To be a member since 1981, when the church’s attendance on a Sunday was less than 500, is seeing miraculous growth with ten services this past Christmas. Can you believe a small church had the faith to buy 80 acres of land and build a 150,000 sq. ft. church costing approximately 28 million dollars? We had a tremendous financial kickoff to raise money. Less than three million was pledged. How would we ever be able to do what we believed God wanted us to do? Where would we get the needed $25 million? God had a plan and gradually we were able to financially proceed.

Central Christian Church in Henderson, NV was a small traditional church whose board of directors received a vision that God wanted us to become a missionary church in the Las Vegas area and beyond. Who would ever have believed that changing our focus onto those who were non-church goers, Christ would change the lives of so many people? Would traditional Christians accept the changes that were going to be necessary to be the church we believed God was leading us to become?

As a traditional church the members expected a robed choir accompanied by a thundering organ like other churches. Instead, we had drums, horns, guitar and a keyboard. The music had a distinctly secular flavor to it, but the lyrics had an equally distinctive Christian flavor. Sermons were not the normal; they seemed to be demonstrating that the Bible is a practical book that can be applied to our present lives rather than just a holy book. It took some getting used to. Some believed it sounded too much like self-help stuff and did not have enough traditional worship.

We did not make changes for the sake of change. We needed to free ourselves of nonessential traditions. We needed to explore new ways to help unchurched people feel comfortable in our services. We will never reach lost people in any great numbers if we do not create an atmosphere that is friendly to them.

However, around the year 2000, the church community fell roughly into three categories: seeker churches, traditional churches and liberal churches. Many of the liberal churches belonged to the National Council of Churches. Whereas, seeker churches were reaching lost people and growing, some were experiencing spectacular growth, both in numbers and spiritual maturity. A few traditional churches were growing but many just held their own or were struggling. This is confirmed by an article in Saturday’s local paper where they stated that religious attendance is dropping.

It wasn’t difficult to realize that we had been given a commission to spread the gospel and we believed God wanted our church to be a missionary church and the Las Vegas area was our mission field. There was no disagreement among board members or even the ultra conservatives who hated change in any way, shape or form could see that the church had to change and expand to fulfill what the board believed God wanted.

The results of our expansion, in this past year 2015 alone, over 10,000 people have accepted Christ as their personal Savior. Also in 2015 over 2,600 were baptized. Since the Henderson church was built in 1999, approximately 60,000 conversions have occurred. Being able to witness the changes and expansion, as a board member, it could only be done with God’s help. There are many opportunities to have similar results in many parts of the world. It started with three years of the board meeting once a week in prayer asking God to give us a vision and what He expected of our church. I believed it took three years of prayer to give us the faith to undertake the changes and the expansion we believed were necessary. When you see these results you know it could never have been done without God’s help, unless we had members who were multi-millionaires willing to donate and if we did, we didn’t know it.

NEVER UNDER ESTIMATE THE POWER OF PRAYER!