For those of you who got to come, we loved having you! For those who couldn't make it, hope you have a chance to listen to the vision. (click on vision casting party) Thanks for all the love, support, encouragements, and affirmations. The Lord is blessing this movement!

(the 3 different models are an excert from www.acts29network.com)
The Missional Church: our church plant model
1. Sent by God as missionaries in their own culture (Mt. 4:19).
2. Exists to take Christ to the lost: Go to the world (Mt. 28:18-20).
3. Members are personally engaged in their communities (Acts 16:20; 17:6).
4. Submerged into its culture like Christ (Luke 7:34).
5. Main focus is training and equipping others to be missionaries (Eph. 4:11-16).
6. Dependent upon Holy Spirit to use individuals as agents for evangelizing (Acts 1:8).
7. Develops relationships with the lost on purpose (Matt. 5:13-16).
8. Relationships are the means to influence others in their journey toward Christ (John 1512-17; 1 John 4:19-21).
9. The goal is to help others find Jesus in their own way and timing (1 Cor. 9:20-23).
10. Participants are affected in every way through a calling by God to be an agent for the gospel (Acts 4:13, 31-35).
11. Faith is practiced in community - groups of people together (Acts 2:42-45; Phil. 1:27).
12. Worship is unpredictable, spontaneous, Spirit-directed and messy (John 4:23-24).

The Evangelical Church: churches in our community
1. Has a program of missions alongside numerous activities of the church.
2. Exists as a place for the lost to find Christ: Come to the Church.
3. Members are supportive of mission efforts.
4. Separated from its culture as a holy quest.
5. Main focus is supporting mission works - mainly overseas.
6. Dependent upon altar call and big events as its main tool for evangelization.
7. Knows a few lost people and prays for their salvation.
8. Uses marketing techniques & business principles to draw people to a corporate gathering.
9. The goal is to produce salvation results.
10. Participants conform to man-made standards through guilt and pressure. Change is through self-will, not Spirit.
11. Faith is practiced at the church building during prescribed gathering times.
12. Worship is structured, predictable and orderly.

The Institutional Church: churches in our community
1. Sends money to missionaries in foreign countries if it is convenient.
2. Exists for the members of the church: Join the Church.
3. Members expect pastors to bring in the lost and unchurched.
4. Has become a sub-culture of Christians living in a parallel universe.
5. Main focus is supporting church activities to attract new families.
6. Dependent upon pastors and staff to evangelize the lost.
7. Stays away from the lost; has very few dealings with those outside the church.
8. Uses tradition, denomination and family ties to attract and keep members.
9. The goal is to increase attendance.
10. Participants compartmentalize their religion and their lives - generally facades of religious adherence.
11. Faith is a routine activity that is private and personal.
12. Worship is ritualistic.

• Casa Grande
• We have been offered the Paramount, a historic theatre in the downtown area of Casa Grande. We want to begin meeting there and preparing the facility for worship services when we outgrow the house service.
• Other possible locations to “nest” in would be the Rock church on Florence or High school auditoriums.
• Eventually, have our own land and building, possibly in a 10 year window.

• We invited 30-40 friends, family, and others who are interested in being apart of this movement. Here we gave a broad stroke of what God wants to do with us in Casa Grande.
• Following this party we plan to start meeting weekly on Sundays to worship.
• W plan on spending a good amount of time building the core group relationally and theologically. This time will be private and for about 6 to 9 months.
• In the next month we plan to start filing out paper work to organize as a non-profit organization with the assistants of lawyers and accountants.
• We plan to begin fundraising in our community.
• In the summer/fall of 2006, we would like some of our core team to be able to go thru a church plant boot camp and/ or mission trips.
• Sometime within a years time we would like to go public…. Possibly as early as Christmas 06 or Easter 07 when we will take the church public from the Core group meeting.

Share our Lives Together
• As we go to plant our church, our core group will become to you a sense of great friendship. No doubt many will come for a time and leave. Jesus experienced this as well. Hundreds of people followed him and left. But there is an inner circle of people you will find strength from and who will own the vision to a much greater extent than your average attendee will.

Be The Sent Ones: Missionaries to our own culture
• One of the most missed facts of all ecclesiology is understanding the sentence of the church. Our primary identity is we are the sent people of God. We see this identity beginning in the Godhead. The Father sends the Son, the Son sends the Spirit, and the Father, Son, and Spirit send the church. We catch a glimpse of this as Jesus sends the twelve and the seventy-two.
• This is a great distinction. The church today has an understanding that the pastors are the ones who do the work. The congregation's job is to show up. It turns the tables on them to see that on Sunday the church gathers to worship the God who has sent them into the world the rest of the week to be the hands, feet, and voice of Christ. What happens when people begin to understand this as a primary identity? They will see that they are the missionaries.

Pray
• Jesus calls the disciples to pray. Pray that God would send workers into the harvest. We can imagine that as these raggedy people went into villages to preach the Gospel with nothing but the shirt on their back, the prayed a lot.

• We underestimate the power of prayer. The reason we don't pray is that we still believe it is something about us that is making it work. God is not impressed with us and our efforts. What he is looking for are people who will humble themselves before him and let him be Head of the church. We believe that if we have the right look, music, style, building, - then our church plant is going to work. That is heresy. God moves where he wants to move. He could use the lamest service, worst sermon, and most backward event. Why? Because he chooses to. So our job is to be dependent in prayer. We should always be growing more and more in the work of prayer and creating a dependant core of people who truly believe that a church that bears fruit is God's thing and not ours.

• Prayer also reveals how much faith we have in trusting God. If you don't have key leaders right now, do you ask God for them? He will move them in from other states and countries if he has to. Do you believe that? Prayer must permeate all we do. He will save us from ourselves and from creating yet another church that does not reflect his heart. If we truly desire to create a church that reflects his heart than we have to get close to it. We do this in prayer.

Truth: that we would know the truth and the truth would set us free.
Truth for us is summed up in Jesus Christ and His story that has been accurately revealed to us thru all scripture. In this Person, Truth is not simply reasoned, or evidenced, but is experienced. Truth is not relative. Truth is found in God thru His scripture.

Love: that we may love Him and love one another.
The Scriptures challenge us to focus on people, loving, serving, relevance, and character

Beauty: that we use our God given abilities to express Truth
God calls us to use our spiritual and natural gifts to glorify God and to bless and inspire our community. We strive to reflect a God that gives inspiration.

Community: that we would always be living onward together.
Biblical community is mutual sacrifice. Biblical community is about making choices that benefit the people around you instead of yourself. Biblical community is radically different than the self-focused ethos of our world; it is what we aspire to as followers of Christ. Every believer must live in authentic community to receive the blessings of life that God intended. Biblical Community always includes mutual accountability, encouragement and support. We will be honest about our sin for the purpose of healing. Community is the means of our mission.

Discipleship: that we would be a church that makes disciples who make disciples.
Discipleship should have you in a relationship with mentors and with protégés, being able to glean Truth thru these relationships to one another. Here again we see encouragement, accountability, support, and confessions being spoken, but now in a one-on-one environment.

Holistic: that the Gospel impacts every area of a person's life and culture.
God is redeeming all of creation through Jesus. He is wiping away our tears. He is putting food in our bellies. He is giving us clothes to wear. God is Holy and ministers through our lives and culture.

Missional: that the church exists for the world and not for herself.
A church that is not missional is not really a church. When a church loses its mission, it ceases to be a church. The church in every generation is called to bring the good news of the kingdom into the culture where it resides.
The church is sent by God as missionaries into their own culture. The church exist to take Christ to the lost, to go to the world, not to have them come to us. Members are personally engaged in the community and submerged into its culture like Christ. Our main focus is exalting God and equipping others to be missionaries. We Develop relationships with the lost on purpose because relationships are the means to influence others in their journey toward Christ

What Will the Church Plant Look like?
• Preaching – expository teaching of the scripture
• Prayer – intercession before the Lord for God and one another
• Praise – testimonies, all the arts, candles, and encouragements
• Communion – the body breaking bread together
• We will not be a program-run church (i.e. Come join us) we will be a Great Commission-run church (i.e. Go! into the culture and build relationships, teaching the Gospel)
• We do not have adult programs; our ministries will be our jobs and our social networks. (i.e. High School Events, Parties, office break rooms, our families, Social clubs, Community Clubs, any place that the culture meets will be our ministries)
• Our church government will be a plurality of Local Elders/ Pastors, based off scriptural qualifications from Titus and Timothy, who lead and teach the church with authority. Our Senior Pastor is Jesus Christ and that title is reserved for Him alone, our church does not revolve around a man but around God.

As the disciples were going about their daily routines, Jesus calls them and then promises to do something very radical in them. "I will make you." The word "make" brings with it the implied creative work of God, and is also used of Jesus performing miracles. One of the most beautiful results of your new church plant will be the transformation of the believers who join you in the work. The beautiful part of planting a church is knowing that when all is said and done God will have used the planting process to shape you into the image of Christ.

The second thing we see Jesus promise is to convert their values. His transforming work is focused on shifting their values. From fishermen to fishers of men. The term must have brought about confusion to the men. What does the term mean? These were guys who had done the hard work of learning the fishing trade. They were unschooled and unlearned. They knew no other way of life. For them to leave fishing was to leave their security, comfort, and ultimately to leave their deepest sense of value.

Values are perhaps one of the most important areas of life. It is from our deepest values that we make choices that reflect who we most truly are. Show someone your checkbook and your daily schedule and you are showing them what you value the most. The demise of the church today is a break down in values at its core. We say we believe in loving the lost, then we form legislative committee's to protect us from having to relate to them. Values, however, never lie. The world thinks the church is judgmental and hypocritical because we have shown the world something other than Christ.

Values are not things we teach as much as things we live. You don't choose values because they are true you adopt them into your life because they move your heart. Often times we value and hold sacred things that clearly reflect the world, the flesh, and the devil, rather than Christ and His kingdom. When this happens we must name it as idolatry and lead people in repentance. You must be able to articulate your values and support them biblically, and ultimately make your deepest choices out of those values.

Who is Planting the Church? “should I be in a church plant”
• 80% of all churches have flat-lined or are coming upon death
• 3,500 churches die every year (that’s a lot of churches to plant!)
• 33% of Americans have never gone to a church service
• Statistically, the fastest way to reach the lost in America is to plant a new church

I like Jesus, but I don’t like Christians
• I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike Your Christ” – Gandhi
• If we weren’t Christians, we probably wouldn’t be attracted to it either
• Sense of distrust and caution towards Christians
• What is this subculture we have created? “Christapalooza: 20,000 Christians convene…God doesn’t show
• Preaching and preaching should not focus on “sin Management”…..it should focus on kingdom living and how to become disciples of Christ now


The Call
As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a new into the lake, for they were fishermen. "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." At once they left their nets and followed him. Mark 1:16-18

The very essence of your mission should be rooted in theological truth. Namely, the proclamation of the Gospel. You need to have confidence in where you are going. There are not many among us who would have thought Jesus handing off the kingdom work to the twelve was a good idea. But it is God who worked in and through them. You must believe He will work in and through the people God gives us.

Mission:
Our mission has been given to us by Jesus Christ through the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.

The Great Commandment
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength...You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The Great Commission
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

Why Plant a Church:
• 30,000+ 2005 population for Casa Grande
• 30% increase last 10 years
• Average church size in Casa Grande is around 200 members
• 30,000/ 200 is 150 churches, CG may have 15 churches at an average size.

The unchurched demographic is not looking for an event (which is what the current church provides), they are looking for something spiritual
• Change our methodologies (church programs are not attractive anymore)
• Be spiritual: There is currently an extreme openness to spiritual things

Young People don’t come to my church? (Barna)
• 18 to 32 are least likely to describe themselves as Christians
• 18 to 32 in the US are more open to exploring other faith
• they avoid church: hence attendance is declining by generation
• Institutional churches have lost influence and need to consider other approaches

Serious Worldview shifts
• Christian-God-centered-view Vs. self-determined-pluralistic-god-view
• Faith found in the church Vs. in personal experiences
• Authority was in the bible Vs. Suspicion of any authority, especially religious
• “what is man that you think of him” (Ps. 8:4) Vs. Sheryl Crow “if it makes you happy”

America has become the new missionary frontier
• More countries are sending missionaries to America than America sends to them

"The time has come the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news." Mark 1:14-15
Jesus begins his calling of the disciples with theological urgency. The coming kingdom reign of God is at hand. In declaring the kingdom is near, he brings a fresh sense of its reality to the forefront of people's minds and hearts, and it is here that he demands a response from them. The people had become complacent to the idea that the kingdom and its reality were worthy of their devotion. Jesus cuts through their complacency by declaring the kingdom both real and present at the same time.

A glimpse at the American Church:
Imagine you were on a cruise ship, not too much of a stretch for some of you, and while everyone is eating the captain's voice comes over the loudspeaker saying that a seal in the lower portion of the boat has burst. The boat is taking on several hundreds of gallons of water every few minutes and it is necessary to evacuate the boat immediately. You get up from the table grabbing tightly to your wife's arm and head up to the top deck. You don't walk you run. As you get up to the upper deck you realize no on is there; in fact you can't even find a steward. You wonder if you misunderstood the captain, so you rush down the stairs and come across a ship worker. "Is the news true, are we taking on water?" you say in a panic. "Yes I heard that too, and confirmed that with a buddy of mind who works down below. The ship is going down," with that he smiles and keeps strolling toward his cabin. Confused you run back into the dining area where you heard the announcement and no one is moving. They area all eating, the band is playing, and everyone is as calm as can be. Does the scenario sound absurd? Welcome to the American church. The Titanic is sinking and we are sipping tea.
There is nothing more staggering than complacency in the mist of an urgent crisis. How can the ships be sinking and everyone live as if life is normal? This is the state of affairs that Christ walked into in his ministry on earth, and it is the state of Christianity in America. He began leading his ministry by the call of repentance made forceful by the immanence of the Kingdom.


Obstacles of Complacency
1. Making the Crisis Visible
We are quick to forget information that does not affect our day to day lives. We need to unveil the darkness of our motives for comfort and bust through the illusion that we are truly living missional lives. If you are that's great, but when it comes down to it, most people don't love lost people because they don't want to.

2. Dispelling the Illusions of Our Culture
The presence of church building is not a good indicator of spiritual vitalization. Nor are Christian rallies a testimony of spiritual vitality. Deep in the heart of every community there is great darkness and a need for Christ.

3. Expect Great Things
In John 12:12, Jesus, says, "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father." It is an amazing reality to consider that Jesus invites us to expect a miraculous result from our faith. To expect and anticipate him doing great things through us for His glory. We have learned to not get too carried away with our faith. The church has learned that we should not expect too much from God. These are all lies from the pit of hell. I will lead you into a deeper faith. God is now and is going to keep do great things for his glory.

4. Measuring Your Success in Relationship to Your Mission
There are so many gauges to try to evaluate how your church plant is doing. The most important thing you can do is be faithful to your mission. Are people coming to Christ and being transformed? Is the Gospel being proclaimed and is God drawing people into your community? If you gauge success by making sure no one ever leaves your church you will fail. We need to evaluate the success of our plant by indicators that God lays out clearly in scripture. Reject false indicators... the Attendance, Buildings, Cash indicators. IE: Move them from, "Bill left the church and is mad", to adopt true indicators like, "We baptized five new believers this month."

5. Be Honest with Yourselves and be Willing to Change
We will not plant the perfect church. No one has. So it is important to be willing to evaluate honestly and share weaknesses with the core. People would rather believe a lie that made them feel good than a truth that hurts. We must create an appetite for honesty