Tuesday, 10 September 2013

Ideas for Vision Sunday - Lengthen and Strengthen!

I believe that Vision Sundays and the preaching brought on those days are vitally important. I always start a Vision Sunday message by giving thanks to God for all He has done in the past season – and then lift the eyes of everyone to the call of God for the next season ahead. This following short series of blogs gives an outline of the message I brought from September 2012 from Isaiah and provides a possible model for a Vision Sunday talk.

Isaiah 54: 1-5 says...Enlarge the place of your tent...do not hold back... do not be afraid... the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth

Each Vision Sunday we take time to give thanks to God and acknowledge His goodness to us as a church – we now have four to five hundred more people attending King’s than we did two years ago. In parallel we also know of marriages restored, lives changed, people saved, and a Channel 4 film team has visited the Feast! We can be assured that God is at work.

Last year I shared a new vision for King’s. Over fifteen years ago we began with an original vision for a church of 1000. Just as we came within sight of reaching that goal, just when it seemed achievable, the realisation came - we believe God is calling us to move on to another vision - for a church of 5000 – a much bigger dream. While the original vision of 1000 people is within our grasp, the new one is way beyond our ability – it can only be done by God. And committing to such a vision requires us to lean into God in new ways.

How are we going to achieve this goal? It is one thing to dream and a completely different matter to see it coming into being under God! I believe that some core principles are to be found in three chapters from Isaiah - 53 to 55.