Yesterday, I unveiled the vision that Harmony Church is going to accomplish. In short, the vision is to be reaching 170,000 people with the Gospel by 2020. That’s the number of “unclaimed” people there will be in the year 2020, according to current rates, as surveyed by the Association of Religion Data Archives. Our immediate goal is to be reaching “300 in 3″: to fill Unk’s to fire occupancy (295) within 3 years. A smaller goal within that is to have more people in Sunday am services than they have at a Friday night concert. Here’s the thing: we measure how we’re doing in part by numbers, but numbers is not the end goal! More people worshiping Jesus is the end goal.
Here’s some notes and a review of yesterday [we didn’t get a recording 
]. I will, however, be recording a special message to our podcast listeners as well, to be rolled out sometime this week.
The Need in Greenville
- You can find the ARDA’s profile of our county here: Pitt County Membership Report
- I think it’s important to remember that in all actuality, there are probably more than 117,000 currently that do not worship Christ according to Scripture. This would be the number of unclaimed in 2007 (roughly 117,000) plus the number of ’survey-takers’ who are nominal Christians.
- I think it’s also interesting to notice the decline and rise of certain denominational groups in our area; it’s a monitor of the religious climate (the rise of Unitarian-Universalists and Latter-Day Saints are of utmost importance concerning the Gospel).
- Our city is growing at a rate of over 5,000 people a year.
- In order to keep up with current growth rates, we need to be planting 4 gospel-centered churches a year.
The Vision of Harmony Church
- By 2020, we will be reaching the 170,000 through multiple services across multiple campuses throughout the city of Greenville, contextualized to the 4 distinct cultures in our area: urban core, suburban families, progressive rural, and traditional rural.
- We will be leading people to become a Gospel-centered community who loves God and people, lives out the Gospel intentionally in the Kingdom, and echoes the Way to others.
- We will be serving our city in social justice contexts (ie. homelessness, poverty), serving households in familial-need contexts (ie. building marriages, raising children), and serving individuals in immediate-need contexts (ie. addictions, career options).
The Method of Harmony Church
- We will reach the 170,000 by reverse-engineering the big picture to small, quantifiable goals achievable by everyone living and working towards the same end.
- The current timeline, in terms of attendance only, looks somewhat like the following:
- We will be engaging our city in three different, but overlapping, environments: the square, the home, and the well.
- The Square is the metaphor that we will be using for all of the primarily eternal aspects of building God’s church in this city. Within the Square, we will blanket with the Gospel,address idolatry, confront worldview issues, and call people to Jesus in a large group setting. The Square stands for the public square, and our current efforts that speak to this environment would be, most importantly, our Sunday morning services. Our upcoming conversations with the campus Secular Humanist group would also be “square” engagements with our city. The spiritual warfare metaphor for this aspect of our engagement is the air war analogy.
- The Home is the metaphor that we will be using for all of the primarily internal aspects of building God’s church in this city. This will include our efforts to create Gospel-centered marriages and families, as well as to create a Gospel-centered community within Harmony Church. Our current efforts that are addressing the Home environment are, most importantly, Echo Groups. Trailer Park and upcoming opportunities for couples and family discipleship will be “Home” efforts as well. The spiritual warfare metaphor for this aspect of our engagement is the triage; a hospital for the soul.
- The Well is the metaphor that we will be using for all of the primarily external aspects of building God’s church in this city. This will include our efforts to create relationships with not-yet-Christians in the city, as well as to address social-justice issues in our community at-large. Our current efforts that are addressing the Well environment are, most importantly, our community partnerships such as those we have with Uptown Greenville and the Third Street School. Other efforts in the Well include God and Guinness, and the tweetups started by Mr. Proctor (GreenvilleTweets.Com). The spiritual warfare metaphor for this aspect of our engagement is the infantry: the ground war that is painstakingly laborious and slow…but necessary.
I am fully convinced that as we labor to love, live, and echo in all three environments: the Square, the Home, and the Well, we will begin to see a community that loves Jesus, clings to the Cross, and calls other people to worship Him.
