A Southern Baptist task force has begun the process of hammering out what it hopes will be a workable strategy to spark a Great Commission Resurgence in the denomination. That plan will be placed before messengers attending the 2010 SBC meeting in Orlando.
Don KirklandBy that time, South Carolina Baptists will have completed the first of its “God’s Plan for Sharing” emphasis, which also aims at carrying out the mandate of Matthew 28:19-20.
The idea then is to renew the GPS campaign each year until 2020, with a goal of every believer sharing and every person hearing the good news of Jesus Christ.
On page 2 of this edition of the Courier, the director of the evangelization and missions team of the South Carolina Baptist Convention calls upon church members to take the first preparatory step in fulfilling the purposes of GPS — prayerwalking.
“It is useless,” writes Marshall Fagg, “to sow the seeds of the gospel until we have prayed.”
The accent on prayerwalking will continue through October and November in the hope — and the expectation — that every one of the convention’s 2,100 churches will pray for the estimated 3.2 million South Carolinians who are either non-Christians or unchurched.
The primary step in GPS — prayerwalking — will be followed by equipping Christians to engage the lost in their spheres of influence during January and February, to connect with the lost and unchurched with the intent of sharing the gospel and personal testimonies in March, to celebrate on Easter Sunday in April as new believers profess faith in Jesus and are baptized, and finally, to disciple the new believers during April and May, equipping them to go out and make other disciples.
“And like all processes,” the evangelism director says, “it can, and should, be repeated again and again.”
But we must not get ahead of ourselves. Step one is prayerwalking during October and November. My wife Linda and I prayerwalked for the first time in Taiwan during our convention’s partnership with that island nation. As a spiritual exercise, it is effective and non-confrontational. It relies solely on the moving of God’s Spirit among the communities and within the homes of people we should love, even though we may not know them.
In his page 2 piece, Fagg encourages churches to help in “preparing hearts to receive the life-changing message of the gospel.”
In the book of Acts, a reluctant witness named Ananias is summoned by God to visit and anoint Saul of Tarsus, whose opposition to people of The Way is abruptly over. God speaks to the fear of Ananias by saying,”He is praying to me right now, for I have shown him a vision of a man named Ananias coming in and laying his hands on him so that he can see again.”
God prepared the heart of Saul for a radical life change — and a new name to go with that new life. He still is preparing hearts to accept the salvation he offers through Jesus Christ. Let our prayerwalks take us wherever they will; God has already been there. He is there now, waiting for you and me to show up.