Garden City KL: Our Vision - Harvest Kuala Lumpur

Resource by Peter Park

Today we’re in the last weekend of our series as we replant the church as Garden City Church.

Week 1 – Our Name – (Drew from…) Bible/Context – KL

Week 2 – Our Values – Gospel – Prioritized

Week 3 – Our Mission – Garden City Church exists to advance Christ’s kingdom through a gospel movement of disciple-making disciples in KL and the world.

I want to encourage you, if you’ve missed any weekends, to go back and listen to the sermons. This series will give you a good overview about who we are and what we’re about as a church.

This weekend – Our Vision – What do we hope to see God do in our day through our church?

Start by telling you a story of a man by the name of Sam James. (Anyone know who he is?) He lived in my hometown in the US for a bit while waiting on some medical things for his family before being sent out to the mission field. And while waiting, he essentially decided to start/plant a church by the name of Homestead Heights Baptist Church in 1962. You’ve probably never heard about it. And he ended up only preaching one sermon at the church and then he left to go to Vietnam, where he served faithfully for 40yrs.

Now, why am I telling you this story? (I’m not leaving.) Because 40 years later after many ups and downs – things that could have and maybe should have destroyed the church all together, Homestead Heights would end up hiring a young ~27yr old pastor by the name of JD Greear who replanted the church as The Summit Church in 2002.

And one Sunday, early on, Pastor JD, somewhat unknowingly spoke a vision from God that he wanted The Summit Church to be a part of planting 1,000 churches in a generation. And everyone thought he was crazy. You probably think that’s crazy right now.

Fast forward a few years…And in 2010, my family joined The Summit Church (intern) and joined the vision of planting 1,000 churches. If I’m honest, I thought the idea was completely absurd. And that’s why I loved it so much. Who am I to put limits on what God can or cannot do? Who am I to say he will or won’t do it? And we sent and sent and sent people and church planters out. Sent out good friends of ours.

Until one day, it was finally our turn. After 13 years of serving at The Summit Church, we were sent out here to KL with the Weiners, who were sent out of one of Summit’s church plants. And here we are today…Garden City Church. We are number 538(/65). That’s right. I didn’t misspeak. You didn’t mishear. (PICTURE) And at least another 15 church are being planted this year.

Now, I’m no JD Greear and Garden City is not Summit, but we serve the same God that desires to do more than we can ever ask or imagine. And none of it is about us. We are all just a part of the wave of work God has been doing in saving the nations through his son, Jesus.

Today, I want to challenge you, us, with the txt that Sam James preached many years ago…Bibles. Turn. Screen.

Text: Isa. 54 2 “Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. 3 For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities.

These two verses sound nice. But God’s people have been exiled. They’ve been defeated. They’ve been carried off into a land that’s not their home. And they’re broken. And it’s in the midst of this, that God says to them…things are going to change. There’s hope. You’re in the depths right now, but I’m telling you that your despair is going to become rejoicing. You’re about to expand. You’re about to grow, outgrow. So get ready and prepare for action. Stretch out – Act in faith now for what is not yet, you can’t see it, but it’s coming. And don’t hold back – Don’t disbelieve or just believe for a little.

Your offspring will possess the nations. What does that mean? It’s not that they or we will conquer everyone physically, but that the knowledge of God as the one true God would spread. Like we talked about last week with Christ’s kingdom, his reign and redemption will go throughout the world.

Question: Will they believe it? Would you believe God? There was a time in the life of this church not too dissimilar. Different time and context. But through at least three different hardships including covid that could have taken this church out, God’s faithfulness has kept it going. Most recently, in 2022, there were 39 people who came back from covid. And they thought about the possibility of closing the church. It would have been the easy thing to do. But they decided to trust God to do what they couldn’t and that he wasn’t done with this church. They fixed their eyes on Jesus and essentially believed him for Isa. 54. And I hope and pray that that kind of faith will always continue in this church.

Many churches plateau and die because they become complacent with what God has already done in the past. Their glory days and everything exciting already happened. And they’re trying to hold on to that instead of looking forward to what God has for them ahead.

Here at Garden City, we will change and adapt our strategies and systems to do anything and everything possible to advance Christ’s kingdom. That means, we’re constantly going to be evaluating and revaluating and trying new things. So if you’re someone who wants things to return to how they were, or you love the church so much right now and you wish things will never change, then I’m sorry but I have bad news for you. But rest assured, we will not change our core values and who we are.

We are going to have a great faith in our great God. Because God has been so faithful, we should be faith-filled. How could we not believe him for more? We’re going to keep pressing towards what God has next. Doesn’t mean that we’re going to try some things and not fail. I’m sure we’re going to make some mistakes along the way. But it will be because we’re doing everything we can to put our faith in God into action for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom.

Vision: Hub for the multiplication of flourishing multiplying churches. Two parts: 1) our church 2) other churches.

1) Our Church – Praise God, our church has continued to grow since coming back from covid. Our staff/leadership look back at the last couple years to find trends, like which weekends are lower/higher because of holidays, and the only trend we see it that it keeps going up. God is at work in drawing people to himself in amazing ways – people are being reached with the gospel, baptized, and discipled. For the month of Jan. averaging almost 5x coming back from covid. We’re not where we want to be in terms of reaching people or helping people grow in their walks with God, but we’re working towards it.

Share some numbers – I don’t know if directly from God but as I was praying for this church and it’s future and how God would use us, this is what came to mind…

500 people. Could the church grow beyond that? Sure. 500 is not a cap but I think it would be a healthy foundation of what we want to do. Probably breaks down to 400 adults and 100 kids. Multiple services. For some of you, you’re getting really excited. Others of you are incredibly nervous. Cause let’s be honest, that’s a lot of people, which means we will need a lot more volunteers – Welcome, Kids – and community groups and everything else. But I know what it will also mean is more salvations, more baptisms, more people being discipled and sent out with the gospel. (What about…)

Facility/Building – Is this the place where we’ll always be? IDK. We’re open. We’re always praying and looking to see what will best position us and allow us to do the ministries God has called us to. Facilities facilitate ministry. They’re not the end all be all. Right now, it looks like we’ll be here for a while. And we’re working to address some of the immediate needs we have: aircons in kids area replaced. Renovate some of our kids area to accommodate the growing number of kids. (And even if we found a perfect facility…)

Strategic Location – Our current location is ethnically, socio-economically, and everything else diverse. I’m not sure there’s a more diverse part of the city across the board. It seems like we’re in a sweet spot, but again, if God leads us somewhere else, we’ll go.

2) Other Churches – 50-100 churches. Why the two numbers? There’s a part of me that’s like with 50, that seems reasonable and doable. So let’s go with that. And there’s another part of me that says, let’s say 100 then, but it also sounds crazy. When the leadership team feels like we have a strong sense from God, we will let you know. But we want to plant all the churches we can here in KL and around the world.

Locally, we are a part of Gospel City Network, that desires to see, among many other things, a church planted at every metro stop in the city. And that number is growing. We want to be part of seeing that goal accomplished. We got to support, in part because of your generosity, a new church plant in the city last year. We’re not directly planting it. But we get to support them and help them a little as they get started.

How do we count? Because depending on how loosely we define the parameters, we could plant like a million churches. Count – 1) We directly plant – ownership take and responsibility for its success – and 2) one of our church plants plants.

So if we plant a new church, we raise up the leaders, we send out our members and plant a church every 5 years, we will in 50 years, plant 10 churches. I think once we start rolling, it’ll happen more quickly but for example sake, we’ll keep the numbers simple. Now if those 10 churches plant 10 churches, we’ll be at 20 and if those churches plant churches, and those churches plant churches, we will end up planting, I don’t know how many. But that’s how we’ll count.

Whatever the case, the heart behind this vision is we want to plant as many churches as possible to reach as many people with the gospel. The number 50/100 is there for us to have something tangible to pray and work towards, not a success marker. We’re not going to look back 40yrs from now and be like, we only planted 37/50 or 73/100 churches, we failed.

As we’ve been saying this whole series, we are not about the success of Garden City but the name of Jesus being exalted in the nations. And we’re going to do whatever it takes to see that happen.

Global lostness statistics. Over 8b people in the world. ~2.4b identify as Christian. Of course in there, you unfortunately have what is probably a fairly decent percentage of people who would identify as Christian, but aren’t truly Christians. They are culturally Christian, or they don’t identify with another religion, and their family is Christian, so they just mark that box. They’re Christian by association. I met a guy in the gym who thought that way. If I’m anything, I’m Christian because my family is. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say 2.4b were Christians, that means at least 5.6b people are definitely not Christian. That’s incredibly sad. It’s overwhelming.

But let’s make it a little more tangible to us and look at KL’s statistics. The metro area est. population is ~8.5m Malaysians and another ~1m non-Malaysians. So about ~10m with a population growth of ~90k people/yr, or 7.5k/mo. On the high side, ~3% identify as Christian. That means, just to keep up with the population growth, forget the 10m people who are already here for a second, we would need to plant ~1.5 churches of 150 people every month totaling 18 new churches each year. And if we were to increase the total number of people we reach to increase the percentage of people identifying as Christian to just 5%, an additional 2% pts, then we would need to plant…over 1.3k churches. And if all the numbers confuse you, then the only thing you need to know is that we need to plant a lot of new churches. And I don’t know about you, but 5% is way too low.

So the only way to reach even just our city is by multiplication. Not going to happen by addition, adding a church here and there. ($ Compounding – ) If I said I would give you RM100m (completely hypothetical. I don’t have that kind of money.) or I would give you RM1 and double it each day for a month, which would you take? RM100m is a lot. But if you chose the second option, you would have RM2,147,483,638. So if you chose the RM100m option, you’d have RM2b less! That’s the power of multiplication. We have to multiply churches.

One of the things I love most about having been sent out from my home church, the Summit: Every weekend, there are more people worshipping around the world at one of Summit’s church plants than at The Summit Church itself. And Summit is pretty big – like 20k people on Easter.

Now, why church planting if the Great Commission is to make disciples? The local church is God’s plan A. Paul on his missionary journeys went into the synagogues and the city to preach the gospel and then he would go and establish/plant churches. On three missionary journeys he planted at least 14 churches. Church planting is the most effective thing we can do to fulfill the Great Commission.

One thing I love about KL – the nations are here. Strategic. Some of the churches we plant and partner in planting may not be English speaking international churches. We don’t just want to plant just one type of church. We’re not just trying to copy what Garden City is and multiply exact carbon copies. We want to do whatever it takes and plant whatever kinds of churches are needed to reach KL and the world.

Reverse engineer some of this…How are we going to accomplish all this? Well, God. But it means we’re going to have to be a sending church – Holding everything and everyone open handed for God to send people out from this church to plant new ones. It is a component of what it mean for us to be a healthy, thriving church. (Without a sending church like the Summit – Parks, Wieners, Joy, Colton, and there’s many more. We wouldn’t be here.) It’s what it’s going to take to reach the nations.

And let me just say: Sending is hard. There’s nothing in me naturally that wants to send out our best leaders. It makes things harder for us here to send our best – because the people who are willing to go on church plants are people who are engaged in serving, giving, leading. And we have to replace those leaders by developing and raising up new ones. So you could say sending hurts us as a church. But it’s not about what you or I want, our ease or our comfort.

If we are going to plant churches, we need pastors, staff, leaders and members to send. We are going to have to develop and train and equip all kinds of people – volunteers and leaders for Kids Ministry, Students, Young Adults, Mens, Womens, Worship, Community Groups, etc.

Do you know who these people are going to be? Some have yet to be reached with the gospel, but some of them are going to be you!

The question is no longer if we are called, only where and how. The call to follow him is the call to be sent and to send. – PJD Summit – Do what you do well for the glory of God somewhere strategic for the mission of God. That’s how our family, and how the Weiners, along with many others, ended up here. Some of you will be called to stay here at Garden City. Others of you will be called to be sent out with one of our church plants. (We already have a list of names we want to send out. JK. But maybe not.)

Something I want to make sure you start wrapping your minds around now, is that you may be one of the ones who gets sent out! It’s not that we don’t like you and want to get rid of you. We can be comfortable and all together in heaven. Until then, we’ve got to do everything possible for the sake of reaching everyone we can.

Wondering – Me? There are generally a few groups of people who end up getting sent out: 1) They feel strongly called

2) They’ll do whatever is asked of them. Servants or go with the flow.

3) The people who say no. I don’t know why. So be careful if this is you. – Don’t tell God what you won’t do.

This is the most important thing: On what basis would God do these incredible things? Since it was the sin of God’s people in Isa. that led them away from his presence and into desolation? They deserved it. God’s grace. His good promises. You know what comes before Isa. 54? Isa. 53.

Isa. 53 Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. 3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? 9 And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. 10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

Isa. 54 is the fruit of Isa. 53. It’s the reward of the Suffering Servant, Jesus. Jesus will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail. The nations are his rightful inheritance. God will do this because Jesus is worthy of it. Gives us incredible confidence as we pray and go about the work – to enlarge the place of our tent and not hold back.

People and churches all over the world are behind us. They’re praying for us, they’re supporting us, they’re sending teams, they’re trying to mobilize their people to be sent here. And when I look at all that, I can’t help but feel/sense that God is going to do something big. Something more than we can ever ask or imagine. Why wouldn’t he?

The church is not an audience, we’re an army. Some of you need to get engaged. In serving, in giving, in sharing your faith, and in prayer. (Prayer is not a gimmicky answer.) The greatest, most effective, contribution you can make to this vision is prayer. “The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelization in history.” – Andrew Murray

God has made a way for you, not based on anything you have done or can do for him. But on his steadfast love and faithfulness. You deserved to die for you sin, but you can be forgiven and brought in and have life with him through Jesus.

Other videos in this series: