A Mission Worth Living For: By Tim Kernan

Jeremiah 50:8-10
8 “Flee out of Babylon;
leave the land of the Babylonians,
and be like the goats that lead the flock.
9 For I will stir up and bring against Babylon
an alliance of great nations from the land of the north.
They will take up their positions against her,
and from the north she will be captured.
Their arrows will be like skilled warriors
who do not return empty-handed.
10 So Babylonia [b] will be plundered;
all who plunder her will have their fill,”
declares the LORD.

Well everyone, it’s been a great month! God has blessed the church here with three powerful baptisms, a touching restoration (the movement has it’s first Oxford graduate!), and an encouraging placed membership from our mighty sister church in Syracuse! That’s how you kick off an evangelism campaign!

Throughout December, the leadership team of the church took the disciples though a very edifying “Consolidation Campaign”. We had all of the new members go through the follow up series and read both the “Lion Never Sleeps” and “Master Plan of Evangelism”. The other members who had already completed the studies went through our “Leadership Study Series” that the leaders collaborated on. The five studies were entitled: 1: Can you confront false teaching, sin and discord? 2: Can you handle the pressure? 3: Are you a leader or a dead-ender? 4: Leadership by Imitation and Example. 5: Leaders of God are Fruitful!

There was a visible change in the spirit of the church as we came of out of December fully satisfied and challenged in our bible studies and our lives. This was the best Christmas holiday we’ve ever had as a church! The bible studies and challenges had an immediate impact as three new disciples were baptised and one restored; one a week for 4 weeks!

That fruitful month took us straight into our third London Evangelism Workshop, which was entitled, “One Another”. Jacques and Jeanette preached about encouraging one another to have vision for the field that God has given us to evangelize. Ken and Ola then preached about discipling one another in order to be effective on an evangelistic level! Phil, Kim and Alex followed and preached about Spurring one another on in loving the lost. Daniel, TK and Ini preached about serving one another and using servitude to effectively evangelise! Finally, Ayeisha, our youngest disciple preached a heart-breaking sermon entitled “Why is it worth it?”. It was incredible to see these brothers and sisters, some of them very new in the faith, preaching God’s Word with passion, maturity and zeal. You can listen to them all on our streaming media page!

Saturday evening Ola gave us our quarterly financial presentation. I was close to tears as he described how much the church has sacrificed in order to grow by 50% in the last 12 months. It blew us away that even in the middle of a financial recession the church finances grew by 20%! The British bulldog tenacity, grit and determination is alive and well in the London Church!

We were all excited about he first week of the evangelism campaign! In the first week of the evangelism campaign there were 17 group sharing times on the streets of London. The disciples went after the lost with the same heart for them as God has. I am very proud of the church!

Despite all the work going on in faith over the past week many disciples took the opportunity to go see the new movie “Avatar”. It’s the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. We all enjoyed it even though the story line could have been better if it had been a story out of the bible! I was shocked however to hear that many people are coming out of the theatres and being hit by serious depression and even contemplating suicide! They yearn for the close knit family, the mission and purpose the “Na’vi” people share…

It broke my heart to hear about the loneliness and pain people were feeling. It made me consider in the past few days just how atomised and weak the western society in which we live has become. Here are a few statistics that might explain why people are feeling so depressed: (these stats are for the UK but I’m sure its the same almost everywhere)

-30 percent of kids grow up with at least one binge drinking parent. (Action on Addiction UK)
-3 out of 4 adults in the UK gamble every week. (Channel 4 News)
-40% of marriages end in divorce and nearly 100% of “cohabitant couples” end in breakup. (Channel 4 News)
-The number of single mom’s has tripled in the last 25 years. (Channel 4)
-One in ten people will live alone their whole lives. (Channel 4)
-44 percent of kids are born without a married mother and father. BBC
-In England and Wales in 2006 there was 193 700 abortions with a rise of about 5% per year. About 90 percent were paid for with tax money. (www.dh.gov.uk)
-70% of those abortions were discretionary; meaning that the main reason was not medical. (www.dh.gov.uk)
-2000 babies were aborted because they may have had a disability of some kind.
-Its possible to buy illegal abortion pills for 30$ so the real number is only known by God but it could easily be double. (BBCNEWS.COM)
-Police recorded 53,540 sexual offences in England and Wales in the year ending March 2008 (Home Office). Only 10% of abuse is reported so the real number is likely half a million cases a year. (www.advocatesforyouth.org)
-1 in 4 people have diagnosable mental health problems stemming from stressful youth and messed up families. Mental health problems cost the economy 77 Billion pounds a year in the UK alone. (www.mentalhealthequalities.org.uk)

In short, the liberal democratic dream of freedom that our parents believed in and our grandparents fought for has become a nightmare of shattered people. If you call “discretionary abortion” murder (and I certainly hope you do) the Democratic allied countries kill 7 times more people a year than Hitler killed in the whole Holocaust. Its enough to make you want to go back to pseudo christian monarchies.

As disciples we walk out of a movie like Avatar and while we think it was a great movie, we belong to a tight-knit family with an important mission. 30 minutes after walking out of the movie I was already back and engaged in that mission. We have to have compassion for the spiritual prisoners who yearn so much for those things that they consider suicide after walking out of the movie…

As we advance in our evangelism campaign this week it’s not just an issue of getting people out to our cute little church… it’s an issue of calling spiritual slaves out of Babylon. We have to continue to build a strong conviction about how important our message is to a lost world and harbour no compromise in our hearts about how lost the world really is…

Love,

Tim