With Canada Day around the corner, one of the great privileges we have is to serve our community by inviting them to our property to serve them. For several years, we have hosted a Canada Day celebration that includes snacks, face painting, games, and fireworks.
I love the way that we can serve our community. We do this out of the generosity of our hearts because we love our community and we love to serve. This is an opportunity to love our neighbours.
But there is a distinct difference between loving our neighbours and ‘outreach.’ Loving neighbour does good. Loving neighbour opens doors to have conversations with others. Loving neighbours serves without expectation. Outreach, on the other hand, can be a slippery word that encompasses so much that it becomes meaningless. What are we reaching out with? I think that there are better categories to use rather than lumping everything under outreach. Is giving someone a snack outreach? Is having a games night outreach?
When it comes to reaching out, there are two ways we do that. One way is to love our neighbours. We serve them. We do good. We show our Christian values without words. But this is only a step towards sharing Christ. When we share Christ, we are talking about him.
Our missional value as a church is that “We believe God’s good news of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension changes everything. Through local and international engagement, we desire to see God’s kingdom come and his will be done in Christ through our words and deeds.”
As people ask you, “Why do you put this event on?” or “Can we donate to help out with the costs?” be thinking about how to respond to people. We put this event on for several reasons: we love our community and we want to have a positive impact here. We want to bring our community together. We want to be generous because we have experienced the generosity of our God who has loved us with an infinite love that we can never repay, so we pass it on. And we are thankful for those who would offer something to help offset the costs, but we give because God has given his Son to us and this is one way we want to show his generosity to us by sharing and celebrating with others.
What we are doing is creating an opportunity for conversations that will raise questions in people’s minds. Take advantage of these moments. We love Ilderton! So we celebrate in word and deed.
God keep our land glorious and free!
~ Pastor Andrew
