Originally posted at Holiness Today Blogs

Recently we took part of our youth group on a weekend trip to Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. Together with the local youth group we organized a couple of outreach activities. Friday night we had a youth service. On Saturday we cleaned the streets of the community around the church and in the evening we organized a family celebration with bouncing castles, barbeque, live music, face painting, and other fun things to do for the whole family.

The whole day of serving the community was underlined with the slogan ‘The church has left the building’. A group of 60 young people went out in groups of four or five and spread throughout the whole community. They washed street signs, swept the sidewalks, cleaned playgrounds, and helped people remove bulky waste. In the end there was this big pile of filled trash bags, old furniture, broken fridges, mattresses, mirrors, old beds, etc. Next to that was a stack of used working gloves, shuffles, brooms, and used cloths.

The young people were exhausted but had many stories to tell how people were surprised that others would help them clean out their yard. People were happy that things finally were gone. Others applauded them because they cleaned the streets. And every time when the question was asked why they do what they do the answer was: ‘We like to help!’ In the evening many people from the community showed up for the family celebration.

Later that night I spoke with a couple of our young people. One girl told me that she was so amazed and astonished by the impact they had on the local people by “only” cleaning up a little and having a barbeque. She couldn’t believe the fact that we reached so many by just serving them.

It is interesting to see how young people discover something we often thought of being a standard given. Fact is that we can talk about it a lot but they probably won’t really understand until we literally take them down that road. Another fact is that we lost much of our impact in the community because we narrowed the ways church works. Many of our outreach activities are based on a few successful strategies from the past, which eliminated many other methods of impact.

Our young people mostly thought of evangelism as preaching the gospel, altar call, visitor friendly services, asking people if they are saved and if not making them repent. This is what they thought was expected of them. But on that Saturday many of our young people experienced that “only” serving others reaches beyond all verbal communication.

The questions to think about with your own church family in mind are: Would your community be any different if your church wouldn’t be there? How much “only” is taking place in your church? How much of your personal impact got lost because of unrealistic expectations?

Comments

Name *
Email (For verification & Replies)
Code   

Submit Comment