Passion for Life

We spent some time last night discussing what we find difficult about sharing the gospel with people we work with, living alongside and spend our free time with.

So often we kept coming full circle and returning to the importance of relationships. Relationships matter, both our relationships with people and our willingness to help people build other relationships. Too often we operate in different spheres; so there are work colleagues, there are neighbours, there are friends, and there is church. Rarely do any two let alone all of them intersect and when they do it makes us nervous.

We were thinking last night about ways to bridge the gap. Ways to build relationships between friends so that an invitation to church is less awkward so that people see the community of grace at work and marvel at it and want to see more of it.

There was nothing earth shattering about the suggestions we made:

• Meals matter - we need to use these more wisely and get friends to meet each other and enable them to see grace relationships.
• Time matters - we need to make time for friendships and church should facilitate this. Just a couple of examples we are going to look at a men's walking weekend in the lakes or further afield, some of the ladies are going to host a tupperware party.
• Everyday opportunities - we don't need to put on loads of extra things but we do need to get our worlds to colide more often, trusting God to work and the gospel to be visible.
• We need help to talk about our saviour in every day situations.

As I said nothing earth shattering. The gospel is what makes the church unique, we need to get people to see the affect the gospel has one people and on relationships and God has graciously in his wisdom given us our churches to advance his gospel and change lives one at a time.

Having seen it small scale they will be more likely to come to church where every week they will hear the gospel proclaimed and see it animated and at work in our lives.