By Alan Findley, Lead Pastor

Saturating Our Community

One of the first things you see when you step inside the building for Overflow Church (other than the smiling faces excited to greet you) is our Saturation Map. This is a visual of where our people have been placed by God all across the area… where they live… where they work… where they spend the majority of their time. It shows precisely where God is working through the people of Overflow Church. And we are praying that God would continue to bring lasting change and saturation to our community.

At Overflow Church, our mission is: “to saturate our community with the overflowing love of Jesus!” Can you imagine what your neighborhood would look like if most people came to know and follow the Lord? How would your kids’ schools be different? What would change in your workplace? I believe that this sort of saturation is the picture Jesus had in mind when He prayed: “Your Kingdom come… on earth as it is in Heaven!”

Just this past week, my wife received a message from a neighbor, asking for prayer over a family situation. The principal at our local elementary school asked us to pray for wisdom in his hiring decisions for the next school year. A business-owner in our congregation brought some of his employees to our Sunday worship gatherings. Each of these examples show the saturation beginning to take place around the people of Overflow Church!

What Does It Mean?

When you hear the word “saturate,” you probably have an image of something that’s sopping wet—like a sponge or a towel… it’s the picture of being completely soaked. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, He told her, “Whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.” (John 4:14) That’s exactly what we want to see happening in our community. We want to see people fundamentally transformed by Jesus in such a way that causes His love to pour over from their lives into the lives of those around them! That is what it means to be saturated.

How Do We Get There?

We certainly don’t have this totally figured out, but there are some necessary elements we have discovered in our pursuit of saturation. If you want to see your people living on mission and experiencing saturation of their own, here are three ways you can prepare them.

  1. Model in Prayer. In Luke 10:2, Jesus told His disciples (as He was sending out the 72 into the mission field), “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest.” Consider how you can lead your congregation to pray such a prayer. If you have a regular time of prayer in your worship gathering, begin consistently praying that God would send out workers into the harvest. Personally, I have alarms set on my phone for 10:02 each day to remind me to pray Luke 10:2. However you choose to do it, begin modeling to your congregation the heart and desire for God to bring in a bountiful harvest.
  2. Equip the Saints. Ephesians 4:11-13 has been a transformative passage in my life. As I understood Paul’s call for the leaders in the Church to “equip the saints for the work of ministry,” I began to realize that ministry is less about doing and more about empowering. J.D. Greear, in his book “Gaining by Losing,” writes: “Real leaders are not those who simply get the job done. Leaders empower others to get the job done.” If you are a leader in the church, your primary purpose is to equip and empower those in your congregation… not to do it all yourself. This is often a large mindset shift (for both the leaders and the congregation), but it is essential if we are going to see saturation happen throughout the Church!
  3. Kingdom-Partnership. Saturation is not something that any one church can accomplish on its own. We must work together if we are going to make a noticeable difference in our communities. This is one of the many reasons we are so excited to be joining the BRKC family! We are so thankful to have already partnered with a number of churches in our association and across state lines to make a more significant impact together, and we believe that our community is better because of our cooperative efforts! The more we are able to join together for life and ministry, the greater our impact will be together and apart.

As you know, our world is in desperate need of the Savior. It’s my hope and prayer that together we can play a part in bringing Jesus’ love and transformation to as many people as possibly in our region. If you would like to talk about specific ways that we can join together across Kansas City, I would love to connect. You can send me an email at [email protected].