O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing!

In 1987 when I was asked to start a new church in Fort Wayne, one of my dreams was inspired by the hymn, "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing," written by Charles Wesley, the brother of John Wesley and one of the early leaders in the "Methodist movement" from which my church was started.

Here are the lyrics of the most famous verse from that hymn:

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer's praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of his grace!

Here was the dream ... to grow a church to the point that in fact, a thousand people could gather to sing that song! The dream has been partially fulfilled over the last 23 years at Christmas and Easter - but this fall, we are approaching that dream on what could be a weekly basis!

This past Sunday we held the first "preview" service for our third campus of Sonrise Church on the north side of Fort Wayne at Cedar Canyon Elementary School. It was an awesome day of celebration as our launch team gathered to begin holding worship in this fast growing part of our community! Though this service was only promoted to our "launch team" - we had 98 folks present for this preview Worship Celebration! What an awesome start!

The one thing I did share with our Launch Team - is that our goal is not to "take" folks from other churches - but to "reach" people who are not connected to the church at all. The only ones we want to "take" are the ones the Evil One is trying to "steal, kill, and destroy" (see John 10) .

With this new campus, our church is now making THREE TIMES the IMPACT which I talk about here. Together with our other two campuses, we had a total of 938 people in worship of our great God this weekend at Sonrise Church!

I fully expect that in the weeks to come, we will have OVER a 1,000 tongues singing of our Great Redeemer's praise! I'm looking forward to those celebrations, and my prayer is found in another verse from this great song ...

My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim,
To spread through all the earth abroad
The honors of thy name.