A post from Rogue Valley Christian Church, a PACE church in Medford, OR about their PACE experience thus far:
For some time now, our church has had a great burden for the unreached, but has lacked a tangible idea of how to respond to that burden. We knew the Lord wanted something from us beyond the traditional means of having a small missions team and a portion of our budget allocated to various missions. It wasn’t until about nine months ago, when we crossed paths with Team Expansion and were exposed to the idea doing a P.A.C.E project that we really saw how we play a more active part in the great commission. The idea immediately resonated with our elders. The P.A.C.E process for us began with about six months of prayer and multiple Skype calls with Team Expansion to help our staff and elders get their minds around the process before taking it to the congregation.
To launch the P.A.C.E project, there was a four-week sermon series planned on “God’s Heart for the Nations,” along with conjoining small group lessons. On the fourth week, the vision was cast to seek God’s direction in adopting one specific people group who we will commit as a whole to do whatever it takes to establish a Gospel presence among them! We kicked off the P.A.C.E. project with a 24-hour prayer event for unreached peoples, the time was concluded with a prayer service for the whole church together where we were greatly encouraged to see just how many people really are catching the vision.
Through this process so far, we have also been pleasantly surprised by the spiritual benefit this is bringing to the whole church. We have more people praying for God’s will to be done and His Kingdom to come than ever before, and there are a great number of people who are sincerely wrestling about whether they are as surrendered to God as they had thought. All this talk about missions causes people to reflect on whether they would be wiling to go if God called them and most don’t want to; it really messes them up in a good way spiritually.
Now that the project has been brought before the whole church, we are going to be moving quickly to keep as much momentum as we can. We are planning several days of united prayer and fasting where we will encourage people to write their impressions and send them in to our P.A.C.E coordinator. Through seeing common responses, we trust God will lead us to one particular region and eventually a specific people group.
During this time, we will be having a team expansion representative come to our church to do a workshop further helping people see how we can all have a part in this and bring even more definition to what is involved with starting a church among an unreached people group. Shortly thereafter, we hope to have a small group from our church go on a survey trip and come back to report what they saw and experienced to the church. Then we’ll get to work on getting a team there!
