About a decade ago, God gave The Summit Church the audacious vision of planting 1,000 churches by the year 2050. At the time, we had two missionary families in the field. So we weren’t exactly starting from scratch…but we were pretty close.
We often quoted Ephesians 3:20–21 in the early days of the Summit: “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!” The notion that we might plant three times as many churches as we had attendees definitely stood in the “immeasurably more than we could imagine” category.
When I think of what God has done in the past ten years, I’m blown away by his faithfulness. I recently reflected on how encouraging it is to hear updates from our North American church plants, who will, God willing, soon have more members and attendees than the Summit does! But the more astounding growth is happening overseas. Our international church staff just sent me some current numbers (and a swanky map!), and we now have 92 international church plants.
Germany – 1 Macedonia – 1 Serbia – 1 Ukraine – 1 Mexico – 11 Brazil – 1 North Africa – 4 South Africa – 7 Kenya – 1 South Asia – 59 Central Asia – 4 Taiwan – 1
When I look at a map like that, two things jump out at me. First, I notice places like East Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, where we have very little work going on. And it moves me to pray that many of the people currently sitting in our services every weekend would sense God’s call to take the gospel where Christ has never been named. It’s not for everyone, but it is for many of us.
But second, I notice that big number there in South Asia. Fifty-nine! How did that happen?
That number represents a pattern of exponential growth. It’s kingdom multiplication, not just addition. Multiplication doesn’t happen unless we empower people and send them out, which is precisely what our teams there are doing. They’ve trained and sent out hundreds of national Christians in biblical studies programs. What I love about those programs is that in order to graduate, they not only need to pass the exam, but three of their disciples must pass it as well. Unsurprisingly, the graduates there are planting churches that plant churches…that plant churches. It’s actually beginning to get unwieldy, since we’ve seen national church planters reproduce themselves up to the fourth generation. That’s right: we have great-great-grandchildren! One of our missionaries there says that it is like seeing the book of Acts happen all over again.
Summit, this is cause for celebration. But it’s also a reminder for us to keep praying God-sized prayers. When we had two families overseas, the idea of adding another 998 seemed crazy. It would only happen if God got involved. Now that we have almost 100 international churches, what does God want us to ask for and to audaciously believe for his sake? Let’s ask it, believe it, and risk it all for the God who continues to do more than we could ever ask or imagine.
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Much of the vision here coincides with a book I recently released, called Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send, in which I talk about how to engineer your church around sending capacity, not seating capacity. If you are interested, order it here!
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