Hey Everyone - Just A Brief Update This Week.
Please mark your calendars for Sunday, June 1st. We will be hosting and faciliating a block party for the neighborhood surrounding KAMP's.
I'm excited about our new friend Terry, who we met through Sharefest. You see, Terry is a hard working loving husband and father. He wakes up around 5am everyday to head off to a construction site for the day. He is excited about building a business so that his children will have a promising future. This kind of hope is not often found in urban neighborhoods, particularly in the urban African American community. Where there is no hope, despair abounds. Despair is what happens when you're tired of being desperate. And there are entire family and neighborhoods living under a cloud of despair.
But not Terry and his family. Terry aspires to have a BBQ restaurant some day. For now, he has a big smoker that he hauls around on a trailer preparing amazing food for family and friends. I'm glad to say that Terry will be providing the food for the block Party on June 1st.
Do you see the significance of this? A neighbor cooking dinner for his neighbor in a neighborhood that needs hope. And we the church, we will make an invisible God visible by facilitating such an event.
Go to the people, Live among them, Learn from them, Love them, Start with what they know, Build on what they have: But of the best leaders, When their task is done, The people will remark "We have done it ourselves." - Chinese Proverb
Please let me know how you would like to help participate.
I look forward to casting vision for the summer months and celebrating communion with you this Sunday evening, May 18th at KAMP's.
Please let me know if we can serve you or serve with you in any way.
Have A Great Day!
Ben.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hey Ben,
Just wanted to chime in.
You know, one of the things Rebecca and I will be talking about a little on June 8th is our journey towards simplification, which is really just about creating opportunities for community. We hope that community happens not only when we are gathered together as the church and being the church, but we also hope it happens, and are trying to be intentional about, making it happen with our neighbors.
I believe that for us to really be the church, for us to really live as Christ would have us live, we ("christians", "good people", etc.) have to quit moving out of the "bad" areas, which by the way, only leaves them in worse shape than they were in while we were there, and we have to to start engaging the people in those areas, "Go to the people, Live among them, Learn from them, Love them, Start with what they know......"
So often, in fact, most of the time, we try to engage people with our desires, instead of engaging them on their turf and letting them know we care. Instead, we have tried to go in and "evangelize" these areas and convert them to our way of thinking, whatever that is, instead of going in and loving them, learning from them, and then trying to shed some light into their situation just by being as Christ would be, a lover of people.... a healer of people.... a ransom paid for people.... Don't get me wrong, I understand we don't bring healing, and we are not the ransom that was paid, but our relationships with our neighbors and with Christ should help bridge the gap so that Christ is easier to find, easier to see, easier to relate to, because they have related to a child of His.
OK, probably gone a little off topic here, so I'll leave with a question and continue with this thought in my own blog. Through our relationships, are we making it easier to see Christ for the loving, caring, father that he is, or are we clouding up the scene with a smokescreen of inauthenticity just trying to convert them to our way of thinking?
Post a Comment