Dig in Deep

A few years ago while at my previous church, we did some servant evangelism projects. The basic idea behind servant evangelism is that you basically do something simple, just as a random act of kindness, to show someone that God loves them.

Of course, at the same time, you make sure they know what church you’re from by handing out a business card along with it, so they can come visit.

Typical projects would include handing out cold cokes on a hot summer day, washing cars, giving away light bulbs, cleaning up streets or yards, etc. Simple stuff that anyone can do. These were usually fun – who doesn’t like to give away stuff for free, and see the reactions people would give, especially when you don’t accept donations.

Now we had a really cool story about one of our coke cans. The very first time we gave out coke cans, one of our older ladies gave a can to a woman, who ended up bringing her family the next week, and joined the church. A few months later, her brother ended up coming to a worship concert we were doing. As it turned out, he was a drug dealer, and had gotten in trouble with his mom. But he thought that if he went to church a time or two she’d cut him some slack so he could keep doing his thing. The way he told the story, something happened to him at that worship concert that night. He gave his life to Christ a few weeks later. His baptism was an extremely powerful testimony. And it started with a coke can.

So I’m not one to discount servant evangelism, at least not entirely. Yet I think that there are better approaches.

A couple of weeks ago at house church, instead of our normal gathering, we went around a local neighborhood asking for canned food donations for a local food pantry. Everyone in the church went – including the kids. (Kyla too!) Try that with a traditional church! We handed out business cards as well, primarily so that people would know we weren’t just trying to con them out of a couple cans of soup.

As we were heading out, I said, “this is kind of like reverse servant evangelism!” It’s kind of funny, but servant evangelism was all about us giving something to others. Something that was nice, but not something that was really needed. Instead, what we were doing was going up to people, and asking them to give something for people who really, truly needed it.

We did have a visitor last week from this effort. But at the same time, we collected serveral bags of groceries.

Which do you think is more like the kingdom of God? Which is a better introduction to what it means to be a part of the body of Christ?