What would you give for a church full of missional Christians? An arm? A leg? Your gas-guzzling SUV? How about $25 and eight weeks? That’s right. A little pocket change and eight weeks of focusing your church on the activities that Acts 1:8 Christians do might be just what you are looking for.
The newest Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma Sunday School/small group resource has just been released under the title “PowerUP Your World.” For those of you familiar with the PowerUP strategy, you are in for a real treat. The first two releases prepare the church for the final edition. This third installment in the PowerUP series is committed to the development of Acts 1:8 Christians, and is the most intensive of the three releases.
PowerUP Your World focuses on the individual person by focusing on the smallest common denominator in the church -the class or small group. PowerUP is personal because your relationship with Christ is personal. Just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the church is only as strong as its weakest Bible study class.
Most people are not interested in institutional church growth. A look at the American landscape today shows a huge distrust in institutions. However, people are interested in personal growth, and an overwhelming majority of Americans are interested in spiritual matters. PowerUP Your World is focused on the individual and the class they attend. When individuals and classes begin to grow spiritually, the church begins to grow-not from the top down, but from the inside out.
Like the previous PowerUP resources, PowerUP Your World has a unique twist. Our Church and Family Equipping team wanted to capture the essence of what it means to live missionally. But this is more than just studying missions, it involves every facet of your life. It involves your personal spiritual growth. It involves your witness. It involves other people that you are committing to team with to reach the world with the Gospel. It’s not really a study about missions; PowerUP Your World is involving every person in the church in doing what missionaries do to reach their communities. We wanted to capture this concept in a simple way that does not discourage people, but actually encourages and helps the average guy grasp the concept. We call it the ‘P3 Process.
P3 comes from the acrostic formed by the process. Pursue-Present-Partner. Pursuing Christ as Lord is essential to Christianity. Matthew 22:37-38 states that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.” Notice the “alls” in those verses. The Christian life is a pursuit.
To help people pursue Christ as Lord of their life, PowerUP Your World has one of its strongest resources-the P3 Mission Journal-a 50-day devotional journal, one for each day of PowerUP.
Many people read devotional literature. These devotionals have their place in inspiring us; however, you can’t substitute someone else’s walk with Christ for your own. When someone asks you about what God is doing in your life, they don’t want to hear what God did for someone else, they want to hear what He has done for you! So for 50 days, you read a Scripture passage and then write down in just a few words what you hear God saying to you through that passage. Then you jot down some things you are going to do that day to follow Christ in your life.
When you are done, you are not going to read what God did in someone else’s life, you are going to read what He did in your life!
In addition, the journal has a weekly Bible memory verse, notes pages for sermon outlines, a section to pray evangelistically for people needing a relationship with Christ and suggestions on how to have a daily devotion and memorize Scripture.
To order a PowerUP Your World resource kit for your church, contact me at 405/942-3000, ext. 4661, or register online at www.bgco.org/sspowerup.
Next week: Presenting Christ.
