Outreach: Keeping The Arrows Out

MAIN IDEA: All Christians have been commissioned to reach out with the love and message of Jesus.

OBJECTIVES: hearers will be encouraged and inspired to keep an “arrows out” approach to life, always looking for and creating opportunities to share the love and message of Jesus with others.

Hearers will commit to doing something “arrows out” in the coming week.

INTRO:

Pop Quiz – (with candy treats for those who answer correctly)

1. Fill in the blank: Our mission is to create an authentic Christian community that effectively ___________ ______.

2. When we reach out to unchurched people, we reach out with what 3 things?

3. The end product our church is trying to produce is

a. busy church people

b. a large and beautiful church building

c. people living a purposeful life of discipleship

4. Name the 3 priorities of CTK church.

5. TRUE or FALSE. The most important meeting of the week is the worship service.

Our Mission

To create an authentic Christian community that effectively reaches out to unchurched people with love, acceptance and forgiveness so that they may experience the joy of salvation and a purposeful life of discipleship.

Our Vision

To see a prevailing, multi-location church emerge that will transform the spiritual landscape. This church will convene in hundreds of small groups, with worship centers strategically located in every community.

Our Priorities

• Worship: We are devoted to worshiping God as a lifestyle.

• Small Groups: We are determined to care for each other through small groups.

• Outreach: We are dedicated to reaching people who do not know Christ as their Savior.

Last week we talked about the importance of Small Groups as our Plan A for creating disciples. This week we’re going to review what it means to say that we are dedicated to the priority of OUTREACH.

We have the 2nd annual “Arrows Out Conference” coming up in 2 weeks. The term “arrows out” refers to a stance that we at CTK have chosen to take in relationship to those outside our church.

The typical church model is arrows in.

This can refer to two things:

1. The energy, money, and time of church members is spent cultivating relationships WITHIN the church.

2. The church expects people to COME IN to hear the good news and experience a purposeful life of discipleship.

Typically this type of mindset starts at the level of the individual, continues up into the smaller groups of the church, and continues all the way the organizational system of the church.

At CTK are trying to buck that trend – and be ARROWS OUT instead. Here’s what that means.

1. The people of CTK spend time cultivating relationships with people outside the church.

2. The people of CTK GO TO people outside the church instead of expecting them to come in.

But even this picture of what our church is supposed to be like is incomplete – we need to add one more feature to the diagram.

Our mission statement says we are striving to create an AUTHENTIC CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY that EFFECTIVELY REACHES OUT. So in small groups we develop authentic Christian community with other believers – but we then use those times as springboards to reach outside the circle and meet others where they are with the love, acceptance, and forgiveness of Christ.

This is in fact what we find when we study the life of Jesus with his 12 disciples. He had his “small group” of men who were his closest friends and followers of his teaching. He spent many hours with them teaching them his ways and showing them with his example what it meant to live in relationship with God the Father. But he didn’t just stay with them, or only teach inside Synagogues. He went OUTSIDE the circle of “church people” and continually tried to reach those still needed to hear his message of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. Take a look at Matthew 9 – which tells the story of Jesus meeting Matthew and then spending time at his home with Matthew’s friends…

Matt. 9:9 ¶ As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

Matt. 9:10 ¶ While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples.

Matt. 9:11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”

Matt. 9:12 ¶ On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

Matt. 9:13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”