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Carolyn Moore is a Mission Society board member and the pastor of Mosaic United Methodist Church in Augusta, Georgia. Here, Moore describes how The Mission Society expanded her worldview and influenced Mosaic to be a church that would impact their community, nation, and world.

I was an associate pastor at Athens First United Methodist Church (Athens, Georgia) some 13 or 14 years ago when Mt. Bethel UMC (Marietta, Georgia) held its very first Global Outreach Weekend. I attended, and that's when I first heard Al Vom Steeg* (a former TMS president) speak. It was sort of like that experience in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, where you go through the back of the wardrobe and you find this whole other world out there. When Al Vom Steeg spoke about missions, I just found this whole other world.

I had already been called to plant a church, but I really had no idea what that was going to look like. But somewhere in that weekend I got a seed of understanding that local church ministry is not about checking off denominational benchmarks. It is about kingdom advancement.

Mosaic is a little church. We have about 200 people, and about 130-plus have been baptized at Mosaic. They’re folks with no experience of church or a bad experience of church. Many are felons or recovering addicts.

The people of Mosaic liked to serve people, and I was encouraging them, so our members were doing a thousand different things, and our outreach was a mile wide and an inch deep. About three years ago, we realized our problem is not that we don’t do missions, our problem is that we do too much of it, and we do it poorly.

Focus
We knew we needed to focus, and that was the first word that The Mission Society taught us. They taught us how to focus. I’ll give you one example.

One of our ministries was the Maxwell House. It’s a low- and no-income apartment complex in downtown Augusta for adults with disabilities. There are about 216 apartment units in the fourth-poorest zip code in Georgia.

We’ve been down there for several years, but because we do everything a mile wide and an inch deep, we were just doing bingo parties and doing a whole lot of their social work. We were connecting and being loving, but we really weren’t taking seriously the call to make disciples of Jesus Christ.

After we had our Global Impact Celebration (GIC), we discovered that we needed to focus and make something of this. We realized if we could partner with Action Ministries, then Action Ministries could take on the social work side of things. That would leave us to be the spiritual encouragers for our new friends at Maxwell House.

We added Bible studies, and we added more worship, and we added more opportunities to go down and just pray with people. Last Sunday night we had a wonderful worship service there, and we were remarking that we were beginning to see a change in the spiritual atmosphere at Maxwell House.

Mary, one of the residents, came to me at the end of the worship service and said, “I’m ready to be baptized.”

That is what happens when you focus.

Global
The second word the Mission Society taught us was “global.” A lot of our folks really don’t think internationally. But we had some missionaries come speak and say, “We’re just normal people just like you, and in the middle of our lives God yanked us out from what we were doing and put us in the middle of something else.”

That got people stirred, and last year we had two international mission trips. Four people went to Haiti, and three people went to India.

One of the people who decided to go to India was Bryan. Bryan is 19 years old. Two years ago he was a nonbeliever who had no real church experience.

Three days into the trip, I preached a message, and at the end I call people forward. People lined up at the altar and everybody had to pray with people. Bryan had never laid hands and prayed on anybody in his life. But he put oil on his hands, and he laid hands on people, and he started praying for things like healing.

This one woman walked up and he said, “All of a sudden I went blank. I didn’t know what to pray for her. I just put my face towards heaven, and I asked God to tell me what to pray. I laid my hands on this woman, and all of a sudden I felt filled with the Holy Spirit, and a language came out of my mouth that was not my own language.” He fell to the ground and he was filled with the most inexpressible joy he has ever known.

This year at our Global Impact Celebration life commitment service, Bryan stepped forward and gave his life to full-time Christian service.

Last year we sent seven people on international mission trips. This year we had 30 people sign up to go on an international mission trip.

Impact
Partnership is how impact happens.

Three years ago we gave $5,000 or $6,000 to mission causes. Two years ago we gave $13,000 or so to mission causes. Last year we gave $60,000 to mission causes.

I want to tell you about one of those partnerships. It’s with SafeHouse Outreach in Atlanta. They serve the homeless in Atlanta, and they’re one of the ministries with which we partner.  

Joe and Judy McCutchen came from SafeHouse and they brought their son, Isaiah. They adopted Isaiah from Africa when they were in their 50s. Isaiah is about 10 years old now.

Isaiah began to soak in what was happening in our GIC. Joe told me that Isaiah has never once in his life expressed an interest in homelessness or expressed an interest in being part of SafeHouse. He’d never been with his dad to work.

At our GIC he began to see how important his dad’s ministry is to our church. At some point Isaiah asked me if he could pray, and he prayed, “I want to be a better sidekick for my dad.”

The day after they went home from our GIC, Isaiah went to SafeHouse and worked alongside his dad the whole day. The next week, Joe McCutchen came back to Mosaic because he just wanted to be in the place where his son got a call.

We’re a little church. There are 350,000 churches. What difference does it make if Stan Self* comes and teaches our little church how to do outreach?

I can tell you that it made a difference in our “Jerusalem,” with Mary. It made a difference in our “Judea,” with Isaiah. And Bryan is going to the ends of the earth.

*The Rev. Dr. Alvern Vom Steeg presently serves as senior international director of the International Leadership Institute. 

Stan Self is The Mission Society’s senior director for church ministry.