Last week we talked about our mission as peopled “called out” to serve our cities. And it’s a difficult mission, or rather, an impossible mission. The mission is to prevail against the gates of hell. This is Jesus’ own description of the church in his first use of the word. He explains to Peter, “upon this rock (that is, Peter and his confession that Jesus is the Christ), I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. It is mission impossible until we see that it was Jesus who first passed through those gates and bound up the strong man behind them.

This week we’re going to look at how we are to actually engage in that task of prevailing against the gates of hell. It’s one thing to understand the concept of it, it is quite another to engage in doing it.