Every other month, on a Thursday night, the city of Delray Beach shuts down the main downtown Avenue for a city event. This month, the theme was Jazz and Art.
Redemption Church had a booth featuring a friend’s art – eclectic, artsy lamps. We passed out fliers inviting people to church and offered to pray for them or let them give us prayer requests over text or written on slip of paper.
In the middle of the street…seeking people. Seeking lives. Seeking to plant a seed, to start a conversation, to start a relationship, to build relationships with the already church members as we serve and seek our city together.
Success? How do you measure it? No goal in mind is a bad way to start. But with the wrong goals, discouragement and wrong focus will creep in.
One measurement…planting seeds. Even if we never see the results, it is so worth it.
Success is also getting prayer requests, having meaningful conversations, seeing our church members step out of their comfort zones, knowing that our name and signs were seen by a few thousand people who walked past, and most of all, knowing that we were being faithful.
Faithfulness…what else are we called to? Our mission is motivated by love for our Savior, and our success is defined by our faithfulness and our personal growth in becoming more like Him.
Faithfulness…to our Savior, our Maker, our King, our Lover, our God.
Faithfulness to evangelize, to baptize, and to make disciples. And going to the ends of the earth to do so.
Our end of earth? Right now it is in a busy town on the Atlantic ocean in South Florida…last night specifically, our end of the earth was an 8×8 patch of pavement in the middle of the Avenue. Preaching the gospel through our faithfulness and love.
Were we rejected? Were we discouraged? Were we ignored? At times, yes.
But it’s not about what people think. We’re called to be faithful, remember. And that’s why we have to measure our success a little differently. Not by numbers…although the numbers are still important.
But the successes are in the faithfulness of our own lives, in the conversations with complete strangers, in the relationships built between us a church while we serve together, in the seeds planted in ways we’ll never know, and in our love for Jesus built even stronger.
The goal…to together stay humble and faithful and growing in our current end of the earth. May all the glory be His.
Be blessed
<3
