[featured_image]Many years ago I was challenged with the vision of Discipling A Whole Nation. I loved the way that vision flowed out of Christ’s final words to His disciples and the breadth of such a simple statement. I thought at the time – “Now that’s a cause that I could give my life to!”
It’s so simple to understand and yet so comprehensive! What does it take to disciple a whole nation? It takes the Body of Christ in that nation to cooperate together in a concerted effort to make disciples who make disciples.
Several months ago I started reading a book by Jim Montgomery, founder of DAWN Ministries, called DAWN 2000: 7 Million Churches to Go. I was fascinated as I read Jim’s story of the development of DAWN Ministries and the strategic components of the DAWN Strategy.
My heart resonates with this vision of discipling a whole nation. I long to help catalyze the tremendous potential within believers and churches for a direct assault on the discipling of our nation and the nations among us. I long to see all the earth filled with the glory of the Lord (Hab 2:14) as every nation is saturated with local churches.To a great extent, it is on the local level that the battle is won or lost. Local churches are a most crucial part of the body in world evangelization. Unless local churches equip and send out their people to do evangelism and church planting, a nation will not be filled with churches; it will not be discipled. Local churches must not only evangelize and start daughter congregations in their own area and among their own kind of people — i.e., in their ‘Jerusalem’ — but they must challenge and send out laborers to reach their own kind of people in more distant places. They must keep ‘all Judea’ in mind.
Local churches need to prepare their people for reaching slightly different kinds of people near by and more distant. They must reach their ‘Samaria.’
It is also primarily at the local level that Christians will get a vision and calling for the ‘uttermost parts of the earth’: totally different kinds of people both close at hand and in distant lands. (DAWN 2000, pp 155-6)
There are two questions that I want to ask:
1. Will you commit yourself to this vision of discipling your nation?
2. What is your part in discipling your nation?
There is still the reality, however, that one local church cannot do it alone. It takes the combine efforts of thousands of local churches to disciple a nation, and millions of local churches to “change the world.” Jim Montgomery
Today’s Missional Challenge
Embrace the vision of discipling your nation – and all nations. Make disciples and start new churches to reach all peoples.
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