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This past Sunday was our launch Sunday. Praise the Lord! With this, we took a little different excursion away from the book of Genesis and learned about the answer to “Why Another Church?" Pastor Danny gave four answers to develop a robust reasoning to this question:

1.    We’ve been around as a church for nearly 100 years.
2.    Church is not a building—it’s a particular group of people.
3.    Church is not our idea—it’s Jesus’s plan.
4.    Our mission is not a church—it’s actually more churches.

These answers show God’s faithful loop of evangelism and churches. This is what I want to focus our attention on in this Application Afterthoughts—God’s faithfulness in His plan (which graciously included Anchor Baptist Church).

Anchor has been an established local church (with two names) for nearly 100 years. But this established local church is not a building but a particular group of people gathering in a specific location. This is Jesus’s plan since the beginning of the church and did not start with our local church. And Jesus’s plan includes our church evangelizing and going to the lost, new people coming to faith in Christ, and new local gatherings of believers being established (i.e. churches). Then, the cycle starts with that local gathering of believers, just as the cycle continued with our church. We get to see God’s faithfulness in our past as a local gathering of believers for close to 100 years, and we also get to look forward to God’s faithfulness in this endeavor as well.

The question becomes, then, are you going to participate in this endeavor? With many visitors that have already come and many more potential visitors in the coming weeks (but even thinking long-term—years), we have a great opportunity to go to the visitors outside of the local gatherings and evangelize, start bible studies, show the love of Christ, etc. (but this also includes our neighbors who don’t come as visitors to our church!). This takes your participation. This takes the participation of the whole church body. We do it in hope, the expectation of God’s faithfulness. He does still save people. He still does gather local believers together. He still calls those local gatherings to evangelism and discipleship. He still is faithful to this loop of evangelism and local churches. Won’t you be faithful too?