Our soul winning passage from the Word of God today is Luke 15:4 which reads: “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?”

Our soul winning quote today is from C. S. Lewis. He said: “The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.”

Our soul winning devotional is part 107 of our series titled “What Evangelism Is” from Dave Earley and David Wheeler.

Ten Reasons to Plant a Church (Part 4)

4. “It Is Easier to Give Birth Than to Raise the Dead”

This statement was a trumpet call of the great church-planting efforts of the Baptist Bible Fellowship of the 1950s. This great theme prompted a young graduate of Baptist Bible College named Jerry Falwell to start Thomas Road Baptist Church in his hometown in 1956, along with a handful of believers.

It also is the theme that motivated Dave Earley to launch New Life Church in Gahanna/ Columbus, Ohio, when he was just 26 years old and a recent graduate of Liberty University and Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. Earley understood that he did not have the experience, wisdom, wiring, or patience to lead an existing church in its retooling efforts to reach the lost members of his generation. So he started a new church that was better designed to speak the language of the unchurched. While his church started out being smaller than most of the existing churches in his suburb, it quickly outgrew and reached more lost people than all of them. This shows how new churches can uniquely impact a community. At the new church there were no traditional barriers to hurdle, no mind-set strongholds to tear down, no committees to please, and no inward focus to circumvent. The new church could simply focus on the task at hand: wining the lost at any cost.

Maybe your calling is to be a “transitioner” at an existing church. If so, you are attempting to shift old assumptions regarding evangelism so that you can reach out to your community in new ways. If that is the case, may God bless you! I hope you are able to lead your church in becoming a true multiplication center that is also dedicated to launching new churches all over the world. However, it is important to note that incredible amounts of time, energy, and effort can be expended trying to transition existing churches, and some have done so with great success. While it can sometimes be done, we need to accept the fact that it is indeed easier to give birth than to raise the dead.