Acts 1:8 (ESV)

⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

I think the number one obstacle for Christian Church growth, expansion and advancement of the kingdom of God, is the lack of the excitement for evangelism in our churches today. And that results in a number of undesirable consequences: 1) No motivation for evangelism, 2) Nobody is even talking about Church growth or church expansion, 3) Even if anyone desiring to start a new church, he’s probably not looking at evangelism by some other church transfer growth. If it is goal of evangelism, there will be minimal. And that’s a sad state of the church completely different from the book of Acts early church pattern.

The reason for lack of evangelism today is due to a number of factors. First, it’s the fear of rejection. Somehow today it’s just not conducive for talking about God, and with the enlightenment and the secularized culture so strong in anti-God And the antichrist forces at work, we can’t even mention God or discussion of God in our corporate workplace, etc. There is just not a sense of excitement and openness for the gospel in our daily lives today in most places, especially in the city where we live, case in point, New York City. That openness and hunger is seriously lacking, and that really handicaps our effort for evangelism. If church growth or expansion is by transfer growth from other churches, and not primarily from conversion and salvation of unbeliever’s background or atheist or secular or backslidden Christian background, there is really no net growth of the kingdom of God and that is very alien to the call of God in Christ. Jesus Christ called us to make disciples of all nations. It does not mean to make disciple and re-disciple those who are already disciples.

There’ s a dying need to discover something, the potency and the power of the Holy Spirit as Jesus promised us in Acts 1:8 that you shall receive power from on high.

Acts 1:8 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

We need to honestly question ourselves why we are not experiencing the power that Christ promised us before he ascended back to heaven, and sent his Holy Spirit to us. And you can see that the promise of receiving the power comes when the Holy Spirit has come upon us, and we see the purpose of the power is to be witnesses for Jesus in Judea, Samara, New York City, and all over the world. The fact that majority of us Christians and churches are struggling to reap the harvest of souls does make us wonder what happened to that promise. Or what happened to us? Many of us have given up and just gone on a non-power mode of living day by day. And that makes fulfilling the great commission to make disciples of all nations incredibly challenging, if not downright impossible. And because Jesus said, unless the “Unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain”, that adds more to the futility, and also frustration and a sense of helplessness.

Frankly, that explains the state of the church today in America and many parts of the world. The only thing that brings in new growth, sort of triggering into the church is more for people invited to come to church through friendship, persuasion, through prayer and nothing straight through evangelism and reap in the harvest like what we see in the book of Acts by Paul. That’s why I am very intrigued and interested to analyze the life ministry of Paul in the book of Acts and to glean how God worked through him and pray that God will do likewise through us today.

(to be continued…)