I love Acts 1:8.

In those last words before Jesus’ ascension, we get a cascading approach to the mission of the church.

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

As “witnesses, we are called to give testimony not just of the gospel of Jesus, but our personal knowledge and experience of it.

Then we get this spiral of geographic and sociological markers of how this mission will spin out: Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.

Before we go, Jesus talks about how we go. Receiving power from the Holy Spirit to guide us on this journey. It’s a parallel to Matthew 28:19-20. This mission is only done with supernatural power.

For any person or church that knows it needs a renewed missional focus, this single verse offers three critical starting points.

1. It starts with Spiritual power.
We don’t have a spirit-filled mission without engaging the Spirit.

This mission is not accomplished by human power, strategy, or willpower. To do this it requires the Holy Spirit—and why wouldn’t we want it to?

Any new move of God must begin in the spiritual realm. Anything borne of God requires the power of God. To simply want to reach others “to save our church” isn’t a valid Kingdom reason, nor does it engage the spiritual growth that must first take place in our own lives.

2. It corrects a common fallacy.
Jesus maps out a geographic expansion of this witness, and the starting point matters. If you turn to those maps in the back of your Bible, you’ll see Jesus is drawing an arrow, starting in Jerusalem.

Many local churches have fallen into the mindset that mission is something that happens elsewhere. We fund missionaries or initiatives. We collect supplies or tools to send to this area. We take short-term mission trips. We think of local as outreach, and international as missions.

This is a fallacy.

Mission is the primary purpose of the local church, and in Acts 1:8, we see where it begins. For the disciples, it was right across from the Kidron valley, in Jerusalem. For us, it starts in the neighborhoods we inhabit and the communities our church exists in.

3. It defines your primary focus.
​This is the third and most crucial point. Your church needs to have a primary mission focus in its own place. The community around your church is your Jerusalem. This is where we learn to live under this missional mandate of Jesus.

Tim Keller diagnoses the church that has forgotten this: “Soon, the congregation doesn’t look like the neighborhood and can’t reach its own geographic community.”

For many struggling churches, this is the core issue. Once we start digging, we discover that the neighborhood around the local church has changed, but the people inside the walls do not reflect the demographic of the community.

I served at a church that had gone through this transition and was working hard to flip it around. Our primary work was in a 5-block area around the church. The pastor was so committed to this vision that he even told people, “If you aren’t willing to drive in and serve here, please go find another church.”

As Aubrey Malphurs puts it, “The more the church is different from its community, the more difficult it is to reach that community.”

When we forget our Jerusalem and instead focus on different markers further down the line, we lose our primary power and focus.

Rediscovering Your Jerusalem

This isn’t about launching a new ministry initiative or a complex strategic plan. It begins back at Point 1: engaging the Spirit. It’s a work of spiritual revitalization, asking God to give you new eyes for the mission field He has already planted you in.

Get out of the church building. Take a literal walk around that “five-block radius.” Dig into the real demographics of your community. Ask simple questions: Who lives here? Where do they gather? What are their real needs?

Then, ask the hard, honest question that Keller and Malphurs force us to ask: “Do we, as a church, look anything like the people who live here? And if not, why?”

This is the primary work. Before we can ever reach the “ends of the earth,” we must have the spiritual power and the missional focus to be faithful witnesses in our own Jerusalem.

Chad