Letters to a Birmingham Jail by Bryan Loritts

Author:Bryan Loritts [Loritts, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8024-9114-5
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Be the Church—Plant Churches

The question still remains as to how a traditional, still dominantly Caucasian, largely professional church can advance multiethnic church planting and underresourced church planting. The answer begins with a candid, biblically based assessment of our community’s needs. Here’s our bottom line conclusion: Memphis needs Shalom, the peace of God; and in order for Memphis to have Shalom, her 127 neighborhoods have to have shalom; and in order for each of those neighborhoods to have shalom, those neighborhoods must have their basic human needs met; and in order that their basic needs be met, every neighborhood must have healthy, holistic, Bible-believing, gospel- centered, neighborhood-based local churches. This is where resource churches, like ours, come in.

Who should lead the effort to plant and revitalize neighborhood churches? Parachurch organizations? Charitable foundations? Seminaries? No, the church must plant the church! This is our mandate. The church in Antioch sent out Paul and Barnabas to evangelize and establish churches, which is exactly what they did. We must, too. In our day, of course, we are splintered into thousands of denominations; therefore, we must make the effort to reconnect with our brothers and sisters in evangelical churches to take responsibility jointly in the spiritual welfare of our city and to plan together as we revitalize and plant churches in our neighborhoods.

If you belong to a monocultural church, you are probably not qualified on your own to plant or lead a multiethnic church plant; therefore, you must partner with those fellow evangelicals who know what they are doing or who will take the time to learn. Sometimes, we simply need to support the work of others in our community, even when it costs us members and money.

When Bryan Loritts came to town and shared with us what he felt God had put upon his heart to do in Memphis, we recognized immediately God’s answer to our prayers. God was sending us a man who had a heart for multiethnic church planting, who was theologically and spiritually sound, and who was blessed with tremendous leadership gifts. Fellowship Church in Memphis has set a new standard in our city for how to plant healthy, growing multiethnic churches. It is our honor to support and collaborate with him. But Bryan’s wasn’t the first one nor the most recent one. Others have labored very effectively for years, without much public notice, steadily teaching, leading, and nurturing a few small multiethnic churches, with all of their challenges. They are all worthy of our prayers, our encouragement, and our emulation of their commitment to racial reconciliation. They need to hear regularly from traditional church leaders how important their ministry is to our city.

At other times, we need to take initiative, either as “mother churches” or as a collaborative group of churches to plant new churches or to revitalize the old ones for all of our communities. At Second Presbyterian, virtually all of our major church planting efforts are either in underresourced neighborhoods or in neighborhoods intentionally chosen for a multiethnic work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.