On This Rock - A Church Planting Sampler

I NTRODUCTION • 9

Through the Spirit’s leading, these churches will develop missional partnerships where kingdom-minded leaders and churches can collabo- rate together for mission and justice. We are trusting God to help us identify, equip, and empower a new generation of urban leaders who will through an empowered urban church demonstrate compassion and justice in the communities where they live and work. In our view, nothing is more critical or important for the sake of kingdom advance in the city than the planting of healthy assemblies of Christ, filled with disciples who are loving God with their whole hearts and their neighbors as themselves. These communities, indeed, are God’s method of kingdom transformation in this lost world. Our hope is that this sampler will trigger a desire for you to move from a mere taste of materials to the actual full texts which are available to you at our online store (www.tumistore.org). When our Lord rose from the dead, his revolutionary grace and conquering victory became acces- sible to the peoples of the world. The command to make disciples is directly linked to the missionary task of evangelism, equipping, and empowering urban folk through the work of church planting. This sampler provides a broad spectrum of our thinking and practice on urban cross-cultural church planting, including its theological, spiritual, missiological, and sociological components. Hopefully, a perusal of these diverse materials will provide you with a sense of our commitment to seeing the Great Commission fulfilled among the world’s urban poor, and what we believe we will need to accomplish this. Brother John Stott’s quote at the beginning of this introduction says it well: “We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.” World Impact is striving to live up to its name, under the anointing and leading of the Holy Spirit. Our passion is to see the Kingdom of God declared and demonstrated in communities where Christ is neither known nor worshiped, in the poorest, most neglected neighborhoods in America and around the world. Our conviction is that planting churches and facilitating church plant movements is the fastest, most effective way to embrace a global vision of kingdom advance, starting here in the communities of the poor in the U.S. Our prayer is that this sampler may spark interest in you, our readers, to join us in this great campaign of winning the world’s poor for Christ. The same Lord who confessed that he would build his Church on the Rock centuries ago is empowering his people today to plant churches and spawn new movements among the unreached around the world. Anyone who listens closely can still hear our Savior affirm his words