Impact Zones

[Note: Please check back for updates as we continue to refine this document]

Purpose

The church exists to worship God, produce mature disciples, and to make Christ known to the ends of the earth.  Although, there are many functions and ministries in the context of the local church it is important to understand the overall purpose:

To love, seek, and imitate God so that He would be made known to the world.

The Birth of a Vision

The vision of Impact Church started with a small group of people diligently pursuing the heart of God.  As we drew closer to God our heart became burdened for the people who didn’t know Him, specifically for the people of Wilmington, NC.  This burden challenged us to look deeply into our community.  Our examination resulted in a realization that our city was in desperate need to know the one true God.  It was from the tension of that realization that our vision was born.

The Need
Our culture has changed, but many local churches have not adapted to this change. As a result the life changing truth of God’s Word is not being communicated as effectively as it needs to be. The majority of Wilmington is un-churched or weakly churched at best. This problem naturally falls into three categories:

1) First, the weakly churched. King David says, in Psalm 27:4, “One thing that I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to meditate in His temple”. This is an expression of a person that is deeply in love with the Lord. No matter the circumstances, David had one consuming priority; to be in an intimate relationship with his God. Matthew 10 makes it clear that Jesus desires/requires that kind of commitment from His followers. The reality is that many people in Wilmington go to church because it is “the right thing to do”. Their relationship with God is stagnant at best. In addition, the heart breaking truth is that many of these are not saved at all. These people sit in a Sunday morning church service week after week with little or no life change. God wants this to change.

2) Secondly, the un-churched (Barna’s definition). The un-churched population of Wilmington seems to be seekers. Obviously, there are some who could care less about God, but most seem to be spiritual. As we meet people in this community most seem to want to know about Jesus and many want to know the specifics of having a relationship with Him. These seekers find traditional church irrelevant and boring. Understandably they relate God to their picture of church, and in most cases their picture of church is not God’s idea of church.  We know from experience, that just forming a new local church and inviting the public to come will not reach the lost people of Wilmington. The lost culture has an opinion or image of church that keeps them away from any “organized religion.” This cultural barrier has to be broken so that the gospel can be communicated in a way that the culture can understand.

3) The Wilmington culture, like many others, is extremely busy. Most families, especially those with children, have very little free time. A ministry model that requires these busy families to add more activity to their extremely busy lives will not work. We have to creatively build ministry into their current lifestyle. In essence we have to “GO” (Matthew 28).

The Solution

The church is this culture’s only hope. God desires to save this generation, but He has ordained the church to be the instrument of their salvation. God is not boring or irrelevant; therefore the church shouldn’t be either. So the solution to this problem is to create a local church that is fully dependant on God and is willing to “do what it takes” to pierce through cultural barriers to reach this community, and beyond.

Vision

Our vision is to be a church that has life changing impact on our community.

Explanation of Vision

Two and a half years ago when we began considering God’s call to plant a new church in Wilmington we were challenged with a very good question:

Does Wilmington need another church?

At first this was a difficult question to answer.  It is estimated that there is approximately 285 evangelical churches in Wilmington.  So with so many churches, why would Wilmington need another church?  After seeking God and doing some research on the demographics of the community it became clear that the majority of Wilmington (approximately 75% according to Percept) does not have an active relationship with God.  The reality that most of our community does not know the amazing love of Christ deeply burdened us.  Something had to change.  We knew that we had to plant a church to reach these people.

So on Sunday July 9th 2006, we began meeting as ONE Community Church (OCC)with twenty two people in attendance.  The first few months in the life of OCC was really interesting trying to figure out how to have a church service in a school cafeteria.  So after that initial adjustment period we began to focus on our mission; reaching the un-churched of Wilmington with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The majority of our core team was from a traditional church background.  So we did what anyone would do, we attempted to do ministry the way we had seen it work in the past.  But we learned quickly, those traditional approaches to ministry did not work the way we had anticipated.  However, those attempts were extremely valuable because they taught us three important lessons:

1) The culture had changed (The need for authentic relationships)
For a long time the church has had a lot of influence in our community.  The majority of the population looked to the church if they had spiritual questions or needs.  But in recent years there has been a shift in our culture.  The Church, has lost influence with spiritual seekers.  From experience we know that people will not respond to our ministry attempts just because we are a church.  What we learned is that authentic relationships have to form before our culture will allow us to minister to them.

2) Our ministry approach was not Biblical
As we have already established, in the past the church was the first choice for spiritual seekers.  So in essence the church just needed to be there.  In other words, if a quality church established itself in our community then people would naturally come.  But now things have changed.  As we examined our ministry we realized that we were asking people to come to us instead of going to them.  The Bible is clear we are to GO to the people not wait on them to come to us.

3) Our ministry approach was adding to the busyness of life
The majority of people that live in Wilmington are extremely busy.  A typical week includes running back and forth to jobs, multiple school functions and sports practices.  Our culture is just consumed with the busyness of life.  What we realized is that our approach to ministry was just adding to that busyness.  We were forming these church programs and then asking people to add them to their schedule.  We were asking people to come to our men’s ministry, women’s ministry, student ministries, or small groups.  In a way, we were just getting them busier with religious activity.  We learned that we had to figure out a way to live life with people instead of consuming them religious busyness.

It was from the reality of these three lessons that God brought clarity to the vision for this church.

We began to see a church that was committed to making biblical disciples.  We realized that Jesus made disciples by living life with twelve men.  So our vision was to imitate Christ with a life on life approach to discipleship.  Instead of our people just coming to church services we saw a church that engaged people in small discipleship teams.  In addition, we saw a church that is intentional about forming relationships with the community; instead of asking people to come to church we would take church to them.  We would simply recognize the activities of the community and align our activities so that genuine relationships could form.  We saw a church full of authentic Christians that had genuine relationships with the community and were inspired to lead those people to walk with God.  We wanted to form a church where the people were united and deeply involved in each other’s lives.  We simply saw a church that was used by God to IMPACT Wilmington and beyond.

So our God given vision is pretty simple, to be a church that has life changing impact on our community.