Where will you go to church on Sunday? Do you have people nearby with whom you can fellowship and receive encouragement? While the accessibility of virtual gathers has made this possible to achieve without leaving your home, we still have these available to us in abundance.
Much of the world does not have a local body of believers within their community.
Jesus came to build His kingdom through His church (Matthew 16:18), which would include men and women from every tribe, tongue, people and nation redeemed by the blood of the Lamb and worshipping at His throne (Revelation 5:9-10; 7:9-10). The local expression of the universal church is a living organism composed of people who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ and are meeting together for worship, teaching, prayer, mutual service, giving, and witness (Acts 2:41-47). The Bible describes a local church as an identifiable group of believers who gather regularly (1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Galatians 1:2; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1).
This past month we brought together a group of global church planting ministries to collaborate on a project to map the presence of a church or existence of believers in every community of a country. We have initiated this effort in 5 countries. One of the countries organized a partnership among all the national church associations and ministries and has gathered data for every village and neighborhood. They will be entering all this information into the mapping application we developed so that they can start the next step of assigning groups to reach all the places that do not have a Christian presence.
What a graphic example of what God can do through the body of Christ when we work together. Please pray for us as we lead the effort in one of the other 5 countries. We are currently talking with several of the church networks in the country to cast a vision of a united effort to map the entire country.