Every year at this time, I do a series that the broader title is the Great Commission Series. The idea is we want to remind our church and tell all the newcomers what our church's DNA is. What's distinctive about us? What do we believe? How do we operate? What are we about? The subtitle of the Great Commission Series this year is More and Better Disciples. I'm trying to put that phrase in your head, trying to repeat it a lot over a few weeks so that it'll be part of your vocabulary and you'll begin to say it too. At our church, our goal, our mission is to make more and better disciples of Jesus. Today, I want to preach a message that I call Where Word and Spirit Meet. Where Word and Spirit Meet, where they converge, where they come together. I want to ask a question. Why is it that we think we have to choose? Have you ever noticed that how Christians sometimes talk about churches as though they're really only two kinds? On one side, you've got the Bible churches. They preach the Bible and they study the Bible. They bring notebooks and they bring pens and they take notes. It's happening around you right now. They can explain the difference at a Bible church between justification and sanctification. Let me tell you, all that's fantastic. It's good. We need it. Then on the other hand, you've got churches known for passionate worship and fervent prayers and expressive ways to praise God and exercising spiritual gifts and expecting God to move in supernatural ways. They've often been called spirit-filled churches or spirit churches. All that stuff's wonderful too. We need it all. But somewhere along the way, Christians began to act like you have to choose. You can either have sound doctrine or you can have spiritual power. You can have Bible teaching or you can have passionate worship. You can have a church where people think or you can have a church where people feel. But I want to know, who told us we had to choose? Here's something I've noticed. For the last 17 or 18 years, I've been driving home from the FedEx Forum where the Grizzlies play their basketball games, working those games. For the longest time, I'm a creature of habit. I'm speaking to creatures of habit because I know where to find you. You're sitting in your seat where you sit all the time. I'm a creature of habit. I take the same route home. I did it for years until they started doing construction in downtown Memphis and they just cut off all my escape routes and took me on a detour. Then I found out that that detour is actually shorter than the route I've been taking all these years. Have you ever driven home for the same way for years only to discover there's a quicker route? Somebody tells you about it and your first response is like me, oh, that can't be right. Well, why is that? Have you even checked? I hadn't even checked. You've always just gone the other way. Sometimes we mistake what we're accustomed to as being the only way and the best way. And Christians can do the same thing with their expectations about God. You following what I'm saying today? Don't turn there, but I want you to think about the story in John chapter 9 where Jesus heals a blind man who had been blind from birth and he was over 40 years old. Can we agree that'd be an impressive miracle? So he heals the blind man. You would think everybody would celebrate, but the religious leaders weren't celebrating. They were interrogating. They were questioning the guy who did this to you. And they couldn't get past the fact that in their opinion, Jesus healed this guy on the wrong day of the week. He healed them on the Sabbath and the rule was you can't do any work on the Sabbath. And I'm going, I don't think there's a long line of people doing this healing work and doing it on the wrong. I think it's only Jesus anyway. The blind man could see, but the religious leaders couldn't see. At least they couldn't see past their own assumptions. And that makes me wonder, could some of our expectations about God have been shaped more by our church background than they have been shaped by the Bible? You see, when we emphasize the word without the spirit, we become dry and academic and church feels like school. When we emphasize the spirit without the word, we get carried away into crazy nonsense. I don't want to be dry and academic or in crazy nonsense, do you? But when the word and spirit converge, when they come together, then we grow into these balanced disciples that Jesus meant for us to become. So I'm going to take you on a progression in this topical message today. And I'm going to do it under three headings and it's going to move forward and it's going to end up with us. But first, Jesus showed us where word and spirit meet. So let's think about Jesus. I had tons of verses to choose from, of course. But listen to how the disciples on the road to Emmaus on the day Jesus rose from the dead, they were all forlorn and sad and they felt like losers and they thought their whole movement was done. A stranger comes up beside them. They don't recognize him at first. They don't know it's the Lord. He asked them questions. He says, hey, what's going on with you guys? Why you're so sad? And they say, haven't you heard what happened to Jesus of Nazareth? And then we read in Luke 24, 19. Here's what they say of him. Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word. Everybody [00:40:00 - 00:48:00] Therefore, Paul and Barnabas stayed there a long time, speaking boldly in the Lord, which is word, who was bearing witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands, that spirit. [00:48:00 - 00:56:00] Word and spirit. Tell me you've seen in that verse. So what were Paul and Barnabas doing? They were speaking boldly. By the way, in the book of Acts, no one ever asked or prays for a filling of the Holy Spirit. When the book of Acts says someone or their church is being filled with the Holy Spirit, it's the result of they always ask God for boldness to speak about the gospel in Jesus. So I've adopted that into my life, and I don't really say, God, would you fill me with the Holy Spirit today? I pray the live to love prayer. Do you know what the live to love prayer is? Father in heaven, thank you for another day of life to live, to know and love you, and to love with Jesus. Please anoint and fill me with the Holy Spirit so that I can love and trust you and love those you put in my path today for your glory. I pray, God, give me boldness today to show the people that come along my path how Jesus would interact with them if he were here in the flesh. You follow that? So when we talk about bearing witness through the word of his grace and speaking boldly, our church needs to pray for boldness. I didn't know Bill was going to pray the elder prayer that he did, but he prayed about it three or four times. God, give us bravery. Give us courage. Then they were speaking boldly, and what was the Lord doing because they were speaking boldly? He was bearing witness to the word of his grace through signs and wonders that they did by their own hands. Let me draw that to a conclusion. The miracles did not replace the message. The miracles pointed to the message. The message is the power of God into salvation for those who hear and believe. Let's see it again in 1 Thessalonians 1, verse 5. The apostle Paul writes through the Thessalonians. It's hard for me not to tell this story. The first year of our church, there was a guy in our church. He had probably never been to church before. His name was Sonny, but his name should have been Willie because he looked just like Willie Nelson. Dressed like him, ponytail, same age. Willie Nelson's coming to my church, first year I'm the pastor. And I am teaching in the text, and I say, like, turn to 1 Thessalonians 1, and there was maybe 50 people in the room, so there was really no inhibitions. And Sonny raises his hand, and he says, Pastor Trevor, I have a question. And it brought the whole meeting to a stop. And I said, what's your question, Sonny? He said, what's a Thessalonian? I was so humbled by that. Here's a guy, he was a one. Somebody invited him to our church. And I'm giving Bible language, and I'm not explaining it. And he's like, if you want me to understand, define your terms. Here's what a Thessalonian is. It's a person who lives in Thessalonica. Did that help? It's a person who lives on the island of Greece, where the Apostle Paul started a church. And when he got there, they had never heard about Jesus. And when he left, a whole bunch of them believed. And here's what he said about them. For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance. When you become a word and spirit church, do you see word and spirit in that verse? Word only, that's word. Also in power, in the Holy Spirit, that's spirit. When you put word and spirit together, you know the next gift God gives to the church? Assurance. Like he begins to remove your doubt, because you went and got your prayers prayed, and God answered them. And you're seeing people live out the gospel in front of you. And you're seeing folks that have the real thing, and they're not hypocrites, and they're also not super spiritual. And you're like, man, if God can do it for them, I'm beginning to think he can do it for me. I don't have to live in doubt anymore. Word and spirit brings assurance. And I just pray, God, let me preach to people, and let me show them your word. And Sunday after Sunday, and week after week, and in small groups, you just begin to raise their assurance quotient. And they used to go to bed wondering if they were a Christian. Now they know. They know because word and spirit. Do you see it in the verse? And by the way, this wasn't confined to the apostles. Word and spirit did not belong to some super spiritual class of persons that we could never join. I want you to think about a guy named Ananias in Acts chapter 9. You know what happened to Ananias? He was just praying one day, and God spoke to him. I don't know if when he was praying was expecting to hear from God, but he did. And God gave him a message that he really didn't want to receive. He said, Ananias, there's a guy named Saul, but you've heard of him. And Ananias goes, heard of him? I'm really afraid of him. We all are afraid of him, Lord. He's public enemy number one for the church. He's our living terrorist. He's the guy that has arrested and imprisoned some of our parents and uncles and cousins. Yeah, I've heard of him. And God says, I want you to go and pray for him. And Ananias goes, who, me? What? Well, here's how it went down. God told him to go visit Saul, the man who had been persecuting Christians. And I want you to know, how does the Bible introduce Ananias? Well, if you look in Acts 9, verse 10, here's what you'll find out. Here's Ananias' resume. He is a certain disciple. If I were putting that, if I had my own Bible translation, I would just call him a regular dude. Just an ordinary believer. He wasn't an apostle. He wasn't a scribe. He wasn't one of the 12. He wasn't a famous preacher. He was just a believer. Ananias obeyed God, went to Saul of Tarsus, laid his hands on his shoulders, perhaps. And Saul had been blind for three or four days. And the Bible says something like scales fell off of Paul's eyes when Ananias touched him and prayed for him. And he received his sight. God used an ordinary disciple in an unforgettable moment in an extraordinary way. And it made me wonder, what might God do through ordinary people like us if we made ourselves available? I want to illustrate that by telling a story about a pastor that's with the Lord now, but I have admired him, his teaching, his videos, and his books for a long time. His name was John Wimber. And John Wimber was a rock and roll singer and musician in the late 60s when that was becoming cool with the British invasion and all that. But he was over in California where they were kind of just cooling out and chilling out and being hippies. And then the Lord saved him and called him into the ministry. And so now we're in the late 1970s. He leaves the music business. He played with the Righteous Brothers, if you're old enough to remember those guys. In the late 70s, Wimber's pastoring a church in California. It's called the Anaheim Vineyard. And he became convinced as he's studying the Bible and leading his church that if Jesus commanded his followers to pray for the sick, that they should obey Jesus and pray for the sick. So he said, hey, church, we're getting ready to start praying for the sick. We're going to do it all the time. And we're going to see lots of miracles. Only after praying and praying and praying, nobody was getting healed. John Wimber later admitted, it was nine months before we saw the first person healed. I was just thinking about that. [00:56:00 - 01:04:00] Nine months of praying without seeing any of the results they hoped for. How do you keep getting people to do it when you're praying and nothing's happening? How do you keep casting that vision? How do you keep it in front of people? How do you keep motivating? Well, then one Monday morning, a man from the church called Pastor Wimber. And this man's wife was terribly sick, bedridden with a high fever. He had just started a new job. They had young children. And if he didn't report for work, he loses his job. But his wife's too sick. She can't take care of herself or the kids. He was in a bind. It was an emergency. So he desperately needed help. And he calls and he says, I just wonder, Pastor, would you come pray for us? So John did. He went to the house, laid his hands on the lady's shoulders. They were hot from the fever. He prayed. And then he turned to her husband and started explaining why God wasn't going to hear the prayer. Giving all the disclaimers and explaining why people sometimes don't get healed. But the husband, he noticed, wasn't listening to him. The husband was looking over Wimber's shoulder and seeing his wife now sitting up. And the sweat broke and the fever broke and her fever was gone. And she didn't feel bad anymore. And she says, I feel great. She gets up and she's like, I feel so good. I'm going to make you all breakfast. And Wimber was stunned. It was a healing in the moment. In living color. Well, after he ate breakfast and said goodbye to the family and asked God to bless the family and the husband's new job, he got in his car, he drove down the street and he stopped at the stop sign. And then the hippie came back to him and he started just screaming and yelling, we got one. We got one. We finally got one. I love that story and here's why. You see, he'd been teaching people to pray for healing, but even he was surprised when God actually did it. Here's what challenges me about that story. John Wimber kept praying when he wasn't seeing results. Did you hear that? He didn't manufacture a miracle. He didn't pretend everybody was being healed, but he didn't stop obeying Jesus. This is what our church must do. God's kingdom has already come in Jesus, but we're still waiting its fullness when he returns. That's why we pray boldly, but we don't presume and we don't claim and we don't promise people healings and deliverances and blessings. We believe God heals, yes, but we don't pretend that everybody we're going to pray for will be healed. We simply trust God with the results. You know what? We don't want to explain away what God has promised. On the flip side, we don't want to manufacture something that God hasn't done. We want biblical truth and spiritual power working together. Jesus showed us. The church lived it. So what does that mean for Great Commission Church on this Sunday? Number three, now it's our turn. Our mission is to make more and better disciples here. And so if we want to know if we're doing it, have there been any baptisms? Have there been any people that weren't Christians? Now they are. Now they're reading the scriptures. Now they're coming and praying. Now they're in a small group. They were in darkness and now they're in light. Can we point to any new disciples being made? And can we point to immature disciples becoming mature? More and better. Well, what makes somebody a better disciple? Is it knowing more Bible verses? I think that certainly matters. It's good to know the scriptures. Do we agree with that? What about having powerful spiritual experiences? Well, those matter too. They encourage us. But neither one of those, more Bible, more spiritual experiences, neither one is the goal by itself. Here's how we define discipleship at our church. Following Jesus. Following Jesus is learning to think, live, and love like Jesus. That's part one. That happens in your own life. And part two is while helping others do the same. Now you're involved in helping others learn to think, live, and love like Jesus. Where did we get this idea of making disciples? Well, what's the name of our church? Say it out loud. Great Commission Church. We got it from what the Bible scholars call the Great Commission. Matthew 28, 18, and 19. Jesus says, All authority has been given to me in heaven and earth. Let me take a side road just for a second. Do you believe that all authority has been given to Jesus in heaven and earth? Then why did you despair when your candidates didn't get elected on Tuesday? Why would you let the worldliness of politics ruin your demeanor and how you feel? Isn't Jesus still on the throne? Is there any way that he can ever be knocked off the throne? All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. And so the church and our power and our mission didn't take a hit on Tuesday. Or if you're on the other side of the aisle, it didn't get bolstered on Tuesday. It's neither. You see, I'm a citizen of a different kingdom. I have citizenship rights in a different country. I belong to the race of believers. 1 Peter 2, 9 says that you're a chosen race. I even changed races when I became a Christian. And so I really believe Jesus has all the authority. And then he says, All authority has been given to me in heaven and earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples, make new Christians of all the people groups. Let me ask about those people groups. Are Muslims a people group, yes or no? Yes. Do you realize that one day every Muslim is going to bow their knee to Jesus? They're going to reject and renounce Muhammad and Allah, and they're going to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. And by God's grace, we're going to sow love and preach the gospel to them that fewer of them are going to be forced to say it because they're going to confess Jesus as Lord in this life and become Christians. You know, we've been supporting a missionary and his wife, and they've been making disciple makers out of Muslims from Afghanistan and Iran, and they've been going back into those countries and starting churches by winning Muslims to Jesus. Who but God can do that? All the people groups. One day, every Hindu, every atheist, every Roman Catholic, every Mormon, everybody involved in a false religion is going to bow their knee to Jesus, and they're going to call him Lord. And a bunch of them are going to be consigned to a devil's hell. By God's grace and by our assignment, we're going to steal some from the enemy, and we're going to make disciples out of them. Does that make sense? Because all authority belongs to our Lord. Jesus announces his authority, and then he gives us our assignment. Let me illustrate it this way. Imagine a father who has a son [01:04:00 - 01:12:00] Everybody involved in a false religion is going to bow their knee to Jesus, and they're going to call him Lord. And a bunch of them are going to be consigned to a devil's hell. By God's grace and by our assignment, we're going to steal some from the enemy, and we're going to make disciples out of them. Does that make sense? Because all authority belongs to our Lord. Jesus announces his authority, and then he gives us our assignment. Let me illustrate it this way. Imagine a father who has a son who's leaving for college in an old, beat-up, unreliable car. I mean, this car is so old, it doesn't have an infotainment system in it. It doesn't have Apple CarPlay. Can you imagine? The dark ages, right? I mean, just so long ago. And this car knocks and hums, and it's kind of embarrassing. It's an old beater, you know? And before the trip, the father says to his son, here's a credit card, son. If you break down along the way, use this. You'll have access to whatever you need to get help by that card. Now, I have a question for you. Has that college-age son suddenly become wealthy? The answer is no. The money isn't his. His father gave him permission, authority, to draw upon resources that belong to the father and the mom. You see, that's a picture of delegated authority. Do you remember that Jesus said all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me? There's something else, though. The son can't use that credit card for just any old thing he pleases. His father entrusted it to him for a purpose. And the authority that Jesus gives the church is never permission to do whatever we want and make ourselves more comfortable. It's the power to do what God wants. And here's something I want you to understand. If you say, Pastor, what kind of church is Great Commission Church? Are you a Baptist church? Some of you have been here for 25 years and you don't know the answer to that question, do you? Let me just clarify today. We are not a Baptist church by grouping. We are Baptistic in our doctrine, in our practice. What does that mean? That means that we tell sinners they need to be born again like we were born again. We baptize believers after they believe. We don't baptize babies. That would make us pedobaptists, Presbyterians, and others. We're Baptistic. We believe the Bible from Genesis to Maps, and we believe it's accurate and God's Word, verbal, plenary inspiration. We're Baptistic in that our church is governed by elders, led by pastors, and big issues of gravity, the church gathers and they vote on it. Baptistic even in that kind of polity. But that's not all we are. Now some people ask us, well, Trevor, have y'all gone Pentecostal? Some of you don't even know the answer to that question. Let me help you with it. The answer to that question is no, because we don't believe that the initial evidence of the Holy Spirit is for everybody speaking tongues, and we don't allow speaking in tongues without interpretation in this big group. You've been here long enough to know, you've been observing, you have ears that work, you know that to be true. So pastor, if you're not really a Baptist church by denomination, and if you're not Pentecostal because of the Pentecostal distinctives, then what are you? We are Word and Spirit. We're both of the best of both of those groups have to offer. That's our aim. That's our goal. That's our understanding. It's why I'm preaching this message to you today. And there's something else I want you to hear. We are not starting from zero at our church by this sermon. We already have a strong commitment to teaching God's Word. If you've been here long enough, you know that's true, yes? We believe the Bible. We preach the Bible. We want our lives shaped by the Scriptures. We're bold in that. But on the other hand, we're Spirit. We're also a praying church. And our elders pray, and our small groups pray, and our prayer ministry teams are here every week praying for people. And ordinary believers like Ananias, certain believers pray for one another. And God has been answering. Let me give you just a cross-section of some real answers to some Spirit prayers that have happened in our congregation over the last six months or so. You ready? Couldn't hear you. All right. I'll go quickly. Here are some signs and wonders that have happened among our own people. Well, one lady caught me as we were singing in this service. So here's one you hear. The 9 o'clock service didn't hear. She said, Pastor, this last week I went to the doctor because I'm diabetic. And the last time that I went to see him in April, he diagnosed me with diabetic retinopathy. I said, what's that? She says, that's the kind of diabetes that causes you to go blind. And she says, I got the church to pray for me since April. This week I go to the doctor, and he says, this hardly ever happens, but your diabetic retinopathy is reversing, and it's improving. If you have diabetic retinopathy, and you get your church to pray for you, and you go back to the doctor, and the doctor says it's going the opposite way, the good way, would you think God did that? A person came for prayer on a Sunday because of chronic foot pain. Well, you use your feet every day. After prayer, they reported the pain disappeared, and it hasn't returned after that prayer. A lady was experiencing such severe pain in her feet, she had to wear a medical walking boot just to go to work. She came for prayer twice, and the last time she came for prayer, God immediately relieved the pain, and now she reports that the gout in her feet have been healed. Gout. A woman was suffering from ear pain and had an echo in her hearing. It was irritating. It was all day long. Every time she heard something, there would just be this ringing and this echoing. She came and received prayer, and that same day, her ears cleared. And she told us the other day the echo hasn't returned. A man had endured years of discouraging medical tests resulting from a chronic illness he has in the family of Crohn's disease. Before the next test, he received prayer. Then they got the results of the prayer, and the results were so encouraging that his doctor was astonished and said no further action needed. But listen, God isn't just concerned about our bodies. And after I shared these next ones that I'm getting ready to share with you, after the end of the first service, people ran over the prayer lines for these and left saying God healed it immediately. A woman was struggling with anger. It was spilling over with her children or her husband and at work, just furious all the time and unhappy. She experienced deliverance from that anger when she came for prayer and other controlling spiritual influences were loosed and sent away. And since then, she says, my life is all about joy and so far less anger. Another person suffering from panic attacks came for prayer, including prayer against the spirit of falsehood that we read about in the Bible. And since then, that person says, hadn't had a single panic attack since that prayer ministry. A woman who had been struck by a car as she was walking along the road and very shaken up by that experience and injured had been struggling with anxiety just about walking in her neighborhood and driving like normal. She received prayer and her testimony is the anxiety lifted immediately and I was able to return to driving and living normally. We've seen someone delivered from insomnia where they literally could not shut their brain off and go to sleep for even an hour at night filled with anxiety, delivered through the prayers of our elders and her small group. No more anxiety. She sleeps through the night every night. One lady was dreading going to work every day. [01:12:00 - 01:20:00] This couldn't go in the building, didn't want to see the people, it was just on her. She received prayer on a Sunday. She found clarity the very next day, Monday, she returned to work, no dread, and it hasn't come back. We've watched the Lord bring deep comfort to a woman who was devastated by her husband's secret sins and subsequent imprisonment. Another lady was praying for someone who was struggling with infirmity, but the woman doing the praying had been sick herself. She had stomach trouble and body aches all week. After she finished praying for her friend that Sunday, she suddenly realized that all the body aches were gone too. She came to pray for somebody else's healing and the Lord healed her. I give you just that short list to tell you, those aren't stories from another country. Those aren't occurrences over there overseas, whatever that means, as if God's stronger there than here. Those are stories from people in this room in the last few months. How good is God? Why does Jesus give the church the Holy Spirit? Is it so we can have more exciting church services? Does he give us the Holy Spirit so we can tell impressive stories about spiritual experiences? Those aren't the main reasons he gives us the Spirit. Jesus empowers his people so he can encourage our hearts and so that we can carry out the mission. You see, the power of the Holy Spirit is not just for our enjoyment, it's for our assignment. And you'll know the Spirit ministry is working overtime in our church when we become an effective evangelistic church and begin to be serious about bringing our ones here to hear about Jesus. Yes or no, do we want sinners saved? Yes or no, do we want disciples formed? Yes or no, do we want broken lives restored? Friends, we want our neighbors and the nations to know Jesus. We don't want to become a church that celebrates the power of God while neglecting the mission of God. In conclusion, y'all know I'm proud of myself when I say in conclusion? Because I always mean it. I'm not going to re-preach the sermon. I'm going to leave you with a question that I make every church stop and think about these two scriptures. I'll bet you know Matthew 16, 18 where Jesus says, I will build my church. Is he doing that? Is Jesus still building his church? Listen, you need to stop listening to the noise that says, oh, the church is in decline and nobody wants to go anymore. That's ridiculous. The ones that are preaching the gospel and care about their ones can't open enough services, plant enough new congregations, or build their buildings big enough. There are more people and more missionaries and more churches and more believers, people being saved today than in the history of the church. So if you hear somebody say, well, the church is in decline, it's not doing good, that's a person who doesn't know what they're talking about. Jesus said he'd build his church and he's really good at it. He just has so much momentum. So we know I'll build my church, but don't we know Revelation 3.20 also? Where Jesus wrote a letter to a church called Laodicea, and in that letter, the most famous verse in Revelation 3 is verse 20, and in that verse, Jesus says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. And he's not knocking on human hearts in Revelation 3.20. He's knocking on the door of the church at Laodicea. I want you to think about that. In one passage, Jesus promises to build his church. In the other, he's standing at the door of a church calling for them to open it. How does the one who promised to build his church end up standing outside the door? Here's how. A church says we're just going to be spirit and we're just going to chase feelings and experiences. That'll put Jesus out the door. Or the other church says we're just going to study the Bible and what we want is a school-like, we want to be academic and we want knowledge. Well, that'll put Jesus right out the door too. If you want Jesus to not knock on the door of your church, but instead meet with the church all the time, we need word and, say it with me, spirit. I don't want Great Commission Church to become so confident in what we can organize and do ourselves that we forget how desperately we need him. And I don't want us to chase spiritual experiences without being grounded in scripture. So we refuse that false choice. You know what we want? We want biblical truth on fire. We want spiritual power anchored in scripture. We want hearts that burn and minds that understand. You've seen it in Jesus. You've seen it in the early church. Now the question is, Great Commission Church, will we embrace word and spirit? You think about that. Let's stand together and pray.

------------------------

Join us this Sunday at Great Commission Church for a welcoming and uplifting worship experience. If you’ve been searching for a church near you, you’ll discover a warm, authentic church family ready to help you grow in faith.

We are a family-friendly, non-denominational Christian church in Olive Branch, serving individuals and families throughout DeSoto County and the greater Mid-South. People looking for Christian churches in Olive Branch often discover a vibrant community where faith comes alive and lives are transformed through the Gospel.

Whether you’re new to faith or have followed Christ for years, you’ll find welcoming Sunday services, practical Bible teaching, and a place to belong. We are more than a congregation — we are a church family united by a mission to follow Jesus and live out the Great Commission.

A Place for the Whole Family

Families searching for a church with strong children’s programs love our engaging Kids Ministry and safe, caring environments. Students can connect through our Youth Ministry, and adults of every stage can find community through groups, prayer, and discipleship opportunities. As a multi-generational church, we love seeing every age grow in faith together.

Meaningful Worship

Experience contemporary worship with modern Christian music, heartfelt prayer, and Gospel-centered messages designed to help you encounter God personally. If you’re looking for vibrant worship near Memphis, you’ll find a place that feels both authentic and inspiring.

Grow in Your Faith

We offer Bible studies, small groups, and discipleship opportunities that help you understand and apply God’s Word to everyday life. If you’re looking for a place to grow spiritually, you’ll find support and encouragement here.

Connected to Our Community

We are passionate about serving our neighbors through outreach and local partnerships, making a positive impact in Olive Branch and beyond.

Conveniently located in Olive Branch, we serve families from surrounding communities, including Southaven, Germantown, Collierville, Lewisburg, and Byhalia.

You’re Invited

If you’re looking for a church family, meaningful community, and Gospel-centered worship, we would love to welcome you.

Join us this Sunday at Great Commission Church — where faith, love, and community come together and lives are changed by Jesus.