Magnify Your Vision for the Small Church

In this day when the emphasis is bigger and better, sadly, the same attitude has hit the small church. As one who visits nationally with pastors and missions committees of these churches who mostly are under 200 in membership, I often get the sense these churches feel their worthlessness and insignificance in the Kingdom of God. As a result, they feel the need to trust what little they are willing to do into the hands of the "professionals", those who they feel are better equipped to work in the international arena. John Rowell's book gives hope and shines fresh light on how a small church can do great exploits for God. And really this is not a new concept. Going back to the church in Antioch which sent out Barnabas, Paul and John Mark, Rowell shows God is still perfectly capable of using anyone, or in this case, any church He desires. And it still is true, availability is far more important to God than is ability. The case study in this book is the Northside Church's involvement in Kosovo, an area where most churches in the US would never ever launch a work. Yet Kosov is exactly where they sense God's leading. And they are quick to try and find the indigenous church to work with and partner alongside them.Frankly, this book should be required reading of every pastor and of every seminary student and of course for everyone interested in missions. Were Rowell's principles to be seriously considered, who knows how much more could be accomplished in the Kingdom of God using the current amount of money and manpower we now have available. (Not to mention how involving church members in the pews would bring even more in churches into the mission fields.)

In this day when the emphasis is bigger and better, sadly, the same attitude has hit the small church. As one who visits nationally with pastors and missions committees of these churches who mostly are under 200 in membership, I often get the sense these small churches feel their worthlessness and insignificance in the Kingdom of God. As a result, they feel the need to trust what little they are willing to do into the hands of the "professionals", those who they feel are better equipped to work in the international arena. John Rowell's book gives hope and shines fresh light on how a small church can do great exploits for God. And really this is not a new concept. Going back to the church in Antioch which sent out Barnabas, Paul and John Mark, Rowell shows God is still perfectly capable of using anyone, or in this case, any church He desires. And it still is true, availability is far more important to God than is ability. The case study in this book is the Northside Church's involvement in Kosovo, an area where most churches in the US would never ever launch a work. Yet Kosovo is exactly where they sense God's leading. And they are quick to try and find the indigenous church to work with and partner alongside them. I personally find this most refreshing that his church is not trying to "reinvent the wheel" and compete with the established chruch but to come along side it and become an Aaron/Hur type ministry.Frankly, this book should be required reading of every pastor and of every seminary student and of course for everyone interested in missions. Were Rowell's principles to be seriously considered, who knows how much more could be accomplished in the Kingdom of God using the current amount of money and manpower we now have available. (Not to mention how involving church members in the pews would bring even more in churches into the mission fields.)

I found this book to be one of the most thought-provoking mission books I've read in the last several years. Not only does it tell the amazing story of how God used a small church that stepped out in faith, but it spells out the biblical principles behind the story. It repeatedly drives home the point that "It is not the size of our resource pool, but the limits of our faith and our vision that determines our impact for the kingdom of God." While this goes totally contrary to our American "bigger is better" mentality,it is a message that the North American evangelical church needs to hear. "Magnify Your Vision For The Small Church" should be read by the pastor/leadership/missions team of every small church and also by the leadership of every mission agency. I believe God can use this book to unleash what is undoubtedly the greatest untapped resource for the cause of world evangelization - the small local church.

It has been rightly said, "A church which is not mission-minded has ceased to be the church. It has lost the Gospel and is dead to the Cross." John Rowell's deeply moving book, "Magnify Your Vision for the Small Church," is the story of the evolution of Northside Community Church, a small church in the USA from the typical approach to missions, applying $12,000 to world missions from the general budget, to a church mobilizing its whole membership into church planting teams, adventuring by faith into a dangerous and desperately needy part of the world to reach an unreached Muslim people group.The journey began by exploring ways of maximizing the impact of their limited financial resources by identifying and partnering with gifted national evangelists on the front lines of evangelism in Africa and Asia.Then came the next step, from supporting to sending. By adopting the "Faith Promise" approach to mission giving, resources grew to match the challenge of sending someone from their own membership into the field. Laurie Nelson, a skilled computer programmer became the first full-time misisonary mobilized by the church. Within just a few years Northside had members serving as new missionaries or tent-makers in Russia, Singapore, Germany and Japan.The third step was the call to adopt an unreached people group. "Professional missiologists taught us that as a mission-minded church, we should give priority attention to identifying a specific unreached people group target of our own - one for which we could pray and toward which we could plan to take the Gospel."Tears and excitement move the reader as the story unfolds of how God used the ordinary praying people of Northside Community Church to plant a church among the faraway and largely unreached Muslims of Bosnia, a culture so different to the culture of suburban Atlanta.Part 2 of this book begins with Isaiah 54:2, "Englarge the place of your tent; stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, spare not..."and it is titled "Principles of Church-based Missions."This half is packed with a wealth of instruction for the pastor seeking to disciple the people of his church into productive Christian living and leadership, with a view to making an impact both in the local community, and over the horizon where millions live who have no way to hear the Gospel.Under the heading "The Small Church, God's Key to World Evangelism," Rowell states that "the most advantageous missions alternative is a model that succeeds by using a pattern of church growth which is indefinitely reproducible."Success has so often been measured in terms of the mega-church, and more lately the meta-church, emphasizing the "bigger is better" mentality. However the mega-church is not easily reproducible, nor is it conducive to the in depth personal all-member involvement in the church planting, church reproducing mission to which every church is called. Rowell points out that 94% of the world's chu

Bill Smith, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. I highly recommend this book for pastors of small churches, missionaries, church planters, or anyone interested in what God can do through ordinary people. It sets forth some challenging ideas in the most effective format, a story. What makes the book so compeling is that the story is true.