Being raised in a church culture that taught me that the fundamental goal of successful church is to get people to a building on Sunday mornings, I simply did not spend much time thinking about all of the people that will not darken the doors of most evangelical churches on our landscape? Where are they? What are they doing? What does it mean to intentionally seek to find ways to engage them with the message of the gospel without them having to come to our church building first.
This Sunday we decided to teach ourselves to think about all those outside of our church buildings. One of the places that we knew we could find people on Sundays would be in the local restaurants serving the people who say in most of our church buildings. So we decided to find a small way to take the church to them and serve them. We called three restaurants around our church building and asked the managers how many employees they would have working on Sunday – wait staff, cooks, hosts, etc. We then took that number and a little money and bought gift bags and stuffed them with some goodies and gifts. We met on Sunday at our regular time, put together the bags, prayed over them, and then broke up into teams and went to the restaurants before all the church people got out to distribute the bags. We ate lunch, gave out bags, and tipped well. No manipulation, no ploy for church attendance, but simply a small way to bless the people that live and work around us every day without them having to show up at our building first.
Small? Yes.
Trivial? Maybe.
A tangible way to take the church on the road and model the type of missionary engagement we should all have in our world? Definitely.
I pray that the Lord would continue to cultivate in me and our young church a heart to show and tell the message of the gospel everywhere we go.
