Author: Pastor Steve Duffy
For last week’s equipping spotlight I shared about our experience at Morgan Creek park as “doers of the word” in some practical prayer, care, and share ways. I also noted that what we learned from that experience, including suggested changes from the students, would then be applied again this past week. This second time at Morgan Creek park included some new and welcomed experiences and even more learning in our journey to engage others in spiritual conversations.
First, head on back to last week’s blog to get the context of our Morgan Creek park adventures. And yes, we went to Morgan Creek right away and drove past Cherry Hill park! Our plan was basically the same, teams of two made up of Trash teams, Engage-invite teams, and Treat teams. This time when I asked who wanted to be on which teams, the outcome was a bit different than last week. Rather than most wanting to do trash, we had two pairs volunteer to be the treat teams and two pairs volunteer to be the engage-invite teams, that left 6 of us to pick up trash. That was an pleasant surprise to see students step into the more engaging team spots! That left me to pick up trash and pray for those teams that were doing more face to face activity.
Learning from last week, one of the biggest changes we made was our introduction when we talked with people. We introduced ourselves with our name, stating which church we were from, and that we were there to pick up trash around the park and invite their little ones over for an ice pop. That was a worthwhile change from last week, and it sparked some great conversations. A few notable and encouraging observations:
We ended the night back in the youth room, sharing a treat amongst ourselves and debriefing again. There were some new suggestions given for what we might do differently next time. I’m imagining that it could be quite effective and a great learning experience to continue to do things like this, but extend them beyond Wednesday nights. The participation, learning experience, adapting to improve our prayer-care-share activities each time, and overall exercising together engaging others was a help to me and seemed to be to the students as well. How might you take our example the past few weeks and translate that into others in your life who do not know Jesus? Give something a try, doing so together, making it prayer-care-share in purpose, learning and building from each experience. And in doing so, being a “doer of the word”, see how the Lord develops those muscles of living out your faith by engaging others in this way, and trust Him in the outcomes. Who knows, maybe we’ll see Aldo and his family (wife Erica, stepson Nathanial, son Silas, daughter hazel) in the coming weeks at Stonebridge?!
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