Matt Chandler - The Gospel Advances

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. Acts chapter 13 is where we’re going to be today. In fact, I’m going to cover chapters 13 and 14. If you think that’s ambitious, you should have been here last week when we covered four chapters! Despite the fact that we have two full chapters here, I’m going to spend the bulk of my time on the first three verses of Acts chapter 13, and let me explain a bit why. Eleven years ago, Highland Village First Baptist Church, or The Village, was 25 years old and running about 160 people. Since then, The Village has grown from 160 to close to 12,000, and it just doesn’t seem to be slowing down. In the middle of all of that, over the last 11 years, we’ve done a wide variety of things both to try to see people come to know Jesus Christ and be discipled, as well as to get people to leave this church and be a part of other gospel works. So we have worked diligently to accomplish both of those. When I first got here, there were two services on Sunday morning. As people started to come and become Christians, we did the only thing we knew to do, because we were young and inexperienced, which was to add services. So we added services and started to plant churches. Very early on, that was our strategy: let’s add services and plant churches. We learned that planting churches wasn’t going to keep up with the volume of people coming. We also learned that most of you would not leave to be a part of church plants but would rather stay here, or go be a part of a church plant for a little bit and then come back here after a few months. So, two services became four, then six; then, we just physically couldn’t do six services anymore. We introduced video on Sunday nights, thinking that would kill the momentum, but it did not at all. We just continued to grow even with that. So we became all the more aggressive about planting churches. Then, someone donated a building to us—gave us a building. We had this section of time where $11 million worth of facilities were just deeded over to The Village Church; both our Denton campus and Dallas campuses were given to us. We did not purchase those campuses; they were given to us in the remnants of that congregation, and some of our congregation, according to land levels, marinated into The Village Church Denton and Dallas. Then from there, we purchased a property in Fort Worth; we purchased this building that I’m standing in. This is one of the highlights of my 11 years as your pastor. We knew there were three grocery stores. We didn’t want to build a huge facility—we had met with some architects and had been told that it would require 30 something acres just to park us at the age-person-to-car ratio. I just wasn’t for building the monster and didn’t want to spend $70 million. Not against those who do that; my own conscience just wouldn’t let me get there. So we noticed there were three grocery stores on this little corner here. We knew there was an Albertsons, a Tom Thumb, and a Kroger. We just began to ask God to let capitalism work its magic and let one of those die, and then, like vultures, we just floated around waiting for one of them to go. We got news that Albertsons would be the one going to be with the Lord, so we immediately, through some contacts we had, heard that they would be asking about $4.5 to $5 million for the facility. We thought we’d offer them $4 million and see what happened. They took the $4 million, and in the most modest giving campaign in the history of Christendom, I stood up and said we need $4 million in the next 60 to 90 days. You’ve got it; we need it; let’s go! And you did it! I mean, it still blows my mind. We were so broke back then, and you made it happen. People sold cars, downsized, and cashed in that change jar that everyone thinks isn’t worth much money, and we bought the building. Then we purchased Fort Worth. People said, «Hey, we don’t buy buildings; people give us buildings,» and I said, «Don’t you go to Flower Mound?» because we bought that building, retrofitted it, and then we bought Plano. In the middle of all this, we’ve just continued to plant churches, continued to send missionaries to the farthest parts of the earth. So really, there’s been no real consistency at The Village Church in how we’ve approached the mission of God, other than us prayerfully considering growing in a knowledge of the Word of God, taking risky steps of faith, and trusting that God is who He says He is. Really, that’s the only consistent thing I can point to at The Village Church. We’ve planted churches, planted campuses, and then in the past January, the last weekend in January, I laid before you the idea that over the last five years the elders have been, in varying degrees…