Small Enough to Know You, Big Enough to Send You

Every person on this earth is searching for identity and purpose. You see it everywhere—even outside the church. I remember reading a while back about gatherings in the UK where non-religious people, mostly atheists and agnostics, started meeting on Sunday mornings. They’d sing together. Someone would speak from a stage. If you muted the sound, you’d think you were watching a church service. But they weren’t there for Jesus. They were there because God built eternity into every human heart, and people who don’t know Him will still go looking for a family—a people—to belong to.

That’s what makes Acts 2:42–47 so striking to me. It’s a picture of a people who know who they are. They understood their identity—not as individuals doing their own thing, but as a family, together, sent into the world.

That’s where we are at Harvest DeSoto. We’ve been operating just over a year and a half now, and for the past several months we’ve been doing the deep, sometimes difficult and unglamorous work of asking: who are we together? We’re still building the infrastructure we need to function well as a family. We’ll keep building it for a while yet. But we’ve come to a point—and I’ve said it for months now—where we must more intentionally engage the world on mission together, in real, specific ways.

So here’s the line I keep coming back to: we are a church that is small enough to know you and big enough to send you.

I don’t know exactly what that will look like ten years from now. I hope we hold onto every bit of it as we grow. But here’s what I know right now: I can know each one of you personally, and you can know me. You can know each other. You can have real, meaningful relationships in this place.

That may make some people uncomfortable. But I also believe most people are hungry for exactly this. Many of you ended up at Harvest DeSoto because you were tired of being unseen and unknown, and you came looking for real community. “Small enough to know you” tells people: I’m not going to fall through the cracks here. I’m not going to go missing. “Big enough to send you” tells people: we’re not just about ourselves. We’re about something bigger than us.

I want everyone who walks through our doors to depart asking two questions, and I want the answer to both to be an unhesitating “yes”:

Will I matter here? Does this place matter beyond itself?

Too many churches in our post-Christian culture have quietly reduced the Great Commission to either “keeping the doors open” or church growth pragmatism. We cannot let that happen here. The end goal never was or will be Harvest DeSoto. The end goal is the glory of Christ among all nations. We can never forget that.

Our vision, framed on the wall as you enter the building, says it plainly: to be a Christ-centered church family where every person is known and loved, nurtured toward maturity, and sent to reproduce the life of Christ in others.

It’s easy to walk past those words every Sunday. It’s much harder to live them. But like it or not, you can’t come here and just disappear. If you’re comfortable staying on the fringes—stiff-arming real community—then we won’t have the transformational impact on your life that God designed for us to have together.

This isn’t a slogan. It’s who I believe God has shaped us to be thus far. And I’m asking you to own it with me.