We were incredibly blessed over the last year as a church as two other churches donated comfortable chairs which have replaced our pews.
One of the things I’m focusing on more during the coming year is working on stuff outside of the church. For the last two years, my focus has been on internal things. Setting up preaching so that the church is getting a balanced diet from Scripture. Taking the prayer meeting through the New City Catechism so that those who attend have a stronger grasp of why we believe what we believe. And making our Sunday morning gatherings as good as they can be with the people we currently have.
We’ve been blessed as a church to have some new people join (even getting ready to welcome 5 new members to the church) in the last year. But beyond that, our numbers have remained mostly stationary.
And so my focus for this third year with the church is on evangelism and doing what I can to try and bring people in. An unfortunate side-effect of being in ministry is that you end up spending almost all of your time with Christians. This is good for obvious reasons but it does make “doing the work of an evangelist” a lot harder to figure out. So to help, I’m looking around the community to see what sorts of things I can get involved in. Things like joining a local writers’ group and language learning class and the local ParkRun.
We are beginning to do actual outreach events where people from the church set up a table at the local shopping centre with big yellow banners and copies of gospels and church invitations to give away.
And my prayer is that we would find people filling the seats that we’ve been gifted. That people would see us living out 1 Peter 4:10-11:
As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.