With the turn of the year, many churches will be concentrating their focus on a ‘Passion for Life’.
This national initiative of local churches to present the gospel within and to our communities will reach its climax at Easter time. Part of its appeal is that individual congregations, partnering wherever possible with other like-minded churches in their neighbourhood, can join together to proclaim the good news through special events as well as their regular church programmes. We can do more together than we could ever do as single units.
Confidence in the unspectacular
But it is as individuals that we serve the Lord, day by day, often in quite isolated contexts. So, perhaps we need to pray that God will help us to recover our confidence that he can use the unspectacular, but faithful, witness of ‘ordinary’ Christians like us to make those vital first connections which open doors for the good news to be heard. We often, rightly, say that our gospel is truth-centred, not need-centred. There can be no accommodation of its unchanging message to the prevailing norms of our secular culture. But the way by which that message is first heard and considered nearly always involves some form of personal contact and some connection with the needs of the person approached.
