Gospel Outreach Ministry Update
December 2008 

Praise the Lord. It’s that time of the year again when we provide our Gospel Outreach Ministry website viewers with a brief synopsis of the progress that has been made over the last six months or so. This report primarily covers the time period from the end of June 2008 until the end of December 2008.

God has prospered us in so many ways and we are thankful that He is yet leading us in paths of righteousness, for His name’s sake. The saints have enjoyed a prevailing spirit of unity during this time, and a spiritual bonding that is only brought about by the indwelling Spirit of God. In these past six months, we have witnessed a settling and deepening down on the part of the saints and this time has been a particularly peaceful season. We continue to meet in homes, parks, shelter houses, convalescent and retirement facilities, around campfires, and in a rented conference room at the local Marriott hotel. In fact, we have developed a very close working relationship with the hotel staff such that they have even referred people to our assembly meetings. We continue to have downtown hotel visitors stop in from time to time, including a man and his young children who had been swimming at the hotel pool. Still in their swimming attire, they came into our assembly and enjoyed meeting with the saints (imagine how that would have went over in our past religious circle). After the meeting, we talked to the father and found out that his wife had abandoned him for another man, taken the children away, and that he had just gotten his children back in his custody. He was at the hotel spending the weekend relaxing and enjoying some wholesome family time. We were able to minister to him in his time of need. Another young man, who was actually directed to us by the front desk attendant, is a 19 year old homeless boy. We have gotten to know him and the circumstances surrounding his present situation. We are thankful that we have been able to minister to his spiritual needs, as well as his some of his temporal needs.

We have several new people that are attending the gatherings on a regular basis. While we have different backgrounds and former church connections, God has bonded us together with genuine love for one another. One woman for whom we have prayed many years, has come into a personal relationship with Christ and is a great inspiration to us all. She contributes regularly to our meetings with her unique insight as a retired elementary school teacher. Another brother who has been coming regularly to assembly meetings is an elder and teacher. He has been an encouragement to us with his spiritual contributions, songs and insight into the Word.

While many Institutionalized churches have discontinued meeting on Sunday evenings due to low attendance and overall interest, our evening meetings continue to have the unusual pattern of having more in attendance than in the morning gatherings. Sometimes, nearly double the amount of people in attendance.  This is because of at least two reasons, (1) People worship at other places in the morning, but find a particular interest in our evening gatherings, (2) Our evening assembly meetings are geared towards teaching the saints and edifying one another. This makes them very interactive, interesting and spiritually beneficial. We are thankful for all who come and participate during our assembly meetings, no matter how often they are able to be with us.

We have also begun to provide occasional PowerPoint presentations during this time period.  In fact, since the end of September, we have had eight such teaching presentations.  God created us such that our primary method of learning is though sight (about 75% of our total learning experience), followed by sound, a very distant second (13%). Is it any wonder that mere preaching (hollering and yelling) is so ineffective in actually teaching and edifying one another?

We have really enjoyed these presentations, and you can too.  The table below provides the links to the PowerPoint files, which you can download to your computer and view at your convenience.

But, as we have said before, being a Christian is not about attending meetings or “going to church”.  Being a Christian means living a Christ-like life and helping others come into a personal relationship with our Lord. Rather than our focus being on “going to church”, we are more concerned about being the church. The church is not an institution, it is a living organism.

Our websites continue to grow, both in substance and in interest. We have added many new articles and we also ran an Objections Considered series.  Our three websites consist of 3,416 individual files  (2,163 image files) and over 163 megabytes of data! There have been over 177, 000 website hits to date. By comparison, that would be like the entire population of Springfield, Ohio visiting our websites three times. Now, that is an outreach! We have made many connections and friends via these websites.

We have continued to operate under the divine principles of shared leadership. The priesthood of all believers is well established among us. We have no big I’s and little u’s. Every person contributes according to his or her individual gifting and talent. We have found that when you let Christ operate as reigning and ruling Head of His own church, He is well able to led and take care of it. We enjoy our sonship with the Father and our servant hood with one another.

Our youth are also progressing nicely. They are growing fast, both physically and spiritually. We have as many youth assembling together with us as we do adults, if not more. We continue to set aside times that are dedicated solely to their needs and interests. We had our first ever Youth Camp in June, which was a success. We have had many youth oriented lessons and hosted another Youth Rally during this six month period. Our youth get involved in community service and are good role models for other youth to follow.

Most recently, we have reached out in jail ministry and are presently working with a young man from the local area. You can read more about Daniel by clicking here. This past holiday season, our assembly was able to be a blessing to five needy families. Throughout the year, we help many people with temporal needs. As our operating expenses are minimal, we are able to do more of this kind of ministry than we ever were able to in the past. Rather than pass an offering plate to support the upkeep of a building, or to let someone else decide how to spend the money (a black hole or for blacktop), we encourage the saints to individually give when they become aware of specific needs. We don’t have a tremendously large bank account, but nether do we need one. All of our needs have been met by encouraging the saints to minister to others needs as the Spirit of God directs them. The days of passing offering plates, issuing threats concerning the “devourer”, begging for money and “systematic giving to the church”, are long past for us. Now, we are meeting real needs. Real faces. Real people. There is no comparison of the two different approaches!

Who can believe that it has been nearly 3 years since we left the Institutionalized church? There certainly have been challenging times along the way, but it has been a very rewarding time as well. Little did we know when we began this outreach endeavor that we would experience the spiritual freedom that we enjoy today.

Freedom from what, you might ask? First, freedom in the Lord, for whom the Son sets free, they are free indeed. Secondly, now that we look solely to Christ as our governing Head, we have been set free from man-rule, from many of the man-made religious traditions and teachings, and as the song says, “free from Babel in the spirit, free to worship God aright.”  In a sense, we are examining everything that was ever dribbled into our religious baby bottles.

But this glorious freedom extends far beyond these things mentioned above. Besides the spiritual freedom, we have been set free from many of the temporal “cares of life” that once held us in bondage. While in the Institutionalized church, we were bound to a specific building and collectively we invested about 70% of our entire annual budget to the care and upkeep of that building and its temporal connections. Furthermore, since we were “the Church” with “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, we felt compelled to “bring people to Church” and win them over to our religious system and dogma. Sadly, winning them to Christ and allowing Him to personally direct them seemed to be an afterthought in too many cases.

While we were in Church-ianity, all of this meant keeping a rigid structure, for without structure, the system would soon collapse. Therefore, we met faithfully at the “Church” every week. Three times a week in fact. To do less was to “forsake the assembling of ourselves together”, which seemed to be an unpardonable sin. We paid our tithes. We paid our preacher. We gave of our time and used our talents to build up the local religious group that we were in. Our thinking was, “Since we put so many resources into our building, why should we care or dare to meet anywhere else?” After all, our building was the “House of God”. Consequently, since we were the Church, all who cared to be a part of the Church, must therefore be a part of us. This provided a mindset and motivation to sit back, relax, and wait for all the sinners to “show up for church”. Our thinking was that if a sinner was truly converted in our local area and sought Jesus with his whole heart, he or she would eventually end up worshipping with us, in our local “House of God”. Why? Because God’s commandment is that we all be one and therefore He would honor His Word and lead them exclusively to us, the one true visible church.  How naive and erroneous was our thinking!

Now, instead of being focused on bringing people to a specific building, location or church group, our burden is to lead them to Christ. He is well able to lead them from there. Some plant the seed, others water, but God always gives the increase. God has always sought quality over quantity. We like it when people enjoy meeting with us, and everyone is welcome at our gatherings. But, we are not focused on numbers, and most definitely, we are not interested in starting a “new church”! If God’s Spirit is present at our gatherings and in our lives, and if we continue to lift up Christ, He will draw all men unto Himself.

That's good enough for us. How much better can it get than to be drawn up real close to Jesus? If we keep Him as our operating Head, He will keep the body functioning properly and will place her members in the body, according to His divine will and purpose. May we never forget that the church is HIS body. We are not our own. We were bought with a price.

 Some have thought that we have lost our minds. After all, they rightfully note that we no longer think the same way that we used to. We no longer rely on the same human reasoning that we used to. In this regard, we have lost our minds. But we believe that we have the mind of Christ. We trust that we are now thinking as He thinks.

Please keep us in prayer and feel free to visit us via the Internet, or especially in person. You can also contact us at Back2theBible@aol.com.

The Gospel Outreach Ministry Team