I love the summer! Kids are out of school which means we are all sleeping in (praise God!) and the only regular thing about our routine is the sun coming out and it being HOT. So even though we don’t really have typical seasons in Florida, it feels like a different season. And during this summer season as a church, we have had encouragement from the Lord to focus on Evangelism and Outreach…we want to proclaim Jesus to people and for our church family to be a blessing to our community. Even though we didn’t know the specific details of what that would look like for us as a church at first, it has been encouraging to see God lead us with some pretty cool events.
This summer as a group we have passed out door hangers in a new neighborhood, participated and helped lead in the very first Love Delray (an event where we had 105 people serve in very practical ways with 4 different organizations in our community), we have seen a church planter and his wife join our church to be discipled and sent out by Redemption Church (Lord willing in 2019), and we passed out hundreds of water bottles and invites at a city booth on the Fourth of July…and the summer isn’t over! But before we move on and continue focus on other big events we have planned to reach people, I wanted to make sure you don’t miss out.
We can sometimes can focus so much on these “bigger” community events that we forget to be personal. It is so important that each of us makes a simple commitment to personally evangelizing and reaching out to the community God places us in. God wants to use YOU this summer to reach people for Him, and He doesn’t need an event to do so. We will and are continuing to plan out opportunities to evangelize as a church, BUT you don’t have to wait until our next event…and you shouldn’t! My heart for you is to be reaching people for Jesus EVERYWHERE you go, to be inviting people personally to our church gatherings, and to be sharing the gospel on a daily basis wherever and with whomever God would have you.
So, HOW do we practically do this?
I want to share a simple tool that I recently came across to make this season of Evangelism and Outreach more personal for you. It is called the BLESS tool. It is a simple acronym for you to practice and try to do every day with people. And although it may be a new acronym for you, these are already familiar things that are biblical that we as a church have been doing.
BLESS stands for:
B - BEGIN WITH PRAYER (I will pray for the people in my life and the places that I’m in.)
L - LISTEN (I will listen to and discover the needs of others and the places where God is at work)
E - EAT (I will share meals and spend time with people in my life)
S - SERVE (I will respond to the needs of others and help them in practical & impactful ways)
S - STORY (I will share the story of Jesus and what He is doing in my life with others.
You can follow the link below to download more on BLESS and simple ways for you to implement it.
This is just another way to have this season of Evangelism & Outreach be personal to you. No tool is perfect, but hopefully it can be a reminder that we do need to keep it simple and not just have “big” events for this season. God wants to use ALL of us to make disciples, and this is a great tool to help with that. So read through the download document, and let me know what you think. Share the stories with one another as you try some of these things with people. And let’s remember that more than just an event or a season, we want PROCLAIMING JESUS to be a lifestyle.
Praying you BLESS many people as you proclaim Jesus.
-Pastor Daniel
