Hello, church. As we go into 2025, I really want to make sure that our church never lets the Great Commission slip. If we fail in seeing people saved, baptized, and discipled, then it is like, what are we even doing here? We are called to reach people with the gospel. I heard of one church, and I liked it. They do not have sports programs, because they said, “We want our families to be out in the community, and sports with other kids is our church’s possibility. It is our church’s opportunity to go shine the light of the gospel out there in the community that needs it most.” They said, “We do not have a Christian school, because we are called to be a church, not a school. And we are called to be missionaries in our communities. And we want to train our church to shine as lights in our communities.” Now, you might have different philosophies about all of that, but you cannot deny that as a church, we are called to preach the gospel. And I am for all of us doing that in any way that we can, however we can, through sports, through school, through work. I am talking about everywhere.
Four Ways to Reach People
So, coming up in 2025, we have four ways this year that I would like to help our church reach people. There is an entire outreach page that we have in our 2025 Vision Sunday booklet that we are handing out.
One: A Weekly Class
The first way is through the class, through our Bible Institute. If you are nervous about sharing your faith, if you are unsure about that, then I encourage you to sign up for the 7:00 Tuesday night classes. You will hear people in your career encouraging you to go to classes. You will hear college and guidance counselors encouraging you to take college classes to further your career and all of that. And as a pastor, I am not ashamed to invite you all, every single one of you, to sharpen your skills in sharing your faith and to commit yourself to an extra class to do so, even coming on an off night on a Tuesday night. I think that would be a wonderful skill to develop and a good thing for you to do. A weekly class is the first outreach opportunity.
Two: Bi-Weekly Outreach Meetings
The second way I would like to encourage outreaches is to go back to our bi-weekly outreach meetings at church.
We will still have the weekly outreach table set up and that is our way to spread the word systematically to our neighbors. These are to the neighborhoods closest to the church, but I would like to go back to meeting every other week starting February 1st. And one of those Saturdays every month is going to be our all church outreach meeting. We have had that this past year, but we have not had the weekly meetings or the bi-weekly meetings like we used to. So I would like to get back to that. Keep on reaching the people within your circles. But I also know that we reach the people in our circles, and many times we do not reach strangers. So I want us all to have the mentality of going beyond ourselves and reaching strangers through the systematic outreaches of the church, going door-to-door through the neighborhoods around the church. I just do not know of a better way of getting our church connected to the strangers who are so closely attached to our church just in these neighborhoods right around. So, our Saturday meetings will resume. I believe we need that to help keep outreach in front of us all the time.
Three: Outreach Events
Third, we have outreach events at the church. We are just working this week through some digital outreach. Bryant works in marketing, and he helps businesses with their digital reach. So in addition to the regular outreach, all the door-to-door, the printed handouts, the personal invitations, especially for Easter this year, then I would like to do a digital outreach and help us get out into our local public square, which is social media and the digital realm where people are living. It is amazing how many people will check out a church based on its reviews. They will decide whether to attend or not based on reviewing us on Google or reviewing us on Yelp. And maybe you can get involved in something like that. Posting encouraging things on Temecula Talk or Temecula Patch. So, for Easter we are going to try to work on that and see what God does through our community, both physical outreach and digital outreach. Now, the biggest outreach event of the year is going to be our fall festival. It is going to be a shortened service. We will have guest preacher Don Ball here with us. He has preached to lost people pretty much every week at Fort Leonard Wood in the Freedom Way program that they had.
Through their church, they have seen hundreds of thousands of people saved. These are soldiers, these recruits at Fort Leonard Wood, over the decades, and it is just incredible. I have been there a couple times and just love this man’s preaching and he has a heart for the gospel. He is going to preach a gospel message and then we are going to dismiss our church and have a wonderful fall festival outside. And I would love full church involvement on this one. We are not going to do the Christmas play this year, so all the time that would have been spent preparing for the Christmas play, learning lines, building sets, rehearsing, all of that, I would like to pour all that effort into making this an excellent event. So, we have ideas, nothing set in stone yet, maybe a short silly drama, maybe some kind of petting zoo or pony rides and just good prizes. We just want to be a hub of activity as a thing to invite people to, not just for families. It will be good for singles, and it will be good for retired folks as well. So we want to start working right now and preparing for our fall festival in November, which means we have got about 10 months to prepare for this thing.
And I am talking about right now thinking, “I am going to pick somebody. I am going to pick a business leader, or some friend, or someone that I want to help, and I am going to invest every single month, do something once a month, to try to reach out to that person, make some kind of contact and connection with them.” Maybe you do that with 10 people. Choose 10 things to do for 10 different people once per month from now until November. My goal is for every single person in our church to bring one person. That is the goal. I think that means that we are spreading a lot of seed and if you try to reach 10 people and one of them comes, well, then praise the Lord. Each of us got one person. Our Christmas program had so many guests because you invited people. And this is a new event for us, but I am very, very excited for this one, though I think it means that we start right now.
Four: The Philippines Missions Trip
Now, finally, the back page of our booklet is talking about our missions trip to the Philippines and I am going to preach a gospel message while we are there in the Philippines on that Sunday that we are there for the services and we want to see people saved.
Our folks are going to be ministering in outreaches in the villages when we go to the Philippines and so I am praying for this to be a fruitful time for us, not just a vacation. Some of us are tacking on a couple extra days of vacation, but the time that we are there as a church family, well then this is a ministry trip and we want to use this time to evangelize the lost. At our church in 2025, we are emphasizing a few things: the new to CBC class, the Deeper in the Word Bible Institute, this outreach emphasis. I am just saying, these are simple things. They are not flashy, but I believe this is what a church is made of. Overall this year, I am just so excited for the steadfast, unmovable direction God has set us on for the past 38 years. And I want us to always abound in the work of the Lord, continuing the next 38 years as well. God bless you, church. Let’s do ministry together in 2025.
