Paul planted, Apollos watered.....


In his first letter to the early church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul wrote about building up the church (you can read that here) and is quite candid about how limited our human endeavours really are in this. The wonderful thing is that we are working with and for God, but to be clear, it is God who builds his church!

At EBC we have been and will continue to strive to be followers of Jesus and to reach out to other people and invite them into our church community where, we hope, they too will become disciples of Jesus Christ.

Here’s the gist of our plan for growth -

  • Be true disciples of Jesus ourselves. Unless we are first disciples ourselves how can we possibly disciple other people?
  • Create great environments and welcoming, engaging, relevant services and events that we can invite people to.
  • Befriend people and invite them!
  • Welcome them into our church community and help to disciple them by our own teaching and example of love and Christian living.Invitation is critical to our mission to reach people and make disciples. It’s part of our own discipleship to be obedient to Jesus’s instruction to “Go and make disciples…” We are supposed to spread the good news of Jesus, after all!
 

As more people come into the EBC family and as we all grow to become more like Jesus together, I believe God will do amazing things with us. Our endeavours to be disciples who make disciples, our determination to “Seek first the Kingdom of God” in our lives together, will bear fruit. I believe that if we abide patiently with God, and faithfully go about being disciples centred on him and inviting others to do likewise, God will do incredible things for our spiritual and numerical growth as a church.

Let’s not wait to do as Jesus clearly instructs us to do (that is, our part in making disciples - the planting and watering of seeds in people’s lives), but let’s wait patiently and lovingly as He brings us the growth.

See you on Sunday!

 

Simon Lace, 20/03/2019