Mission:Gateway is now history. What a great outreach adventure it was! Through planned service and evangelistic projects we ministered to our cities, area schools, first responders, community children, participants in RAGBRAI, and needy people through the Victory Center and Helping Hands. Many from our church participated in these activities. We were also alert to opportunities God gave us to reach out with the love of Christ individually and spontaneously to those around us in our daily flow of life. We heard encouraging stories of what God did.
During the Sundays of M:G:2012 the pastors each preached a “Go” message: go love, go serve, and go disciple. “Go disciple” was the focus on Sunday, July 22. After worship that day we made a resource available to the church family, a small book titled One-to-One Bible Reading. I challenged us to use this book as a way to act upon Christ’s command to “go and make disciples.”
The back cover of the book tells us that the author, David Helm, “longs for all Christians to read God’s word for themselves and with others.” Why? “… because of our convictions about the power of God’s word. When people are exposed to it, they find salvation in Christ, they are sanctified in the faith, they are trained for effective ministry, and they find community in a web of relationships that are unlike any other the world has to offer.” (page 16)
On that Sunday we ran out of the supply of these books we initially purchased. We have restocked and have more on hand now at Connection Point.
Let me tell you about my first experience of putting into practice what I read in the book. It was during family devotions. The four of us were sitting around the table, having just finished supper. I suggested we try the approach outlined in the book for our devotions. I chose Colossians 1:1-14 and each of us read part of the passage. After reading, we talked about it using the COMA method, one of the ways of reading the Bible given in chapter 8: discussing context, observations, meaning, and application. It was fabulous! We were all engaged in the text, discussing what we saw there. I was strengthened and encouraged by hearing what my family saw in the passage. What was especially impactful for me was when we got to the “A” part, application, the Lord connected what we had seen in the passage to a very specific situation in my life. Wow! We concluded our time with prayer. I look forward to our next time reading God’s word together!
I hope you will find this same joy as you open God’s word with someone else and read the Bible together. That “someone” could be a coworker, church member, friend, neighbor, relative … anyone, believer in Jesus or not.
M:G:2012 may be officially over, but we are still on mission to go love, go serve, and go disciple.