Monday, August 9, 2010

The Smoking Section

This was originally an old email I sent to the Christian fellowship I'm in on campus.  It was a Friday night, and we'd just had our weekly fellowship together.  One of the staff members and I had gone to the campus pub a little later to pass out flyers for an event we were having.

So I came back from the Battle of the Bands at Cambridge Queen's Head a little while ago.  Tina invited me to go there with her after an awesome and totally impromptu dorm storming session in Thayer to tell people about the outreach event next Friday.  While we were at the pub, we talked a little bit about how the people there (and there were A LOT of people there) should be individuals that we try to reach out to.
I've always felt like we (Christians in general) do a lot of talking about grassroots outreach...but tonight, we actually did some.
We had a whole lot of flyers with us, and we just went around and passed them out to people at the Battle of the Bands.  It was kind of awkward at first--imagine, tapping random strangers, who may or may not be somewhat inebriated, on the shoulder and giving them flyers about your Christian fellowship's outreach event--but eventually it didn't feel as weird.  For the most part, people seemed genuinely interested.  Some even asked me what the event was all about.  I did see one paper airplane on the floor on the way out...but thankfully that response seemed to be the exception, not the rule.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is...we can have these wonderful talks about evangelism all semester long...but when are we actually going to give out our flyers instead of collecting them in our rooms?  I'll be totally real with you guys, I DEFINITELY wouldn't have gone dorm storming or pub-pubbing (haha) by myself, but after being with everyone tonight, one thing sort of led to another in this crazy, spontaneous chain reaction of sorts.  Neil Cole said in his book Organic Church, "If you want to win this world to Christ, you are going to have to sit in thesmoking section."  We shouldn't be afraid to do that; I mean, it's the Great Commission in plain sight.  Of course actually GOING to the smoking (or drinking) sections of life and talking about Jesus to total strangers is really hard to do (reading over that just now was a little bit scary), but it's definitely something to think about.   
I prayed tonight that what was said in large group would actually leave theroom with us...and this is how God answered.  It might be worth it to actively explore all of what was said tonight further.  

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