Launching Forward With Fresh Vision

GAP Missions News & Update

Greetings everyone. We have just recently kicked off a new season of focus and growth with local and global missions here at The Church of Grace and Peace. This comes as a result of diligent prayer and planning, behind the scenes, for almost a year now. Yvonne Doval and Bernadette Huey are the first members of our newly formed missions board, serving with our missions board director, Linda Fischer. On Mission Sunday in September, the congregation was inspired as we highlighted the current reach of GAP missions. We expect great things as we move toward 2008 and throughout the year beyond. Enjoy the news!

-Pastor Jim Wehrer, Missions Overseer

GAP Missions Launches Forward With Fresh Vision

There are approximately 6,620,377,382 people in the world. By the time you finish reading this, the number of people alive will have increased by thousands. Many will have been born without the hope of knowing Christ Jesus. But Abba God knows them. In Him, there is hope. We were interwoven and formed by God in our mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). He knows us all and does not forget any of us, whether here or in the nations near and far. Throughout the Gospels, Christ Jesus repeatedly tells us to love one another and not to forget our neighbors, but love them as He loves them. Because of His unchanging love, He charges us today, as He did His disciples in Matt. 28:19-20, to “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” In Acts 26:16-18, our precious Lord arrests Saul with His love for him, for His Church, and for the nations. He speaks to Saul about His purpose to save those like him and those unlike him. Our Lord Jesus says to Saul, “…I will deliver you from the Jewish people, as well as from the Gentiles, to whom I now send you, to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Me.” We too are to share the Good News – to tell our neighbors and the nations, near and far, that there is hope in Christ Jesus, that God loves them and has a plan of redemption through the death and resurrection of His Son. He is asking for more than assent to His existence. He is looking for an eternal relationship with those He knit together in their mother’s womb.

Our mission is to answer this call, individually and corporately; but how? GAP has reached out through various ministries to touch people with the truth and the love of God; through nursing home ministry, hospital care ministry and prison ministry, the Lakewood Outreach, the New York City Outreach, the Brazil Short Term Missions effort. We have also come alongside the McCarty family, missionaries to Myanmar and Thailand; the translation of the Bible into the Moor language for those in Burkina Faso, Africa; and the Faith Comes by Hearing Ministry. (This is by no means an exhaustive list of GAP outreach/missionary efforts.) We are at the commencement of a new season; He is leading us into the fulfillment of Matt. 28:19-20.

In the scriptures above, Jesus identified people by groups and nations. While mindful of the circumstances of people’s lives, GAP Missions will be looking at the ‘nations’ and our efforts in light of the Word and the fruit. We continue to hold up the mirror of the Word and have prayerfully shifted to an apostolic paradigm for Kingdom expansion, which is oriented toward extending God’s influence into the earth in both practical and spiritual ways with one heart, the heart of the Father, and His mission vision.