Multiplying Worldwide
ROB O’NEAL, DIRECTOR OF CHURCH MULTIPLICATION
The World Evangelical Congregational Fellowship (WECF) met in Orlando in February. Leaders of Congregational fellowships from around the world gathered to encourage one another and share ideas. It was exciting to be in a room with people from all over the world! It felt a little bit like being in the new creation described in the Revelation!
It is a joy to know that the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference helped to bring this group of people together. It is also humbling to think that we all share the same challenges. Multiplication is an imperative and a challenge everywhere we look—all around the world.
The WECF had access to two important reminders of what multiplication looks like that week. They met in the city of Orlando, Florida, a place where population has exploded in recent decades. In 1970, before Walt Disney World was built, Orlando was a sleepy mid-sized city of several hundred thousand sitting in the center of Florida. Today, 2.6 million people call the Orlando area home.
That’s multiplication!
On Saturday, the group visited Saint Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. In 1600 (after Saint Augustine was founded), 350 Europeans called what would become the United States home. Today, 320 million people live here. That’s multiplication!
With 7.2 billion people on this planet, we have to say that God’s command to be fruitful and multiply biologically is the only command we humans have seriously attempted to follow and fulfill.
At the same time, what is happening to the population of Christians in the world? And what is happening to the population of Evangelical Congregationalists? Few if any of our fellowships could be said to be truly multiplying. Some are adding, some subtracting, and we hope all are avoiding dividing! But where are we multiplying disciples and churches?
On Friday afternoon, I sat with the leader of the Evangelical Congregational Fellowship of Macedonia. We talked about how difficult it can be to multiply. We talked about the challenges of making more disciples who make disciples. We both sensed the challenge. I felt the ties of kinship with him.
Such a challenge deserves our desperate prayers and our best thoughts. When the WECF gathers again in 3 years, I pray that we will be able to say to our brothers and sisters around the world, “We did it! We multiplied disciples and congregations!” I pray that they will look back at us and say, “We did too!”
Let’s multiply.