallahassee and all my friends for Jesus through the local church, and I hope anyone who will ever call our church their home will want to do the same.” The instructor thought I was being sarcastic with such a non-vision-statement-esque vision statement, but I looked at him and simply said, “This is what I’m trying to do, man.” Since then, we’ve summarized this mission as being “for the gospel, for the city.” But the goal hasn’t changed.

The visions of all local churches should sound pretty similar if we are going to be faithful to the mission mandate given to us by our Lord. I am all for creative expressions, ideas, approaches, and manifestations of the mission, but that should spring from a gospel-centrality in our congregations (led by the pastor) more than a super hip marketing campaign (led by a creative team). Branding is great, but the vision should be simple. And the vision-caster is Jesus Himself speaking to us through Scripture.

In my opinion, the aspects of application to get hung up on are ones of strategy, not vision. The vision is laid out already, but how you’re going to carry it out is the conversation you should be having. Every biblical local church has the same message, but working out the calling to make disciples in your specific environment might include:

  • Regular reminders of who you are as a church and also who you are not.
  • Saying no to certain things so the church can be available to live out the Great Commission in your community and beyond.
  • Identifying how you can utilize your assets, human resources, exposure, platforms, etc. to reach your given audience, city, and congregation.
  • Equipping your church members to carry out the Great Commission in their personal lives, not only relying on the church as an entity to reach the city.

 

Pastor, you can rest knowing that the creative vision for your church is laid out. Our job is to lead churches, by the Lord’s help, who are faithful to what Jesus has called us to do for His glory, Kingdom, and Church.

“So, I can be a vision guy simply by keeping the church focused on the Great Commission,” the pastor said back to me at Chick-fil-A. The light bulb went off for my pastor friend. He already had all he needed for vision since Jesus provided it in Scripture. My friend merely needed the courage and resolve to keep his church focused on reaching people and making disciples.



Episode 323: Movie Swap!

By / Jul 9

Our debate over the quality of Christian movies is now notorious and a running gag on the podcast, but this is only the second time ever we’ve done an official “movie swap.” Ross assigns Jared a Christian movie to watch. Jared assigns Ross a “Christian-“eque movie to watch. Then they sit and down and compare notes. On this week’s episode of the podcast, the guys discuss 2006’s “Facing the Giants” and 1998’s “Simon Birch.”



What resources do you recommend for college students? – Dan Darling

By / Jul 8

Ftc.co asks Dan Darling ‘What resources do you recommend for college students?’.



Episode 322: Patriotism

By / Jul 2

An American and a Scotsman walk into a podcast studio . . . It’s not just the start of an obscure joke; it’s the start of this conversation about patriotism. Is it a sin? Is it biblical? How should Christians think through national patriotism in a way that still maintains their allegiance to God above all?



What resources would you recommend? – Will Standridge

By / Jul 1

Ftc.co asks Will Standridge ‘What resources would you recommend?’.



Recovering the Exclusivity of the Gospel

By / Jun 27

Editor’s note: This summer, we’re sharing articles aimed at encouraging pastors, ministry leaders, and church members in living and serving in light of Christ’s coming Kingdom. To hear more on this topic from Jason K. Allen and other key leaders, register to join us for the 2025 For the Church National Conference, “Kingdom Come: Ministry in Light of Glory.”

The following article was originally published at JasonKAllen.com and was republished at FTC.co on April 28, 2022.

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Known as the silent killer, each year colon cancer claims close to 50,000 American lives.[1] Though treatable if detected early, colon cancer is known as the silent killer because, if not screened for, it will grow unnoticed, undetected. By the time it is discovered symptomatically, it is often too late to be cured.

Like colon cancer, I’m convinced there is another slow, silent, growing malignancy within the church. The malignancy is particularly catastrophic, bringing with it ruinous consequences.

It hollows out the gospel message, undercuts the Great Commission, and undermines the entire logic of collaborative missions and ministry. The malignancy to which I am referring is the slow, subtle rejection of the exclusivity of the gospel.

By the Numbers

Recent research conducted jointly by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research makes clear this challenge. For example, 45% of Americans think that “there are many ways to get to heaven” and 71% agree that “an individual must contribute his/her own effort for personal salvation.”[2]

Defining Exclusivity

Historic Christianity, throughout its creedal formulations, has affirmed the exclusivity of the gospel. In fact, this was Jesus’s self-assessment when he unequivocally asserted, “’I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes to the father but through me.’”[3]

By exclusivity of the gospel, we mean that only those who personally, consciously, explicitly, and singularly confess Jesus Christ as Lord can possess eternal life. Let’s consider these qualifiers more closely.

Personally: Salvation comes to us individually, when one follows Christ. No one gains eternal life because of someone else’s faith, or by his or her affiliation with a family, church, or ethnic or national group. Each sinner must come to repent of his or her sins and believe the gospel personally.

Consciously: To inherit the Kingdom one must do more than reflect the ethic of Christ; one must consciously embrace him, knowingly and intentionally following Jesus. There are no anonymous Christians, regardless of Karl Rahner’s assertion otherwise. Authentic believers know whom they are following.

Explicitly: One’s faith must be placed in God’s Son, Jesus Christ, not just generically in God. As Peter declared in Acts 4:12, “’There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.’”

Singularly: Faith in Jesus alone saves, and saving faith must be placed in him alone. The singularity of Christ as one’s faith object is especially important on the mission field, where missionaries encounter religions, such as Hinduism, where they are happy to add Jesus to their pantheon of gods. We do not add Jesus to our portfolio of faith objects. Christianity is not a both-and proposition; it is either-or.

Of course, when converted, one is not necessarily thinking through these categories, like boxes to check. Rather, the point is that one cannot reject or negate these gospel distinctives.

Challenges to Exclusivity

Why is the exclusivity of the gospel losing popularity? There seems to be a number of reasons. First, globalization has brought the nations near to us. This nearness should have increased our burden for the lost, but it seems to have done the opposite.

Second, the forward march of postmodernity continues to undermine absolute truth claims, especially one so audacious as the exclusivity of the gospel—that of the 7,000,000,000 inhabitants of Earth, only those that hear and believe the message of Christ can be saved.

Third, political correctness limits our willingness to offend, and asserting the full gospel message is the most offensive of truth claims. Political correctness finds the notion of a literal hell as insufferably backwards, and has re-envisioned it as a mythological—or nearly unoccupied—place.

Alternatives to Exclusivity

While universalism is often contrasted with exclusivity, it is actually not commonly accepted. There is just something disconcerting, even to thoroughgoing secularists, about the possibility of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden spending eternity with Billy Graham. Even our most naturalistic instincts desire some sort of eternal reckoning.

More common alternatives are pluralism and inclusivism. Pluralism argues there are many ways to God, and one should earnestly follow the religious path revealed to you. Inclusivism maintains that Christ is the only Savior, but his provision can be accessed through other religions.

Ron Nash, in his Is Jesus the Only Savior?, helpfully summarizes pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivity in two questions: Is Jesus the only savior? Must people believe in Jesus Christ to saved? Pluralism answers both questions “no”; inclusivism answers the first “yes” and the second “no.” Historic Christianity answers both “yes.”[4]

For the many who attend evangelical churches yet deny the exclusivity of the gospel, pluralism or inclusivism—though they may not know these terms—is probably their ideological home. While they may not intend to reject historic Christianity, operationally, many of our church members—and our churches—are there.

Conclusion

To be a preacher is to be a decision maker. Each week preachers determine what to include in a sermon and what to leave out. Time simply does not allow one to say everything that could be said about every passage. Preachers intuitively triage their text, their sermon, and their congregation, asking themselves, “What can I assume they know and affirm, and what must I assert and advocate?”

Perhaps this triage has led too many pastors to assume their church members understand and embrace the exclusivity of the gospel. We can no longer assume this. We must assert and advocate the exclusivity of the gospel.

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[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/colonandrectumcancer/detailedguide/colorectal-cancer-key-statistics.

[2] Ligonier Ministries, in partnership with LifeWay Research, “The State of Theology: Theological Awareness Benchmark Study,” 4. Available online at https://gpts.edu/resources/documents/TheStateOfTheology-Whitepaper.pdf.

[3] John 14:6.

[4] See Ron Nash, Is Jesus the Only Savior? (Zondervan, 1994).



Episode 321: FTC Mailbag

By / Jun 25

It’s another installment in the FTC Mailbag feature, where Jared and Ross answer listener-submitted questions. This week’s topics include pastors keeping in contact with previous churches, preaching “balance,” whether churches should lock their doors during services, the purpose of the trees in the garden of Eden, and suprisingly influential books.



What recommendations would you have for implementing a discipleship strategy? – Ashlyn Portero

By / Jun 24

Ftc.co asks Ashlyn Portero ‘What recommendations would you have for implementing a discipleship strategy?’.



What the Early Church Knew About Prayer

By / Jun 20

Editor’s note: The following article was adapted by the author from his book Pour Out Your Heart: Discovering Joy, Strength, and Intimacy with God through Prayer (pp. 161–65, 171–73). Pour Out Your Heart is available now from B&H Publishing and wherever books are sold.

I know God doesn’t make mistakes, but I sometimes wonder if I was supposed to live in the first century, because I love everything about the early church. Apart from the lack of air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and antibiotics, living in those times would have been amazing. Jesus had just spent forty days with the disciples after his resurrection. He went up, and the Spirit came down. Thousands were added to the disciples’ number. They worshiped daily, prayed continually, and shared meals together. They cared for widows and orphans, cast out demons, and healed the sick. Even when they were persecuted, they spread out among the nations and planted churches like it was nothing.

But what was it really like? Was it all that great, or were there significant hardships? What was a typical church gathering like? How did they do church in these wild early years?

In the first thirty years after Jesus’s ascension—the period of the book of Acts—the early church was everything. It was great, and it was awful; it was evangelistic, and it was legalistic; it was hungry, and it was lukewarm. The only thing it wasn’t is nothing. Its influence swept the globe in a way no social or religious movement ever has or ever again will.

Early Christianity scholar Michael Green wrote a book with the perfect title, Thirty Years that Changed the World. Green puts this season in history like this:

Three crucial decades in world history. That is all it took. In the years between AD 33 and 64, a new movement was born. In those thirty years it got sufficient growth and credibility to become the largest religion the world has ever seen and to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It has spread into every corner of the globe and has more than two billion adherents. It has had an indelible impact on civilization, on culture, on education, on medicine, on freedom and of course on the lives of countless people worldwide. And the seedbed for all this, the time when it took decisive root, was in these three decades. It all began with a dozen men and a handful of women: and then the Spirit came. (7–8)

Incredible, right? Green goes on to say, “We can and should ask ourselves, ‘If those people then acted in the way they did, what are the implications for disciples today, given all the differences brought about by culture, space and time?’” (8)

Among all the unique features of life in the early church, one thing stands out—prayer. If we compare the lifestyle and activities of the early church to our contemporary churches, the single most stark difference will be in our prayer lives. Green writes, “Prayer, not activism, is what they relied on” (268).

Learning Prayer from the Early Church

In Acts, prayer is the central power and activity of the church. In chapter 1, we see the believers praying before the coming of the Spirit. In chapter two, they’re gathered together again, almost certainly in prayer, when the Spirit falls. At the end of that wild, historic day, the thousands of new converts are joined to the apostles and early believers together in prayer (2:42). As chapter three opens, we find the believers going up to the temple to pray. This pattern goes on throughout the book. As Green summarizes, the early church had “life-changing power. And it only happened because these men and women put prayer at the top of their priorities” (271).

If prayer was a defining mark of the early church—with beautiful and world-changing results—why has it fallen so down the priority list for the church of contemporary America?

I believe the answer lies in our general fear that prayer doesn’t do much at all. We subconsciously believe we can do more by our intellect, strategies, and efforts than God can do in response to our prayers. How did we get here? There are multiple answers, but I believe one key reason is our diminished emphasis and dependence on the Holy Spirit.

In Pour Out Your Heart, I suggest that prayer helps us hold together two beautiful things in tension—gospel and presence. Embracing the gospel without living for the presence of God can lead us into mere head knowledge and sacrificial living. We can believe in the message of the gospel and have impeccable theology and yet barely experience the beauty of Christ. Yet, in the same way, living for the presence of God without remaining centered on the gospel can lead us into error as well. We might become focused on spiritual experience, not on knowing God in Christ. Without a heart full of the gospel, our spiritual life can become focused on personal discipline, moral improvement, and self-fulfillment.

As one of my friends put it: If you have only the gospel, you have the key to the whole house, but you might never go inside. If you have only the presence, you might have the whole house, but no key to get in.

Reading Acts and the New Testament letters, it seems the early church didn’t have this problem. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians: “For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction” (1 Thess. 1:4–5). Word and power. Truth and Spirit. Gospel and presence.

What, then, would it mean for us to be more mindful of God’s presence in our prayer lives? What would a more Spirit-filled prayer life look like?

Prayer and the Spirit of God

A life of walking by the Spirit is a life of prayer, and a life of prayer is a life of walking by the Spirit. Prayer is a refusal to do life in our own strength and ingenuity. It’s a plea for help from above (and within). Prayer demonstrates a heart that is hungry for God’s presence and intervention in our world. In the same way, walking by the Spirit is a lifestyle of depending on God, not self, for life and breath. The two things are nearly synonymous.

To the Galatians, Paul wrote:

Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh… If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law… But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:16, 18, 22–23).

Paul compels us to become like Christ, developing the same character of Jesus and demonstrating his characteristics. The way we become like Christ is by walking in the Spirit, living by the Spirit, and keeping in step with the Spirit. These three phrases suggest a practical, ongoing, moment-by-moment relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is only through this perpetual dependence on the Spirit that we can uproot the power of sin in our lives and demonstrate Christlikeness.

Dependence is a key word there. As we’ve seen, our human tendency is to rely on ourselves, defend ourselves, and promote ourselves. The Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer famously wrote:

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism, nor, I would add, postmodernism, consumerism, and other more contemporary isms. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.[1]

This happens both individually and together in the church. Our lives, apart from walking by the Spirit, become an anxious experiment in self-reliance. We become devoted to building and protecting our own little kingdoms. We don’t intend this, but when our old self (what Paul calls the flesh) is more active than our new self (who we are in Christ), we live no different from our non-Christian neighbors.

Our churches and ministries can operate the same way. We drift back into our old self-reliant selves collectively, and we end up busy, distracted, and focused on building a spiritual empire (however big or small) that is not the kingdom of Christ. We ought to honestly ask: If the Holy Spirit suddenly left our ministries, how long would it take us to notice? If our prayers suddenly were ineffective, would our ministries come to a grinding halt? Or would they continue undiminished—because it wasn’t dependent on the Spirit and prayer to begin with?

In Galatians, the old apostle knows this self-assured, fleshy habit within us and wants to sever it. He wants us to replace it with Spirit dependence.

What would such a walking by the Spirit look like? The most practical, moment-by-moment way to keep in step with the Spirit is through an ongoing conversation with the Father.

Through God’s Son, by the power of God’s Spirit who indwells us, we can continually praise our Father God, humble ourselves before him, seek to do his will, and ask for all that we need and want. Prayer is the heart of walking by the Spirit.

Let us follow the pattern of the early church and surrender ourselves daily, in prayer and obedience. Through the power of the Spirit, let’s enjoy the life of prayer and intimacy with God that Jesus died to welcome us into!

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[1] Francis Schaeffer, The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way (Crossway, 2022), 36.



Episode 320: Favorite Biographies

By / Jun 18

From two guys who don’t read a lot of biographies comes a list of favorite biographies. On this week’s ep of the For The Church Podcast, Jared Wilson and Ross Ferguson discuss the Christian biographies that have impacted them the most.