Sunday Message: What did we learn from the 1990's church...Jesus must increase.

In this Mother's Day message, Pastor Joe explores the landscape of 1990s church culture. The message provides a look at how the church evolved, discussing church sizes from house churches to giga-churches, and the rise of multi-site church models. Pastor Joe shares some personal memories of growing up in the 90s church and serving every Sunday morning as an acolyte!

Drawing from John the Baptist's biblical example, Pastor Joe breaks down the text: "Jesus must increase, and we must decrease." The sermon challenges listeners to move beyond passive church attendance to active discipleship, encouraging them to ask two pivotal questions: "What is my next step in my relationship with God?" and "Who am I discipling?"

The message was also on Mother's Day, and Pastor Joe acknowledged the complex and varied experiences of motherhood. Pastor Joe called for empathy and understanding, recognizing that this day means different things to different people.

Key Takeaways:
1. Church growth should be relational, not just numerical
2. Discipleship is about actively seeking your next spiritual step
3. Churches should support each other's kingdom goals, not compete
4. Personal faith is defined by your relationship with Jesus
5. Every Christian is called to disciple others, not just attend church

This message serves as a call to relational, kingdom-focused Christianity that prioritizes spiritual growth and community over institutional boundaries.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Mother's Day Reflection
• 7:02 90s Church Culture and Personal Memories
• 16:15 1990's Church Size and Multi-Site Models
• 22:08 Reading from John chapter 3 Exploring John the Baptist's relationship with Jesus
• 24:15 Discipleship and Personal Growth
• 26:08 "What is your next step?" and "Who are you discipling?"

Transcript

Pastor Joe Liles: 0:00

Be seated. So as table was saying earlier, we're in a series right now called church shopping, and we lined up the 1990s worship with Mother's Day because we thought that would be an excellent way to honor generations, right that have come through. And just so we know, if we're talking the 90s worship. I just want to let you know, if you fast forward a little bit to the 2000s and then 2010 so 2000 would be 10 years. 2010 would be 20 years. 2020 to be 30 years. So to the early 1990s were 35 years ago. In case you haven't done that math, I kind of feel like, I kind of feel like anything pre 2000 is just kind of like back then in the 90s, but it's 35 years ago, which makes me feel a whole lot older. So, yeah, so much older and so, so we thought, you know, what a wonderful way to go back into a life of worship, and not in a way that we're taking 90s worship and saying there wasn't something valid with it. If you felt any emotion from those songs, it's because we grew up with those songs. We grew up with the songs which gave us those emotions. It connected us to God in a certain way. I grew up with every single one of those songs. I can tell you, where I sang those, when I sang those, how I sang those, what camps I was at, and before we get into that and kind of breaking down this 90s church. So this whole church shopping series is about going through the years of development on how Sunday morning came to be. And if you want to know, we started off in 100 and we went through the year 100 and talked about the early church that was in homes that was small communities of faith that were sprouting up everywhere, because this Jesus movement was starting that they called the way, and Jesus had ascended into heaven. And so now you have these Christians that are that are getting the gospel, and like 70 through 90 and and they're starting to read the word and not just hear the word. And so these communities were and then they're persecuted for hundreds of years as the Christian church. And so they have to fight to be Christian, something that I think in a North American culture, we really struggle with. We're not a persecuted church, and so we can go to church freely on a Sunday morning, we can worship, we can talk about our faith. And then when a moment when we feel like we can't, we're like, Whoa. What's this about? I can't believe they would say something. This is a different persecution, right? They were taken and putting in jail if they were found. So they had to worship in catacombs and in basements and different things like that, the underground church, as they called it, and then you come through that was the early church. And then last week, we moved up through the 1500s and did a church history lesson on the Reformation, which was the big church, split between Catholicism, right? And then also all the way through to what is Protestant, which means not Catholic, right? And so all these Protestant denominations of which Luther was the first. And so if you want a church history lesson, I invite you to go listen to our podcast. You can listen to the message on the podcast right. You can go watch on YouTube. That's fine. But then also we break it down as a staff, and we go through the whole reformation history also, which is really interesting. And then we're fast forwarding a little bit. We're fast forwarding another almost 500 years, really, into this kind of new 1990s church. And we're gonna get to that in a second. But before I start with 1990s I would love to take a moment to pray for a Mother's Day and and I tell our staff whenever we start Mother's Day that I want to honor. I want to honor the day in all of its width and breadth. And I want to take you through what that means for a second. I love Mother's Day. I think it's a very special day. I think as a culture, we have popularized it to be a celebration on Mother's Day, and I want to honor as a church that we understand that there are many different people who care for children, there are many different people who have different relationships with their mothers that are not just Happy Mother's Day, as you see everywhere, there are people who struggle with that. There are moms who want to be who couldn't be. There are moms who are trying to be right. There are moms of other children who will never be their own, but they care for other children away that people will never know. There are grandmas who are moms again and again and again, over and over again. There are so many different types of mother figures out there that we want to make sure that there is a way that we really pray and open our hearts to all of that. And the reason I say that is because I want you to open your heart. I want you to understand as you walk through today that you might experience someone who is not having the Happy Mother's Day that you are accustomed to, and to give space for that. I think that's what we as Christians do we stand in the midst of that tension and say, How is this day for you? And if they say, Ah, my mom and I have a great relationship. I love it. She's coming down. We're doing a brunch. We're going to cook the old things. It's going to be great, wonderful, celebrate. And if you come up to someone and says, I haven't talked to my mom, and I can't even tell you how many years, and you say, hey, let's pray over that too. Why don't we pray over that, that that's gotta be really hard, and I'm here with you for that too. We can be in both spaces as a church and as a people, and that'll actually factor into a little bit of our message at the end too. So we're just going to take a moment of silence after I pray, and then we're going to get into our message on the 90s church. So if you'd pray with me for a moment and then share a moment of silence, go. Oh, heavenly and gracious Father, we are here today because you came for the sake of each and every one of us. Lord, when you say you came for all and you gave your life for all, you mean that. And yet sometimes we only think of one person, and we only think of one way and maybe even one emotion. Lord, when we walk through life and and when the church meets culture. Sometimes we engage in that culture, in the way the culture says, do it this way, and let Lord, you came into this life to show us that you stand at the well, that you meet people in homes, that you pray with those who are passing by, who have lost people, that at times you even said at the moments on the cross that this is your mother and this is your son. So Lord, we know you met this over and over and again, and we ask you to open our hearts. Open our hearts to each and every type of mother that is out there to celebrate and stand in the midst of, to be next to, to walk with, to grieve with, and to hope with. Lord, we are here because you've called us to love, and so maybe that is what today is. Today is just a day of love, a day of love for where you are at and what you have gone through and what you're hoping for in the future. So Lord, in that moment, I give us time again, time to lift up the prayers for those who we know in our heart need A Prayer for Today, on this day that we call Mother's Day, and so Lord, Let us have a moment of silence with you. You Lord we pray these things in your holy and precious name, And all God's people said, Amen. So as we jump into our 90s series, I want to let you know that I was not this cool in the 90s, but if I have an opportunity to wear a jean jacket, I'm going to wear a jean jacket. Can I get an Amen? Now you all had the opportunity to wear a jean jacket too. I'm just saying that out loud, maybe next year, on our 90s Sunday, you're going to come wearing a jean jacket. But I had to go out with my daughter because I showed her the pictures from the 90s. And she was like, what? And I was like, look that. That's that's what it was, right? But I did not own this kind of stuff in the 90s. This was not what I look like. I was, it was, I wasn't cool in the 90s. I'm just going to put it out there like I didn't meet that crowd and so, so we know she's like, Dad, you got to get some barrel pants. Like, you can't get baggy pants. You got to get I wore jingos At one phase. That was a bad phase. We're not going to go back to it. Dang. I wore some jinkos, right? But I wasn't cool. I didn't wear them with, like, the cool skater shoes. Didn't have vans converse, nothing like that. I wore them with, like, Reeboks, right? Which Reebok wasn't cool when it was Reebok in the 90s, right? And so well that. But then my friend here, Matt Poe, he had some cool 90s kicks. Look at those guys, man, when you're preaching in the 90s, it feels fantastic. How many of you grew up in the church in the 90s? Right? Okay, alright, we grew up in the church. How many did not attend church in the 90s? Right? We got some people not attend church. Okay, great. We got some great. We got Landon, yeah. Landon, you weren't born yet. Boy, okay, sorry, I got a call. That's my son messing with me on stage. I apologize. Man, got me again. That's great. So I want to walk you through what 90s church was like. Now, I grew up in 90s church. I mean, so if you want to imagine I was born in 82 there's my age. I'm 42 years old. Proud of it. Here we go. And so I was born 82 I'm working through so in the late 90s, I was hitting high school, right? So that 97 range I was hitting freshman year in high school, right? We're rocking ready to go. So I grew up in this, like, middle school phase of the 90s. I grew up in 9797 we didn't have internet still at the high school, so we had to go to the library to do our book studies, right and everything else. Like, midway through high school, we got Oregon Trail. We're called the Organ Trail generation. Let's go, Yeah, that's right, that's what I'm talking about, huh? Floppy disk, baby. Floppy Disk is so good. So we had to go play all these things right, on the church, on the computer, in the library, in the school, because we only had like, two computers, and so that's where we grew up. Now, the church I grew up in the 90s was a traditional church. How many of you grew up in a traditional 90s church, right? Traditional church. And I mean, all stoles rolls, you had hymnals in the Okay, that's great. How many of you grew up in non traditional church, right, in the 90s? Okay, that's great. We got some B, okay, that's an even mix. Okay, that's really good. So I didn't know in the 90s that there were other styles of churches. I only knew one style of church, and it was traditional church with the LBW, the Lutheran book of worship, right? And that was wonderful. And we can did right Praise God from humbling. No, Ryan, you're going to hear that next week, by the way, so it's going to be awesome. So now with that, I only grew up in that church. I was not familiar in the Lutheran church, that churches planted churches. I was not familiar with the thing called mega church. I wasn't familiar with the thing called a multi site church. See the the advent of the 90s church, if you kind of break it down, was this movement that went from kind of these siloed, independent churches, part of a denomination, to what I would say, started to establish the local church. And what that means is you had churches now, kind of planting their own churches and going multi site. They said, Hey, we can replicate what we do, we don't just need the denomination, which would be like a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Lutheran or a Baptist, right? We don't need them to tell us to do it or plant something here. We can do it ourselves. And so you found these churches that were larger, start to plant other churches, and we called that multi site, and so they would have and there's different multi site models, which we'll talk about in a second. But I but I want to share with you different sizes of churches, though, because when I say a large church, I want you to understand large church. And we just added, for the first time ever, recently, and I would say within the last 10 years, we added another large church category, which we're going to talk through today. If you haven't heard that before. So if I'm going to say that there's a house church, size of church. What size church do you think that is? If there's a house church size less than 20, someone said 15, less than 100 right? House church is less than 50, less than 50 people. Okay, that's house church, less than 50 people. Okay? And in the Lutheran church, that's about 80% of our congregations. There's 8500 congregations. About 80% of them are less than 50 people, all right. Now that's also true of all Protestant denominations, the majority, right? And I'm going to say we're at 80 it's going to get a little bit less, right? It hits about 37% 37% of Protestant denominations, right? Sit in this house church category. Then you have small church, small church. Where do you think that hits under 50? Okay, right around there. So it, yeah, it sits under 100 is a small church, and that's average worship attendance under 100 and then you have the next category, which is a mid sized church, right? And what does that sit under, okay, 500 that'd be a great jump. Can't go that far. 252 50. And below right is a mid sized church, right? And you have that there, that's a mid sized church. Now, what is a large church? Large church, over 250 Yeah. How that breaks down. Like 250 is a big number, and this is something that's very true. It is hard, because what happens at 250 is you move from a pastoral church that has a few programs to a programmatic staff led church. That's the difference, right? And that jump is incredibly difficult, and by the time you get there, you either have a pastor who's going to help you jump to there, or a pastor who has not been taught how to get there. And so the church stifles at that point, right? And needs to continue to go forward. Now we do have now what we call mega church, right? A mega church, and that category was added in the 90s, right? So this is why it's important. How big do you have to be to be a mega church? A mega church is, oh, see how everything was under this, and now we're going to over that. That's the switch. What is a mega church over 5000 I really over 500 Okay, over 1000 over 2000 I'm gonna stay there. So a mega church is over 2000 it sits in between over 1800 over 2000 it's fine. You get that big, you're a mega church, right? You're a mega church. That happens, that's average worship attendance. Now, there's something new that we just added, which is interesting, because I just heard this for the first time. Also, we now have a giga church. Giga church. You guys know what Giga means. It means a billion, which is not true. So I'm wondering why they call it a giga church. Okay, so, but what do you think a giga church is? Over 10,000 people? Yeah, 10,000 people in a giga church. Now, if you've seen life, if you've seen life, dot church, they are multi site campuses. They have over 50 campuses, and they, on a Sunday, reach over 47,000 people, giga church, right? That's the difference. So I just wanted to take you through this, because what ends up happening is, we get into our text today, we're really going to talk through what was this movement. And if you see that we're moving through things, we're moving from this community style church that men, people's homes and did different things, and then you have this church in the 1500s which was a state run church, and you had to go to church, and required to go to church, and you have this in the 1500s but then it's given back. The people in the Reformation, and they start saying, What does church look like if we understand church? And now you move to the 1990s with a little thing that came out in like 97 called the Internet, and it changes how we reach people. All of a sudden, your local church is not the only church to reach people. You can now reach people where, everywhere, who has the funding to reach people everywhere? Giga churches, that's who has the funding. But think about this, the mega churches had the ability to reach more people, which grew them, which means they had to Plant more churches. So in the early 90s, you had eight multi site churches, eight. It's definable eight. At the end of the 90s, you had 100 in 2012 you had 5000 today, there's over 8000 to 10,000 multi site churches. They expect that'll increase 2000 more in the next five years. But what's happening in a very interesting way, and this is a church trend that I'm going to give you, is that the multi site and larger churches are growing, and the smaller, mid size, even large churches at 250 are declining. And you're going to have this middle section of churches that either makes it or doesn't make it in the next 10 years, that's what's going to happen, and they're watching it everywhere right now. So with that, if we're talking about the 90s church and discipleship, we have to understand what our role is and who we are within the church. Who are you as members of the neighborhood church? Who are you as the tenders of the neighborhood church? What is it that Christ is calling you to in the life of the church? In order to begin that, I want to, I want to share relationship to John the Baptist, and I want to talk through a story where, where he was questioned a little bit on who Jesus is and why Jesus was doing the things that Jesus was doing, which we get a lot in the church too. So I want you to open your scriptures. We love Bibles in the church. So I want you to open your Bibles. We're gonna be in John chapter three. If you got a Bible, raise it up. Who's got a Bible in the church? Whoo, nice. Got some Bibles in the church? Yes, I love it. Oh, great. Mother's Day gift a Bible. Fantastic. You can never go wrong, right? They will always appreciate that, and you can give that to them. So we got Bibles in our Bible boxes around the church. If you wanna get up and grab one, you can grab a Bible. We got study Bibles in there, and we have kids Bibles in there. You can take that home if you don't have one. If you're online, there's a link in the description. And if you're on the Bible app on the smartphone, download the Bible app. There's a chair back card that has our church apps. You can download the Bible app and follow along with notes. There. We have a really neat devotional on there for the next couple days, which is called cultivate the soil, which is really about how you cultivating your soil, how you're deepening and rooting yourself. But we're gonna start in John chapter three, Matthew Mark, Luke and John are the gospels that tell the story of Jesus Christ, from birth in some gospels, to resurrection and ascension and other gospels. And the Gospel of John is great. It talks about the Divine Lord Jesus Christ, right? And so it begins in a really incredible way. And we're going to talk about Jesus and John the Baptist. And I want to take you through what is happening right before this is that there was a Pharisee Nicodemus who visited Jesus in the night. He wasn't allowed to visit Jesus. He wasn't allowed to see him during the day, so he came under the cloak of night, visited Jesus and asked him a question, how can anyone be born after having grown old? Because Jesus was saying, you have to be born again. And then they have this whole conversation about what it means to be born of the kingdom. And then you get this language with John the Baptist. John the Baptist, who was the one doing the baptisms before Jesus's ministry. He was the one who paved the way for Jesus, who made a way in the wilderness. And he said, I am baptizing you now with water. But Jesus, who the one who's coming after me, who I'm not worthy to untie the throng of his sandal, will baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and He is coming. And then even John, the Baptist, was the one that baptized Jesus, even though he didn't want to and said he wouldn't. Jesus said, you're going to and he said, Okay, I got it. So he baptized Jesus. Here is what happens in this text, John, chapter three, verses 22, through 30. After this, Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he spent some time there with them. Baptized. He spent some time with them and baptized. John also was baptizing at aenon near Salim because water was abundant there, and people kept coming and were being baptized. John, of course, had yet not been thrown into prison. Now, a discussion about purification arose between John's disciples and a Jew. They came to John and said to him, Rabbi, teacher, the one who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you testified. Here he is baptizing, and all are going to him. John answered, No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven. You yourselves are my witnesses that I said. I am not the Messiah, but. I have been sent ahead of him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom, the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. For this reason, my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, I must decrease. And that's where we're going to begin. So it's interesting. I want you to think about this statement that happens at the end of this text. They're saying, Hey, John, Jesus, right over there, same river baptizing people, and there's more people going to Jesus, and John's like, Oh no, no, I'm gonna get them all back over here. Did you hear that in the text? You didn't hear that in the text. What you heard was John say, Hold on, the same Jesus that was with me. The same Jesus that I baptized. This is the Jesus that is baptizing across the river, the one that I said that baptizes with the Holy Spirit. This Jesus over here is baptizing wonderful. I rejoice at the sound of his voice. My joy is fulfilled in hearing him and knowing that he is near us. Jesus must increase and I must decrease. And this is where we got into the issue with the church. See what ends up happening with the church is that we feel that when we have a church, that you are all sheep of the neighborhood. You are all inside of our wonderful grazing area. It's a beautiful field. We have great grass. It's really wonderful, like it's the best in Northwest Arkansas, and you can graze for as long as you'd like. We let in fact, we don't really ask that much when you come into our grazing area. We kind of just let you in. It's beautiful, and you can graze in this area. And we wonder, but if you leave, we got some questions, what? Why? Where are you going? Why? Why are you leaving? Did we not provide you the space that you needed? Did we were we not next to you? Did we not have a shepherd for you? What was going on when you wandered through our fields and different things like that. What happened in the 90s is that the church saw that the church was growing in these multi site movements, and what ends up happening is you start to silo in the churches. Everyone says, I don't want another church next to me. I don't want people that could come in and they could take our people when we're forgetting, as John the Baptist says that hold on a second. Who must increase Jesus and we must decrease. What we start to have happen is view that the only way that we see church and the only way that we attend church is the way that church should be and the only place that people should go. The 90s actually began something really neat in the background, which I believe, was a local church movement. When I first started here, one of our goals was to combine the area churches in ministry and do and we worked on that for years, 567, years. And the one thing I kept on hearing was, if we partner with you, then all our people will go to your church? And I was like, No, it's not the goal. Like if we partner, we can raise up the kingdom, we can raise up the body. We can see more people come to Christ. And like, no, but our people would leave the church. And that happens over and over and again throughout the whole body of the church. And then I started to realize and ask a key question, do any of our churches hold all of the people in Northwest Arkansas? Not one church holds all we don't have a giga church in Northwest Arkansas. Not one church holds all the people. So do we have room to be the local church in Northwest Arkansas, walking people to Christ, wherever they would find that relationship to Christ, we have room for that. And the wonderful language that we should share with people is, hey, we are raising Christ up. We have a wonderful church. You should come check it out. Hey, it wasn't really my vibe. That's okay. What are you looking for? What are you looking for? Because I can guide you to a church. I know lots of people that go to different churches, would love to walk you into another church. In fact, I have told people, if this isn't the church for you, I will walk you and introduce you to the pastors that I know and a church that I think you'll fit. Because I want you to find and develop your faith as a Christian. I want you to be discipled, and if it's not here, that's okay to me, because there's room for growth everywhere we can begin that. And that's what John the Baptist is saying. Jesus must increase and we must decrease. That's a discipleship, and it's not just for the church. Every one of us can have that every single one of us. Now I want you to turn to verse 26 and listen to this. Verse. 26 says this. They came to John and said to Him, Rabbi the one who was with you across the Jordan to whom you testified, here he is baptizing, and all are going to him. Now I want you to go back and listen to the first part. Rabbi, the one who was. With you, and I want you to stop there. May we only be defined at a point in our life by saying, Rabbi, the one who is with you. Nothing more needs to be said. They defined John the Baptist as the one with Jesus. And then what did John do when they said, but it doesn't look like us, and they're stealing our people, and he's baptizing over there with the Spirit, and we're baptizing with water, and all the people are going to him. This is where, when you are defined by Jesus, and Jesus must increase and we must decrease. John the Baptist says, I delight in the name of the voice of the Lord, and in that voice, my joy is fulfilled. Jesus must increase and I must decrease. Is that the same language that you have when you talk with people and do they define you by the one that you're with? Hey, that's my friend. That's my friend over there. Jess, she's awesome. Yeah, super Christian. Like, totally with Jesus. Awesome. You love her. She'll pray for you. She'll do these things. It's awesome. Is that how people define. You see, what I believe about church growth is that church growth needs to be rooted and relational. That's what church growth needs to be. And what we saw in this multi site and mega movement is that as you grow and as you increase that as some of the relationship starts to falter, because it's not as rooted you can kind of walk in and walk out. It's not as rooted in there. And the difference is, is that when we try to understand a personal discipleship, you have to be in relationship with people. That's the reality. If you're coming here just to consume the gospel and not live it out, we're missing a key step. And we have to understand that if we're going to be a church that moves the kingdom forward, and not just the church forward. That's who we need to be. And if you didn't know, there are different church models and church mega sites, or mega site, multi site and mega church, there are different church models. And it's interesting, because once you get larger, they sound very business like, like, Did you know The first model of a multi site church. It's called a franchise. Does that make sense? Right? It's franchise. And what it is, it's, it's, you can replicate it, right? You have a structure at the top. You replicate what's on the bottom, and all you do is you take the pastor and you stream them to another church. Has anyone ever been there to another church where they stream the pastor? Right? That's great. I've showed up to a couple churches where I expected a pastor, and they streamed in and out, and I was like, well, where's that pastor at? And I was like, Can I go to that church? Like, I don't. I missed out what's happening. And it's okay, because there were hundreds of people in this auditorium experiencing this. That's great. So you have the franchise model, and then you have Ooh, this is great. If you want to learn about the multi site Church, the modified franchise, everyone go, ooh. That gives the campus pastor the ability to preach. Every now and then. Have you seen that? When you've walked in and it's like, oh, there's a pastor preaching this Sunday, you're like, why is that? Because they allowed him one Sunday a year, and he got the one Sunday, and he's coming hot, he's ready to preach the Word. He's ready to go. That's a modified franchise model. Is what happens from there. And then you get the campus model. The campus model says, Hey, you have kind of a little bit more autonomy. You can work into this church and say that the pastor will be the main one preaching, right? They kind of have structure over the worship teams. They have structure over the ministries, right? They're loosely connected right to the top church that's out there that planted them and kind of set them out. But really they're starting to develop their own thing. And the last model is called a church plant. That church plant says, I am separating myself from the multi site church, and I'm going to do my own thing, but I was planted from that church, and that's the multi site model of church planting. Now all that is only about church growth. That's it. Every single one of these is only about church growth, but every one of you have a question in this text and in your life as church attenders, and this is the question you should be asking every single Sunday in the life of you attending church, what is your next step? Now here's how that question is different. If you come into church without asking that question, you're just attending a church. If you come in actively seeking, what is your next step in your relationship with God through this church now you're in a discipleship movement, that's the key difference. It's okay to be here. There are some people that need a season of just coming to church and being present and falling in love with church. Again, embracing the church, again, being present, understanding the church. But if you don't come into church asking, What is my next step, then you're just attending a church. That should be your key question. No matter where you go and where you attend, what is my next step in my relationship with God through this church that's a discipleship movement. It's not the only question. Here's the harder one, who are you? Discipling, that doesn't have to happen inside a church. What's your next step? Is the church question? Who are you? Discipling is your Christian question. Who are you? Discipling says, What is God doing in your life, and who are you bringing to the Lord? Because God calls you to that, just like God called John the Baptist. So if we are thinking about your life in the church and the growth of the church, those key questions will help guide you to who you are called to become as a member of a church. And all God's people said, Amen, let us pray heavenly and gracious Father. We thank you for bringing us here today to talk through the life of the church and just understand a little bit more about the history of the church and what formed and Lord, this is something so different from these moments of the early church and these moments of gathering in homes and and breaking bread with one another and sharing the resources. And yet we still do those same things. But yet, Lord, as we got into these more recent moments, we understand that we have a media and a response, and it has given us the way to grow the kingdom beyond our local church. It's given us a way to grow into other areas, into other homes, and Lord, we've even experienced that here at the neighborhood when people say, Hey, I've watched you online and I've listened to the podcast and I've and I've seen these, and they've never stepped foot inside this church. Lord, we believe that your kingdom can grow in any way, and the church should always be increasing Jesus Christ and decreasing ourselves, the same should be true in our personal life. So Lord, be with us this day. Let us ask these hard questions in our relationship of truly, what is our next step in this church, and then also, who are you calling us to disciple? Who are you calling us to share our testimony with? And Lord, if I say this out loud, I think many of us already know, and it's time to step into that relationship, to disciple them for the sake of the kingdom, not just for ourselves. And we pray these things in your holy and precious name, And all God's people said, Amen. You guys enjoying our series on church shopping. You.