STATE OF THE CONFERENCE REPORT
Heartland Conference, IPHC
“A Praying Conference of Church Planters”
Written and Presented by Bishop Frank Tunstall, Superintendent of the Heartland Conference, formerly known as the Oklahoma Conference.
“We Have Hope and a Future!”
Thank you for the privilege to serve you as your conference superintendent.
Bishop Talmadge Gardner in his opening address has given us a sober assessment of the present condition of the American church in our pluralistic society. He has also shared the challenge of our presiding bishop Ronald Carpenter to “Live, Move, and Be” as we meet head-on the challenges of our generation.
For us in the Heartland to do our part in confronting our culture as we face our future, we must have a plan of action, and I believe that we do.
I base my remarks today on the prophecy of Jeremiah:
“I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29-11-13).
First. I give honor to my Baby Doll who has been with me almost every step of the journey as we’ve traveled the roads of the Heartland. On March 29 we began our 48th year of marriage; I don’t even want to try to imagine the future without her.
I also honor the highly experienced executive council members you gave me to work with in the Heartland. They and our capable department heads witness together that we have hope and a future!
The growth we are seeing in the conference is gratifying. If we stay the course as “A praying Conference of Church Planters,” then clearly we have hope and a future!
We understand that the future is on the side of our pastors and congregations who release the power of the Holy Spirit in their services. Please don’t run from the baptism with the Holy Spirit in your church. The Holy Spirit is your hope and your future!
Ten new church plants are in different stages of development now in the Heartland, and each of these baby churches suggests that we have hope and a future!
We rejoice in our five ordinands and our seven licensees who are joining the Heartland Conference today, along with the six ministers who in prior years experienced disappointments and departed the family, but are returning home today. We welcome them back home warmly, knowing that they too are evidence that we have hope and a future.
If we let ourselves passionately love the church like Jesus loved it, then surely we will have hope and a future!
If you looked at the stats we just recently sent out for Easter, people are being saved in our churches, and that means we reason to hope because we really do have a future!
Last quadrennium we began to face together the large number of our senior adult churches. In fact, we closed as many churches in those four years as we started. It does appear now, however, that we are turning the corner. We are starting more churches now than we are closing. This means we have a future! Said another way, we can with fullness of faith start making decisions and acting like a people confident of our tomorrows, because we do have hope and a future!
We have congregations that should and can buy land and build new sanctuaries, because they have hope for their future!
The new churches and the revitalized churches in the conference affirms to me that we are a $100,000 conference for the Global Outreach Offering, and a $30,000 conference in giving to scholarships for our young people at our own Southwestern Christian University. Yes! Those young people are our hope and our future!
The new church plants and our revitalized churches tell me that we can raise the salaries of our pastors, and expand their staffs, and at the same time develop more benevolence ministries, because we have hope and a future!
And because we sense the spiritual energy of this hopeful future, I believe we will be a cooperating people who cheerfully earn our CEU’s, and with good attitude send in our monthly written reports along with our tithes.
We are a people who understand that we can have . . .
•network churches, and
•mother churches, and
•theater churches, and
•shopping mall churches, and
•house churches, and
•main street churches, and
•churches with one service, and
•two services and
•three services and
•Saturday night churches; and
•Sunday night churches, and
•churches that will permanently worship in rented facilities;
You see, because we know we have hope, we are a diverse and innovative people who have a future!
Because we have our priorities right in the Heartland, and understand what is of first importance, we can claim what Jeremiah prophesied, “You will seek me and find me when you search for me with your whole heart. I will be found by you . . .” So, please let me call on each of you, all of our churches, to absorb a new paradigm and accept the challenge to reproduce yourselves: each church giving birth to your own baby church.
Ah! Then we will indeed have a future filled with hope!
Because the energy of our future inspires us onward, we can add
•Anglo churches, and
•Hispanic churches, and
•Native American churches, and
•African American churches, and
•Multi-ethnic churches, and
Celebrate them all in the rich variety of their ethnicities. We want our conference to look like the population of the great state of Oklahoma. Yes, this too is our hope and our future!
We have the abilities, the spiritual gifts, the energies, the anointing, and the monies in the Heartland Conference to scale many more mountains together. The writer of Hebrews penned, “Do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded” (Hebrews 10:35-36). The implication of this passage is that you can throw away your confidence. Instead, I challenge you to stay the course and “persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised” (Hebrews 10:35-36).
Said another way, we have hope in our future precisely because the Lord Himself is standing in our future and beckoning us to come to Him. The closer we get to the Lord . . .
•Dangling from three nails, hanging on Mt. Calvary, and
•Crowd in together under the cross with Jesus, and
•Put our hands into His royal blood as it soaks into those old rugged cross beams, and
•Glory in His awesome triumph – that He did not get off the cross but actually stayed, impaled on the red-with-blood cross timbers until He could say, “It is finished,” the sacrifice is complete, and hung His holy head and died –
The closer we get to Jesus under His cross, the more we realize we have a hopeful future!
When we stand at His empty tomb, and receive into our own heads and hearts that He is risen indeed (and if you don’t believe it, “Come see the place where the Lord lay) ” then you’ll know your future! Mary Magdalene is a wonderful role model: “Go tell my disciples and Peter . . . .” We in the Heartland are to tell His story to all peoples in all ethnicities until He comes.
The gospel road wends its way from Golgotha, to the empty tomb, and from to the top of Olivet. Please join me. Let’s stand with Him again . . .
•on the Mt. of Olives, and
•see Him go into heaven until the cloud takes Him from our sight, and then
•witness the angels – the men in white as they say to us, “Stop your gazing into heaven; instead, go do what He said,” because you have a future! Ours is a grand future wrapped in hope, because the One you’ve seen go into heaven will come back as you have seen him go into heaven.
Brothers and sisters, as you go back to your post of service, please, please, please, don’t give away your birthright. Instead, stay on the Gospel Road until it reaches the Upper Room. Yes, let’s go back to our Upper Room and wait there for Him, precisely because the baptism with the Holy Spirit is our unique birth mark; the Holy Spirit is our future! “You will receive power after the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you shall be my witnesses, both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
And talking about our future, I want now to introduce to you each of our ten church planters, the class of 2011. They believe we have a future! They are our front line soldiers. They are the heart of the Heartland’s action plan. With the sword of the Spirit in hand, they are carving our future out of this new frontier that we all must face together, namely, this wicked and perverse generation.
Brethren, please come forward as I call your names. You will be honored with our admiration of your vision and determination to co-labor with the Lord in building His church, and you will receive a lovely church planter’s lapel pen from Evangelism USA.
[Editor's comment: What can I say? I believe this is one of the finest vision statements I've ever read. It is a masterpiece. Thanks, Bishop Frank Tunstall for sharing with me and giving me permission to share it with my readers, some 5,000 strong, around the world in more than 20 countries, and all across these United States of American, as well as Canada and Mexico.]
Posted on
Thu, May 5, 2011
by Hugh Morgan