All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “ Abba, Father. ” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
How is your church going to grow? Will it grow by fine-tuning worship, the preaching, the Christian education programs, and the like? Or will it grow by making strategic assessments of the people it is most likely to reach and focusing the ministries of the church on the goal of offering the gospel to those people? In this brief, practical book Harold Percy helps congregations answer these critical questions about their mission and ministry.
After assisting the reader with the crucial issue of motivation, Percy lays out the four main groups of people that any congregation can and should seek out: 1. Those in the pews; 2. Those who walk in; 3. Friends and family of current members; 4. Those who live in the neighborhood. Percy argues that these four types of people represent the congregation's best opportunity to lead people to become committed disciples of Jesus Christ. He offers solid, easy-to-follow advice on how churches can understand the needs of these groups and reach out to them.