January 29, 2025 Weekly Update
As our Messy Church planning team has worked through marketing and sharing information about Messy Church, I can’t help but feel a little voice push against me, saying, “People don’t want to hear about Jesus! People aren’t going to be interested in church!” For many of us who grew in the mainline church, Evangelism feels like a dirty word. We don’t really like the idea of pushing faith at other people, and we don’t know how to talk about faith. We worry we might make ourselves or others uncomfortable.
Michael Adam Beck, a Fresh Expressions leader, knows that people are skeptical of the whole toxic evangelism, say a magic prayer, get a premium afterlife plan. He writes that younger generations “aren’t asking about escaping an afterlife of hell – they’re asking about deeper, more urgent matters. They are asking questions like ‘I feel lonely sometimes. How do I stop doing this thing I know is hurting me? Am I unlovable?” or “Is there more to life than just making money and getting likes on social media? Does my life even matter to anyone?’ These are the real questions people are wrestling with in an epidemic of loneliness.”
Jesus wasn’t focused on hellfire and brimstone, Instead, his teachings asked questions about people’s lives and their desire to discover healing, peace, and compassion. His words in Matthew 11 were basically “come to me, take my yoke/rhythm of life/ and find rest.” Jesus words were an invitation to a relationship with him and his community.
Whether or not you are part of helping with Messy Church, we all have a call to help communicate the compassionate love of Jesus and our faith community to others. When you talk about your life, your circumstances, or where you find meaning, how does God, or our ministry, connect to that conversation? I invite you to “sit” like Jesus in the synagogue and reflect on ways you can be a connector between our ministry and our neighbors. One sentence could be the difference between someone feeling lonely and isolated, or knowing that you and our church are in their corner as a supportive presence in their lives.
Blessings,
Pastor Jared