God Still Speaks (Part 4)
One thing most people do not realize about our journey into mobilizing missionaries is it all started while we were still the lead ministers of Bridge of Hope Church in Boardman, OH, years before God called us out from our family and friends there.
It started so slowly. There was a person here and another over there: a real estate agent who became a friend, who we prayed for healing with and shared what it means to be a follower of Jesus and many other life conversations.
We are talking about random people we would meet around the community where we lived and ministered: the server in a local restaurant who one day (after many, many conversations) began to introduce us as their pastor, even though they had never stepped into a worship service with us. In all of it we shared Jesus and His love; the Gospel had truly come near to him.
They came into our lives as we moved deliberately out further into our mission field to build relationships with people who we normally wouldn’t meet at a gathering of our church. There were couples who were in relationships that eventually needed to break up as they began to serve Jesus, and we walked with them through it.
It really comes down to one day when God busted into our lives with Luke 19:10 … “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” and we have never been the same since.
We (myself and Kandy) began to live with greater Gospel intentionality and made more intentional attempts at increasing in our Gospel fluency as we interacted with people who rarely, if ever, came to a gathering of an organized church.
The result was the Holy Spirit began to introduce us to people very different from ourselves. It’s amazing how much it changes the way we live when we see the interactions we have with others as God’s way of inviting us to join Him where He is already at work. What a difference it makes seeing these unplanned encounters as an invitation to go to work with God in someone’s life.
As we ventured more and more into living as missionaries in the greater Youngstown area, the Holy Spirit started bringing more people into our path who thought and lived very differently from us.
Jesus had penetrated our hearts with a desire to seek and save those who are lost. It was important to Him, and now it was important to us.
Many people who genuinely love Jesus are unaware that God is daily sending us to others where He is already at work in their lives. We meet people and pass right by; maybe we perceive there is no interest from them, or we are just too preoccupied.
Here is what we do know: when we began to see ourselves as missionaries in our community, all of a sudden there were plenty of people to talk with about Jesus.
Their response is not like what happened before … they are engaged and asking questions. They are a part of the conversation. What a difference it makes to join God where He is already at work instead of trying to force a conversation with people who are not interested on any level.
This is what we are mobilizing when we talk about a missionary movement. It is ordinary people living incarnational lives with greater Gospel intentionality and Gospel fluency at work in them. It’s a way of life, not a program we run or event we go to. Join us as we discover what’s next in God’s plan.
We had planned to wrap this series up this month but it seems to have a life of its own. Hopefully next month we will finish up this series on the idea that God Still Speaks. If you missed our earlier articles on the subject, you can find them at the links below.