Being a rooted and reaching church is a vital and challenging calling, one that requires the full engagement of every member in worship, ministry service and outreach. In a living, active, rooted and reaching church, no member is unimportant, disengaged, passive or disinterested. Everyone is committed to prayer, participation, service and outreach.

In late December, as I was beginning to think about the possibility of pastoring a new church plant in Forest Hill, Maryland, I wrote a blog post entitled “Healthy Churches: Rooted and Reaching.” In it, I considered the call for churches to be grounded in solid truth while openly engaging with the world, to be salt and light, distinct from the culture but engaged with it.

Now, almost four months later, I have been called to pastor Forest Hill Presbyterian Church, a new PCA church plant in the Chesapeake Presbytery, a daughter church ofNew Covenant Presbyterian Church. In a couple of months, we will pack up and head back north to Maryland, back to a community we called home for years and which still feels like home – as much as anything in this world can. As we look forward to the launch of Forest Hill Presbyterian later this year, I thought I’d explore this “rooted and reaching” idea a little more.

What’s in a name? Forest Hill Presbyterian Church may sound like a boring name, but it’s very intentional: We are a a Presbyterian church and we’re not interested in hiding the fact that we are a church and we are Presbyterian. We are committed to a presbyterian form of church government, to the Westminster Standards and to the historic tradition of Presbyterianism. We are a church, an assembly of believers called out from the world to worship God and serve Him together. Yet by taking the name Forest Hill, we also desire to communicate that we are committed to being in our community and to being here for our community. We have no more desire to run or hide from our community than we do from being a Presbyterian Church.

Every church is called to glorify God and to reach their community, the particular cultural place and time where God has planted them. Our hope is to be a living and vital testimony of the love of God to our community, to find ways to serve our neighbors and reach out in love and humble service while also being very open and up front about our identity as a church.

Who is our worship for? Is Sunday morning worship primarily for the committed believers who are members of the church or is it for visitors who are new to the church and who may or may not be believers? Well, the answer, which may surprise you, is neither!

The primary goal of worship is to glorify God, to magnify God, to bring honor and praise and even bring pleasure to God. Worship is an offering, after all – all about God and all for God! Some people hear that and think that means that worship should be boring and dull. What? Do you think God is glorified when His people are bored or boring? If God is real and the Gospel is true, then our worship should be anything but boring, but neither should it be so trite or trivial as to be characterized as “entertaining.” It should be vibrant, passionate, engaging and sincere.

When we sing old hymns, we should do so with joy and passion, communicating to God and to one another that we are not the first generation of people to know God and to praise His name. When we sing new praise songs, they should be both vibrant and full of vital Gospel truth. When we sing the Psalms, we are singing God’s words back to Him and also reminding ourselves of our connection to the church not just across generations or centuries but even millenia!

What about the preaching? Preaching is to be approached as the time when God speaks through His word through the preacher, who faithfully lays open, explains, makes clear and passionately proclaims the word. Martyn Lloyd-Jones called preaching “Logic on Fire.” Is God interested in speaking to believers or unbelievers? Yes! If the preacher seeks to exalt Christ and make Him known, the Holy Spirit will use the message as a means of grace to draw unbelievers to repentance and saving faith and to draw believers closer to Christ through repentance and faith.

What does our outreach look like? Should we seek to serve the community in ways they would appreciate, by doing good works and being a blessing to our neighbors? Absolutely! Yet the church is not just another community service organization and we must not forget two vital truths:

1. The best thing the church has to offer her neighbors is Christ.
2. We have not truly loved our neighbors as ourselves if we have withheld the Gospel from them.

So we must seek opportunities to serve and to speak, to love in word and deed, to demonstrate the Gospel and the life-changing power of the grace of God through our loving actions and our grace-filled words. This looks different in each community’s specific context and is the calling of all church members, not just the pastor and the elders, but surely the pastor and elders are called to lead by example in this area as in all areas.

Should we focus more on reaching the lost or on growing believers toward maturity? Yes, of course we should! Jesus’ commission for the church is to “make disciples of all nations” and that means both helping unbelievers know Jesus and helping professing Christians learn to follow Him better.

Should our outreach efforts be primarily local or global? Again, the answer is yes! We are to love our neighbors and to take the Gospel to those who have never heard it. We should be fully engaged in our neighborhood and in unreached parts of the world.

Being a rooted and reaching church is a vital and challenging calling, one that requires the full engagement of every member in worship, ministry service and outreach. In a living, active, rooted and reaching church, no member is unimportant, disengaged, passive or disinterested. Everyone is committed to prayer, participation, service and outreach.

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped,when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” – Ephesians 4:15-16   

Jason A. Van Bemmel is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. This article appeared on his blog Ponderings of a Pilgrim Pastor and is used with permission.