Who is Your Church Accountable For?

Host: TJ Freeman

Summary: In this episode of Rural Church Renewal, TJ Freeman speaks on the unique value and role rural churches play in showcasing God's glory. TJ emphasizes that God is the one who established the church and that it serves a specific purpose in its community, however remote. He uses analogies like soccer positions to explain how each church must understand and take responsibility for its specific area, ensuring that the gospel is shared repeatedly within that region. TJ also discusses the importance of mobilizing church members for outreach, providing practical advice on how congregations can map their areas of accountability and engage effectively in evangelism. He concludes by encouraging church leaders and members to work together to make Christ known and invites listeners to connect through the Brainerd Institute for further support and resources.

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Transcript

Your church is strategically located in the middle of nowhere. I get it. Mine is the same way. But you would not believe the value that your congregation has, for the sake of God's glory, and the little town or the little cornfield or wherever it sits.

God means to use your church in a big way, and you can take some steps in that direction today. So stick around, we'll talk about that on this episode of Rural Church Renewal. 

Well, hello, my name is TJ Freeman and I'm a rural pastor. That means that, like you, I live in the middle of nowhere and I spend a lot of my time thinking about what it means for the church to show God's glory in places that the rest of the world would say is easy to overlook.

Today you are stuck with me. Sorry. Joe and Josh, they're off, I don't know, eating sushi and doing martial arts or something. I don't know what they're doing, but today they were unable to join me. 

I wanted to spend a little bit of time thinking about your church's accountability. So God is the one who built your church. Did you know that it was not some founding pastor? It was not the Sunday School Society. It wasn't the church planter. God is the one who built your church. Whether you're a pastor, an elder, a deacon, a lay member, the head of a committee, you need to recognize that Jesus established your church for a reason and you need to understand what that reason is.

He built your church. He wants his glory made visible from it to your community and to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. So your church is meant to make a statement about the glory of God. Now, your church may be right next door to another church. But out in these rural parts, having two healthy churches right next to each other is pretty rare.

And so I'm gonna assume that there's some distance between you and some of the other churches around, and you need to think about that. You know what that means? It means that you have a role to play in that little region that no one else is meant to play. 

You might think about it like sports. Okay, I don't sport. I do coach soccer because I love my kids. And I did play soccer because when my hand and my eye haven't figured out how to be coordinated with each other, my feet occasionally can do the things that I want them to do. So soccer was a better fit. And I know that on the soccer field and probably other sports as well, that you have a certain position, you're meant to play the goalie, where's the goalie stay?

Right in the net. And then you have defense. Where's defense? Usually stay on the defensive side of the field and then guess what's next? The offense. And they play more on the offensive side of the field. It would be bad if the striker, who's the central offensive player, spent most of his time hanging out back in the goal.

That's the goalie's territory, and he has to go pretty far out of his way to go back and get there. And then when he's needed up front, if he's found back in his own goal, he's not gonna be effective at all. I'm probably taking the analogy just far enough, but can you see what I'm getting at? Every person on the soccer field has a part to play, and it's really important that they play their part now in the body of Christ.

That's true as well because we all have different spiritual gifts, and we're all meant to play a role based on the spiritual gifts we have. But did you know that your church is also meant to play a position in God's kingdom? Number one, your church is out there in the middle of nowhere. It's in a rural place, so you are placed out in a spot that like a church in the city is not. 

So if you named your church that's in a town of 500 City church, people laugh at you. But if you name your church, city church in a town of 30,000, well some people will still laugh at you. Sorry to my friends who live in a town like that with a church with a name like that.

 You're in Manhattan and you call your church city church, it's just normal. God has different kinds of churches in different sized communities for a reason. They're going to look different.

A country church is not going to look like a city church, but God wants to be glorified in the country and in the city. And so the country churches are not less important. They're just as important, in fact, because there is likely fewer Christians per square mile out in the country.

You could even argue that there's like an out weighted responsibility that a country church plays. There are fewer Christians and fewer churches per square mile, which means less radiation of God's glory from a specific place through the local church. 

 But it's not just size. Your church is in a strategic location, wherever the Lord had that thing spring up, and it's really important that you think about what your church's responsibility is in that location. So as a congregation, you should just regularly be thinking about who are the people that the Lord has us here to reach?

First, you have those people who are members of your church. You are meant to care for them well, whether they live right in the neighborhood or not. You're in covenant with these people. You have to love each other, serve each other, care for one another, do all the one another's of scripture together.

That's like a first priority, but right behind it is recognizing that you, as the body of Christ are plopped down in a location to show the people around you what God's kingdom is like. So as you live out your faith with each other in a community, you're demonstrating to that community what it's like to belong to the Kingdom of Heaven instead of the kingdom of this world. 

More than that, you are called to extend an invitation to the people around you. Not to come to your church or your thing, but to come and meet Jesus. And as they do, they're to be plugged into the body of Christ, but you are there to give the people around your church repeated opportunities to see, hear, and respond to the gospel. 

That is one of the most important reasons that your church exists. So what you should consider doing today would be to take a map out and look for some natural boundaries. Maybe there's a series of roads that pass through the area. Maybe it's a river, maybe it's a mountain chain.

Whatever it is, draw some lines that connect to one another, kinda like a big blob that looks something like a circle and you're going, this is the area where our church is taking responsibility for. We're gonna make sure that in this little area, the gospel is going to be made known to every man, woman, and child.

So if that's like, you know, the town. If you live in a town of 500 people and you draw your circle using the roads that are around your town, great. Now, if there's another church in your community, you're working together to reach that circle and talking to them. The two of you might be able to expand the circle just a little bit if your church has people who live out just a little further into the country.

You can expand the circle a little bit more, but you're, as a congregation, looking to say, what is the region or the territory that God means for our church to cover. Back to the soccer field. If you are defensive and you play on the left side, I. That left side defensive player is meant to cover that whole territory.

Your church is the same thing. What's the ground that you're meant to cover? The space that God is expecting your church to take responsibility for, and then what does it look like for you to be a part of the mobilization of Christ's people to reach them? Because a pastor can't do it alone. The deacons or the elders can't do it alone, nor are any of them meant to.

The members of the body of Christ are meant to be equipped so that they can go out and do this kind of work. You, no matter what your role is in the church, you play a part in mobilizing Christ's people to go reach the people in the community. So as you think about outreach, for example. Don't just think, how can we get a bunch of people to come to our cool event so that maybe one or two could come to church?

That is not the point of outreach. When you're doing outreach, you're trying to give opportunities to give the people in your community an opportunity to see. To hear and to respond to the gospel, and you need to do that over and over. If that's VBS, sweet, do VBS do it really well and do it with that purpose in mind and make sure every volunteer knows that the styrofoam backdrop isn't worth half as much investment of their time as the people who will walk through those doors.

If you think it's a block party, awesome. We've done block parties here before, and in our context they've been useful at times and other times we've decided that would not be the most useful way to present the gospel to the people in this community. The secret sauce though, if there is such a thing, is helping the congregation understand the responsibility that they have.

As part of Christ's people to go to their neighbors, to their friends, to their coworkers, to their family members, et cetera, and love them. Well serve them well and share the good news of the gospel with them. And I just heard a really good sermon at my alma mater, Cedarville University, done by the senior chaplain.

So it was a student and his last at bat, it was his last sermon. He encouraged the body of Christ there at Cedarville to go out and evangelize. And he used that quote, preach the gospel and if necessary used words. I'm sure you've heard that before. And then he just showed how silly that really is, because the gospel requires words. Jesus came as the word of God.

The point is not for you to just be a really cool neighbor that your other neighbors really like. The point is for you to actually be a great neighbor who loves them and then shows them the love of Christ because you've been shown the love of Christ and you do it out of a heart of gratitude and an earnest desire to see these neighbors love Jesus.

So you're mobilizing as a church and then you're mobilizing members of the congregation to go out to the people in their area and proclaim the gospel. This is a vital responsibility for your church. So, if you're not in leadership at the church, you wanna just be praying that the leaders of the church will think carefully about this.

You might even say to your pastor, Hey, could we just grab coffee and think about this idea? Could I be helpful in helping our church figure out what we're accountable for in the area? About how many people has God entrusted to this congregation to reach and how could we be thinking about that together?

Certainly don't become judgmental if you don't see your leaders embracing that idea the way you wish they would. And don't become a part of the problem. Just pray for them. Have conversations when you can, and you be a really good example of what that looks like. Be the best, most active evangelist in your church.

That doesn't even mean you have to have the gift of evangelism. Just means you're taking seriously the responsibility of going out and making Christ known and just doing that will make a statement about the importance and value of doing something like that. If you are in leadership in any capacity, make sure the people you're leading understand that that's the responsibility of the body of Christ is to go and make Christ known in a region that your church has been assigned by God who put your church there to begin with.

So what we learn, we've learned that God is the founder of your church and he's put your church there. As a display of his glory, we've learned that your church demonstrates God's glory not only to the community it's in, but all the way into the heavenly places, and that you have a responsibility first to care for your members.

But then right behind it to make sure that the people around your church have repeated opportunities to see, hear, and respond to the gospel. And we know that that can happen through events sometimes, but that it probably happens most effectively in a decentralized way as Christ's people are mobilized and go out to the people in their circles of accountability to make Christ known.

If you'd like to talk more about that. I would love to talk to you. You can head over to brainerd institute.com. You can sign up there for our newsletter and whatnot. We've got some whatnots, and then you could also send me an email if you want to, tj@brainerdinstitute.com. I would just be honored to have a conversation with you and if we can partner with you in any way or serve you, we would love to do that.

 We want to see a healthy church in every rural community in the country. That's gonna take a lot of people working together. So let's think carefully this week about what it means to take ownership for the region where our churches are placed, and let's pray.

That God will glorify himself so that rural America just shines like a beacon of his glory. Thanks for tuning in. This is sponsored by the Brainerd Institute for Rural Ministry. Head on over there for more information. Brainerd institute.com. For now though, will see you next time.