SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, Providence family, it is good to see each one of you. If you're in the harbor this morning, uh thank you for meeting there. And uh, we're grateful that you are here as well. If you have a Bible in your hand, turn with me to Matthew 28. And uh for those of you who are guests with us, we are honored that you have joined us. And uh we pray this time will be encouraging to you. Um, I don't apologize for this, but I do feel compelled. If this happens to be the very first time you've ever been to Providence, um, you probably should know that this sermon is gonna feel different than uh the next 51 until the next vision weekend, okay? And so uh we are gonna open up God's word. Uh, we're gonna look at some things and what he says to us, and then we're gonna spend uh the last half of the sermon trying to think about how we as a church family can apply this in a strategic way. And so it may feel a little different, but we are glad that you're here, and I want to pray for us as we get started. Father in heaven, we bow before you and ask that as we open your word, that you would open up our hearts and help us to see amazing things about who you are, true things about who we are. And we would also help us to understand how we are to respond to what you have said. Would you give us curiosity and faith and courage, obedience, a will to want your will and only your will for our life. We ask, Father, that you would speak through weakness and that you would give us clarity as to where we should go. And we thank you for your kindness that tells us that you're really sovereign over all things, which means you are going to open doors and you're going to close doors. And as we think about strategy, we know that some of these you will shut down and some you will open up. And we trust you with all of it. We know that you know best. You know all things. So thank you for your kindness to us. As we pray, Lord, we also lift up to you the people throughout Nepal and China who are experiencing tremendous devastation and grief and loss. We ask that you would draw near to them. We pray for our church planners in both countries, that we support, that we love, we ask that you would provide for them, that you would give them hope, and you would give them courage to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people who don't know who he is and yet are grappling with the issues of life and death. So help us to see the gravity of the situation around us and the significance of this passage as it relates to it. And we pray all of this in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. As you turn to Matthew 28, if you haven't done so already, I want to remind you and encourage you and to be careful. Anytime you hear a man stand up and say, I have a vision from God. For when a vision is baked in a sinful heart, when it's packaged to be believable, and it's served up with human charisma, and it's endorsed with God's signature, it can be a source of tremendous perpetual evil in the world. That being the case, I want to stand before you and say, I have a vision from God. And by that I do not mean that I have seen something that you can't see. And I simply want to ask you to trust that I've seen it and do what I say. Rather, what I mean by that is I want to help us see something that we can all see in God's word and then ask in prayer that he would move our hands and our feet. And to do that, we need to go back about 2,000 years to a real day when 11 disciples of Jesus saw him in his resurrected form, standing before him. And you can imagine the heart that was puzzled and full of doubt and relief, how they were overwhelmed and frightened and happy all at the same time, wanting to circle around him, touching his hands that have been freshly marked with nails, and his side, wondering what in the world his resurrection from the dead would mean not only to humanity and eternity, but to their individual futures. In verse 17, we're told, and when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. The Bible has a concept that is calling. We use it, sometimes you've heard people say, I feel called to be a missionary, I feel called to break up with her, I feel called to do something. We've maybe heard the word calling. And in the Bible, what calling means is that when God Almighty speaks to an individual, they know that it's pertinent to them and it creates within their heart a determined passion to do what he said. And in the Bible, it's interesting, there's a number of different kinds of callings. There's the calling to salvation. We read about this in Romans chapter one from Paul himself, where he says that when we hear the gospel and when we heard the gospel, those of us who are followers, when we heard the gospel and we thought that is amazing news, and suddenly we within our heart felt that that news was pertinent to our life, and it created a determined passion in us to trust Christ and to repent of our sin and confess Him as Lord. For many of us, the calling from the Lord, it moves beyond that. In fact, in the New Testament, you find repeatedly people feeling called to things like a holy life. Meaning, when God Almighty in his word is read to us, we read his word and we find instructions like, forgive as I have forgiven you. Go and make disciples. And when the Holy Spirit confirms that that word from God is pertinent to our personal life, it creates within us a determined passion to do what he said. And within these verses that I just read from Matthew 28, I want to show you two things that Jesus calls us to as his followers. The first thing is Jesus calls us to live under his authority, to live under his authority. Now, this story, of course, is near the summit of redemptive history, but it's not the beginning of the Bible story. The Bible story, where all the stories are combined to tell one central story of redemption, begins in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth. And he created you and me, and he created all things. And what's so interesting is he created humanity, he made us in his image to have a relationship with him. And he wanted to protect that peace. And so he gave us instructions. There's only one, really. And he gave to the first man and the woman, and yet the man and the woman looked at that instruction and saw it as so overbearing that God was wanting to remove from them pleasure instead of they imagined protecting their own life. And so as a result of that, what the Bible says is they sinned against God. They broke fellowship with him, and suddenly this avalanche of brokenness swept into their heart and into their own relationship with each other and into society, and their nature became twisted so that their nature, which at one time said, your life, I should say, my life for your good, an unselfish way of living, suddenly was twisted. And all of a sudden, people began saying, Your life for my good. Everything broke. And God, even though he was the offended person, in grace, he made a promise. And he says, One day I am going to send a special son to the earth, born of a woman, who's going to crush the head of evil and restore the possibility of you coming back into a relationship with me, with God Almighty. And throughout the Old Testament, we find all these hints and all these promises of where the Christ would be born and when he would be born and what he would do and how he would do a decisive work of allowing himself to be pierced for our transgressions. In the fullness of time, the Christ came. Christ means the promised one. And he came to the earth, and he wasn't just a special son, he was God's only begotten Son. And he came to the earth, was given the name Jesus because Jesus means Savior. And Jesus lived without sin. And after he lived without sin, making him a perfect sacrifice, he chose willingness, willingly to die for our sin. He went to a cross, and there he paid the penalty by giving his own life in our place. The Bible says that he died on the cross, he was buried in a grave, and on the third day he rose from the dead. And when he rose from the dead, he extended an invitation to the world through his remaining followers. And the invitation was very simple. It was if you would acknowledge that you have a sin problem, if you would acknowledge that your sin problem has created a debt before God that you cannot pay, but if you would put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, in his life, his death, and his resurrection, and confess him as Lord of your life, you will be forgiven, filled with his spirit as a seal guaranteeing heaven to come. And this good news went first to his disciples, and they began spreading it all the way down the generations to me, just saying it to you. And what's interesting is all around the world, as this is spoken, including in this room, right now, there is doubt. Some believe, and some doubt. And maybe this morning, as you hear that, you doubt the credibility of that news. Maybe you doubt the efficiency, the effectiveness of Jesus' blood and how his blood could actually atone for your sin and remove the guilt and the shame that you feel. There's lots of doubts that people experience when they hear this good news. And I want you to know that for those of you who are experiencing doubt, you happen to be in really good company because the disciples were doubting as well. We're told here that their doubt was like the waves of the sea, and yet there he stood in front of them as this immovable rock, absorbing and dispersing their doubts until the place that they worshiped. You can imagine the waves, they rise and then they crash, and then they rise again and crash. And there they were surrounding Jesus, encircling him, wanting to touch him, saying, People can't rise from the dead, but you rose from the dead. People can't rise from the dead, but you rose from the dead. Maybe it's not Jesus, but I'm certain that it's Jesus. Maybe it's not Jesus, but I've touched his hands. I know that it's Jesus. And suddenly his immovable nature, the fact that he was standing there, it dissolved those doubts until they all worshiped. And then Jesus said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And these words, if you understand that they are pertinent to you, are not only a word of hope, it's hope and comfort. And the reason is because everything you're anxious about, he's saying that he has authority over. But not only is it a word of comfort, it's also a call to surrender. Because what it's saying is Jesus is saying to us, I have the authority to tell you how to live your life. I have the authority to tell you how to treat people. I have the authority to tell you how to think, how to believe, and how to behave. You see, it's really interesting when you look at the game of chess, and chess, when you see checkmate, it signals the end of the game. But friends, in life, checkmate, when we surrender and bow underneath the authority of Jesus Christ, it signifies the beginning of our life. The beginning of eternal life. And if you see that that is important and pertinent to you, what it does in your life is it creates a determined passion to live underneath his authority. You see, he is our creator, he's our redeemer, and he is going to be our final judge. And one day we are going to see him. He's going to be in a robe that says, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We're going to look at his face, and the book of Revelation says that his faith, his face is going to be so bright like the sun shining in full strength. When we see him, his authority will be undeniable, as will our rejection or surrender to him. So he calls us to live under his authority. And the second thing is with that authority, he calls us to make disciples. When a man rises from the dead, is given all authority, what he says next matters. And what he said is go therefore and make disciples in all the world. I want you to baptize and I want you to teach. It's really interesting in this passage that we speak about so frequently around here, there's actually one imperative, one verb, one main idea, and it's make disciples of all nations. You know you're living underneath his authority when you're seeking to make disciples, not just of people in America, but outside of it. To make disciples. That is what he desires. And what's interesting is what he's saying is I want you to be a disciple who makes a disciple. Well, all of us know that none of us can make a disciple unless we are a disciple, and none of us can be a disciple unless we know what a disciple is. But when you open up the Bible and you simply look for the word disciple and then read around that verse about what those people were doing, you find that disciples in the New Testament are marked by five identities. First, is you find them as a worshiper. They're worshiping Jesus Christ. Second, you find them as a family member, meaning when you find one, you typically found another one. They like to gather together. They enjoyed praying together. They worshiped together. They were a part of a family of Jesus together. The third identity is a learner. They kept learning his word, learning his ways, wanting to grow in their understanding of who Jesus is and how to be a follower of Jesus. Fourth identity is a servant. They use their strength to serve other people. They're looking out for the interest and the needs of other people. And the fifth identity is a missionary. Not that they all packed their bags and went to another country. Some of them they stayed right close to home, but they all became mission-minded. They began thinking, how do I impart my faith and my hope in Jesus Christ to the people around me? How do I create a strategy for doing that? And so we asked the question, okay, Jesus, you tell us to make disciples, but do you give us any handles on how to do that? And he does. In fact, in this passage, there's three participles. Now, I realize I've just said participle, and I've said imperative, and you're like, those are great words. Um imperative is a verb, it's not a suggestion, it's a command. A participle are instructions on how to do the verb. In other words, he says, make disciples. And if we came back and said, How do we do that? he'd say, This is how. First, you gotta be going. The church is never intended to be a place where people just come and sit. It's intended to be a movement where people move. We gather and then we scatter. Second, baptize them. Once we tell people about Jesus Christ and they put their faith in Christ, these new believers need an opportunity to be able to publicly identify with Christ. And so we baptize them. And then he says, we're to be teaching them to observe everything that Christ commanded. Observe means to obey. So it's not just give them a head knowledge, it's to teach them how to apply it to their life. But friends, don't you see if indeed the measure of how we make disciples is to teach them to observe everything he commanded, and making disciples is what he has commanded, then none of us have actually made a disciple until the disciple we're making is making a disciple. It's investing in people who will invest in people who will invest in people. And people who understand and hear these words and feel their heart by the Holy Spirit saying, This is pertinent to you. It creates within them a determined passion to say, I am going to live under the authority of Christ, and I'm going to utilize my life in partnership with other people to say, How can I make a disciple who makes disciples? For 48 years almost, in October, it'd be 48 years here at Providence. This passage has been a motivational force within our church family. We exist to glorify God by introducing all peoples to Jesus Christ and to grow them up to love and worship Him. This is our mission. We want to be disciples who make disciples. And we have a pathway where we say, okay, what could we do if we all did it, we would actually fulfill this mission. And so we say we all want to connect to Christ and to each other. We want to grow in love and in truth. We want to serve inside the church as well as outside in our community. And we want to take the gospel and we want to go to people in our city and around the world. Anytime we look forward to say, no, what are we going to do next? We should always ask, what aren't we going to change? And our mission and our pathway, these things are stable. But every few years, the pastors and elders here at Providence, we ask the Lord and we pray and we seek his face and we say, God, what do you want us to prioritize in this next season of the life of Providence in light of where we are today? Five years ago, we believed the Lord called us to something we called it reach, where each one of us identified four people. So we wanted to reach our four, we wanted to reach our city, and we wanted to reach the world. And now five years have passed, and Providence is in a different place. And as we have prayed over the last year and sought and studied, and as we have written, we believe the Lord is calling us in the next five years to multiply. Now, why multiply? Well, the fact is there is a gap today between Jesus' worth and the worship that he is receiving. And the sobering truth is that mere addition to churches will not bridge the gap between his worth and his worship. And the reason is because population multiplies exponentially. Think about it this way: From the time that Jesus rose from the dead, it has taken 1,800 years for the world population to get to one billion people. And then it took only 226 more years for the world population to get to 8 billion. In other words, if we as the church, not just our church, but all churches, are simply adding, then the gap between Jesus' worth and his worship in a growing populating world is only expanding. Think about it this way: if we rented out Carter Finley Stadium and were able once a week on Sunday to bring 60,000 people, new people every week, into the stadium. We share the gospel with them, and suddenly all of them believe. Just imagine they all believe. And then we sent them all home. And the next week we were able to find another 60,000, and we kept doing this every single week. We were flying people from all over the world and all over our country, 60,000 at a time per week into Carter Finlay, sharing the gospel with them. It would take us 130,000 weeks, 2,500 years to get 8 billion people into Carter Finlay to let them hear 60,000 at a time. 2,500 years mathematically. But just imagine. Just imagine that there's only one disciple in the whole world. And let's just imagine it's you. Just one. And you think, okay, what's the strategy? Reaching this whole world. With the hope that I received in Christ. And let's just say that you spend a whole year, you're sharing the gospel, and one person comes to faith in Christ, and you begin to work with them and teach them and help them to read the Bible, and suddenly you're encouraging them. And then year two, the two of you make one disciple each. So after year one, you got two, and after year two, you got four. And if you kept doing this to the next year, all four made one disciple, and then all eight made one disciple, and then the next year all 16 made a disciple, instead of 2,500 years that it would take for all eight billion people to hear, it would take 34 years. The great commission of Jesus Christ is a mandate to multiply. Where disciples are making disciples to make disciples, and this is what we studied in the book of Acts. The gospel spread all over Africa, Asia, and Europe, not because of superstar rallies, but because of individual people hearing the gospel, saying, I believe, and going and telling other people, and it spread rapidly like wildfire. And so, as a congregation over the next several years, you're gonna hear the statement a lot, and that is that we desire to see everyone at Providence embracing the cost to make disciples who make disciples. So you should ask the question well, what do we need to multiply? And what would be the cost? Four things. First, we believe that we need to multiply our maturity. Our maturity. Because the book of Colossians and many other places in the Bible say, teach everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Him. Immaturity of faith is something we all carry. Every one of us can grow. And there needs to be motivation to grow. And the reason is because if we're followers of Christ and we're immature in that, that immaturity not only brings pain to the individual, it also brings confusion to the people who are observing our lives. And so we want to grow. Just imagine if we as a congregation grew in our understanding of how to pray. Just imagine if you know 10 books of the Bible and after a few years you knew 20. Think of the impact of that. Think if we grew in our understanding and our practice of forgiveness and kindness and mercy and compassion, relational skill. Think of the impact. And so, what would be the cost? The cost to multiply our maturity begins with prayer. I would ask you, would you pray that the Lord God would help you to grow? He would help you to grow. Second, is that you and I would be devoted to practices that help us to grow. In fact, next week we will begin a new series. It's called How We Change. And there's little booklets out in the lobby of that, well, it looks exactly like this. It's called How We Change, okay? And it's a Bible reading guide that simply supplements the sermons so that you can read through the week. And what we're gonna do for the next two months as we seek to understand these practices is we're gonna walk through a series of sequential steps that the Bible gives that if we engage in them in faith, that God says we will change, we will grow. The third thing that we all need to do as a cost, we would ask you, is to help the younger generation to grow. Not only as parents, guardians, and grandparents, but also as a congregation that's been entrusted with so many children, how do we help the younger generation to grow? Tonight, Ben Holden, our family pastor, is laying out a strategy, not only to parents and grandparents and guardians, but also to anyone at Providence who wants to partner, to say, how can the church partner with the home in order to prepare the future generations, the younger generations, to love the Lord. It's gonna start at six o'clock tonight. I'm sorry, five o'clock tonight, and I welcome you to it. Well, for us to multiply our maturity, we're gonna have to multiply our groups. We're gonna have to multiply our groups. And the reason is because we grow together. We're told in 2 Timothy, pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. You notice the command is to pursue these things, but notice he doesn't say and pursue these things in isolation. He says, pursue righteousness and faith and love and peace along with other people who love the Lord and who call upon him out of a pure heart. In other words, we need groups. And some of us were not in a group, and so the cost, what's the cost for us to multiply the number of groups here at Providence where we can multiply our maturity? Well, there's three of them. First of all, it would be for you to commit, all of us to commit, to a group. You involved in a small group where you could be known and were people and where you could know people, where you could encourage them and they could encourage you. Second, it would be to invite people to your small group. Just imagine if on the way to your small group, instead of simply going there, you invited other people who may be standing around here in the lobby or somewhere else to say, Hey, do you have a group? Because I found value where I'm going, and you may find value there as well. And the fact is, is if all of us at Providence are actually going to a group, and if all of us are inviting people to a group, then you understand we're gonna need more groups, which is why the third is to help your group form another group sometime in the next five years. That these groups can multiply. And for us to be able to multiply our groups, we're gonna have to multiply our leaders. We're told what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and trust a faithful men who will be able to teach others also. So you see within this verse, there's four individuals where one thing is being passed to the next with the expectation that they would pass it on to someone else, with the expectation that they too would pass it on to someone else. Each and every one of us have been given a spiritual gift. If you're a follower of Christ, the Spirit of God has given you a spiritual gift which is intended to be used to build up the church. So, what would be the cost of us individually for us to multiply the number of leaders at Providence? Well, first it would be to identify what your spiritual gift is, and we want to help you do that. And once you know what it is, it would be to utilize that spiritual gift. And if you're already utilizing that spiritual gift with 1,300 of you are serving currently at Providence somewhere, just imagine the power and the impact is if every single one of those 1,300 people were saying, Who in my circle of influence has the same gift or passion that I do? You may be a mission trip team leader. If you go on a mission trip, I would encourage you every time you do it from now on, as you go and you say, Who in this group could potentially lead a group next year that I could pour myself into to give them opportunity and some training while we go to prepare? There's many of us who may be a life group teacher or a prayer leader or an outreach leader within the life group. The fact is, is if our groups multiply, don't you see we're gonna need twice as many leaders? And the fourth and last thing is that we believe that God is calling us to multiply our reach. Acts 1.8 says, You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. The last five years we've been seeking to reach our forer city in our world. And the fact is, is we want to continue to do that. And so the cost for us to multiply our reach is at least fourfold. I want to share these with you. First, it's to identify somebody in your life for people to bless. Bless is an acronym. For those of you who've been here for a long time, you know what it means, right? B stands for begin with prayer. Identify people and begin praying for them. Second is to listen to their story, hear where they're from, what they believe. Third, it might be to eat a meal with them. And then the two S's are to serve them in some practical way and then to share the gospel with them. We would also call each one of us to pay the cost of serving the city once a quarter. This last quarter, there were 78 service projects that were done in the city for the good of the city by people here at Providence. And this next quarter, you could participate to simply to be a blessing to people in our own community. The third, it would be to be a goer or a sender. This last year we sent 460 individuals on a mission trip. And that took a lot of people going, 460 of them, but it also took many, many more than that to send them by either giving to them or by praying so that they could go. And one last thing, which is um which is an interesting one, is that in light of where we happen to be today, in terms of space constraints on Sunday morning, I would simply ask you to be praying. A cost that you could actually pay would be to go to Saturday worship services. If not Saturday, our hope and prayer is that sometime in the next five years, we're gonna plant another church. And maybe this would be the year that you would become a part of the launch team to go to another church. And then the last is we believe over the next five years that the Lord perhaps would open up the door and lead us through it to plant and launch another campus. A church plant becomes autonomous, a campus would be a second place where people could gather, would stay a part of providence that would not be here. Now, I realize that I just said the C word, and for some of you, the word campus is the only thing that you're gonna remember when you leave today. Um, I want to encourage you to remember this, though, that the vision that I'm trying to help us to see today is not campus. The vision is to multiply our maturity, our groups, our leaders, and our reach. And there are a number of strategies that have been developed, and some of those strategies, the Lord is gonna open up the window and bless it, and some of them he's gonna close that window and that door, and he's gonna say, It was a great attempt, but that's not my intention for you. Many strategies, and one of those happens to be to launch a second campus that would not become autonomous, but would stay a part of Providence. Now, since this would be a new thing for Providence, I want to try to explain how we get there and how we're supposed to think about this. A few things of clarity. First of all, anytime we're seeking to make disciples, first of all, there's a calling to do so. We know that. He tells us to make disciples. Second, is there's the authority of the Bible. What that means is that we believe that the Bible is supposed to inform every part of life, including how we make disciples. What that simply means is even if we wanted to make disciples, if we wanted to make disciples in a way that was a violation of God's word, it wouldn't be advised. That would be the wrong way to do it. And so for us, we want to open up the Bible to say, okay, God, we want to make disciples. Is there anything, any constraints, anything that you're telling us specifically to do or not to do? And then the third thing, anytime we're seeking to make disciples, is we have to recognize there's a cost. And the Apostle Paul, he described the cost in his own life this way. He says, I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some. In other words, apart from violating God's word, which we don't want to do, we want to embrace any cost to make disciples. And when you open up the scriptures, not only does the Bible not command that the church has one campus, it never condemns churches that meet in more than one campus. Now, in recent years, as we have thought about these kinds of things, we've not gone in that direction. Instead, what we've done is we've added services on Monday and Saturday. We have um uh we have waited and asked the Lord if there's churches around us that need to be like revitalized, that they would come to us and we would send people and leaders to them, which we've done. And then we've asked the Lord, would you help us to plant a church, which we did two years ago, and they'll become autonomous uh next summer. And so the fact is, is we've done these things because we believe the Lord was leading us in this direction. But here we are today, and our ability not only to make room for our family, our church family, but also to make room for future faithfulness and inviting people, as well as making room for future faithfulness to make disciples that they could join us here, it's being constrained by the fact that our Sunday morning capacity is full when most of the people at Providence choose to gather. And therefore, in addition to adding more services, and we're thinking even now, do we add a service on Sunday afternoon or Sunday night or a second one on Saturday if enough people would come? In addition to waiting on churches that would say, Would you please help us to revitalize? In addition to wanting to plant another church family over the next five years, we're open to the possibility of a second campus. Now, I rarely, in fact, never on a weekend do I talk about numbers. I've been your senior pastor for 11 years, been here 29 years, and there's not been a single time I've stood on stage on a Sunday morning and said, let's talk about our numbers, how big we are, or how small we are. And there's a number of reasons for that, right? One is because numbers, they can be a false sense of hope, they can also be a false sense of health, and they can also advertise our pride. We don't want to do any of those things. The fact is, is Providence has all kinds of needs. There are so many parts of our church family that is in need of the grace of God. And I know that, and I trust that you know that as well. But it's impossible for me to be able to try to communicate to you why a second campus is even an option within our minds unless you understand some factors that we're trying to grapple with. So I want to try to give you three categories of numbers to help us tell a story about what's happening here. First of all, is worship attendance, okay? Worship attendance is as you can expect, it's people who come to this service. This would not include people who are on the campus right now, such as kids birth to five years old who were in the nursery and they don't enter this room. They're important, they're human beings, they're here, but it's not who is represented in this number. Well, five years ago, that number here at Providence, we averaged just over 1,700 people on a weekend. And last weekend, we crossed 3,500 people on last weekend. And so that's a factor that we're looking at to say, okay, it's a lot of people. How do we manage not only for them to be able to fit, but also manage future faithfulness that they would be able to invite and make disciples? The second category that we think about is called unique individual attenders. And what this number is, it's people who we know their name. And we know their name because they either give financially in the quarter, they serve in a ministry. So we're like, this is so-and-so's name, and they're serving here on this week, or they're in a life group. And what we know is five years ago, so so all of these people we know, and because they're giving and serving and they're in a group, we assume that most of them call Providence home. If they all came on the same weekend, this is probably who would try to come on the same weekend. And then five years ago, that number was just over 4,000 people that would come on any given quarter. And today it's just over 6,200 people. And so we're trying to pay attention to this. And this is why when it comes to Easter and Christmas, we say we're gonna need seven services, and you go, really? It's because everyone at Providence wants to come on the same weekend. The third factor that we look at is first-time guests. First-time guests are not guesses, we're not like, oh, it looks like there were some guests. I didn't know that many of them. No. So when we say, hey, if you're a guest, you can fill out the blue card and the seat back in front of you and you can take it to the welcome desk, over the last five years, every year there's been over a thousand cards given to the welcome desk. And when we call them and we say, We're so glad that you were our guests, can you tell us how you got here? How'd you hear about Providence? The vast majority of them say, Someone within your church family invited me because they found value and they assumed that I would find value as well. So when we think about those three numbers combined, we look and we think, wow, how are we supposed to manage this many people that the Lord has entrusted to our care? Raleigh has all kinds of problems. And I want you to know that Providence, I do not believe, is her solution. Some people talk about Providence's brand. I don't really know what that is, but I just want you to know Providence's brand is not the solution to our city's problems. Jesus is the solution to our city's problems. And not only is Providence, but there's other churches around here who love Jesus deeply. We happen to be one of them. And so the question then comes well, why not just plant churches instead of a campus? Planting, there's no doubt, is, I believe, an extremely strategic way to reach a city. But it has proven, at least over the last many years, to be an inadequate solution for capacity at this stage of our life when we're growing as we are. When we revitalized Mount Hermon and New Hope, and then we planted cornerstone. All three times I stood up and I said, I want to ask you to pray. And if the Lord tells you to go, I want to ask you to go. If he tells you to stay, I want to ask you to stay. And I trust that you prayed earnestly, and I trust that he led you. But most of us said, He's telling me to stay here. Roughly 225 people went to those opportunities. And on the basis of the numbers that I just shared with you, what that meant is eight weeks after they all left, all of their parking spaces and seats were refilled. In other words, to keep up with current growth that we see right now at Providence, we would need to plant three churches every year that we couldn't afford. In each one of these areas is what we would want to see. Not only that, we would hope to see five to seven hundred people leave this campus to go to another campus in the hope that because you knew the pastor who was going, and perhaps you knew, I'm not leaving Providence, I'm just going to a different part of our community where Providence is at, that maybe it would incline more people to be able to move. Not only would it provide us an opportunity for capacity, but our hope is that it would be located in a place to where those individuals would be reaching people where we currently are not reaching as a congregation. Both campuses would make up the Providence family. We would launch with a campus pastor that today I can tell you is Daniel Savage, and we would send a small staff with him or a large staff, depending on how many people would go. The sermon series would be identical with live preaching predominantly and some video preaching, and the live preaching would be done by Daniel, one of our pastors at Providence, and I would hope to go there once a month. Now, I realize that there's all kinds of questions. Okay, we have five years to unpack a lot of this, okay? But we anticipated a number of questions about leaders and about groups and about campus, and so you can go to pray.org slash multiply and you can just look through there and you can study it. You're gonna find a number of things that we anticipate people are gonna want to ask, and our answer to them. But before we close, I want to do one last thing, and that is answer the question why can't we just stay and do what we're doing? Why is any of this even necessary? And there's really three reasons that I would love for you to consider, and then I'm gonna give you a moment to pray. First, is there remains today a gap between Jesus' worth and his worship, and he gave us a commission to make disciples in all nations as the means to bridge that gap. The second reason we cannot stay where we're at is because today there exist at Providence hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who need a strategy to know how to grow spiritually. They need a group, they need to be activated and trained as a leader, and they need to be sent with the gospel around the world. And the third reason is because many who call Providence long to gather on a Sunday in this place where we are limited on space. So, what I want to ask you to do now, you've heard a lot. I want to give you a moment to simply pray. And ask the Lord to open your heart, and ask the Lord to open doors, and ask the Lord to close doors, because ultimately what we desire more than anything is to do his will. So you take a moment now and let's pray. Would you remind us of the simple categories that are the most important? And that is that you have called us to live underneath your authority and you've called us to make disciples. And that's what we desire to do. We believe that you are worthy of our life and you're worthy of worship, you're worthy of all praise and honor. And it bothers us, Jesus, that you're not receiving the worship that you are due. So we ask that you would give us courage and wisdom and openness to embrace the cost to make disciples that make disciples. That you would lead us in the days and months and years to come to open doors and close doors. That we would only walk in your will. Nothing more and nothing less. So we sing to you now in faith, and we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.