When Church and Community Meet

How does Church reach into its community?  Do we just sit inside our 4 walls Sunday after Sunday, singing the same songs,  praying the same prayers, chatting to the same people week after week?  Meanwhile, outside the building are hundreds of people whose only experience of church is dusty pews and scratchy hymns, where they used to venture only for weddings and funerals but now even those happen in secular venues.

Sometimes we just need to break the mould, do something completely different on a Sunday morning.

Let's throw open the doors and invite the community in, feed them barista coffee and cupcakes and a sausage sizzle, entertain with some music, give them freebies in a goodie bag, and show them what we can offer.

We put up displays highlighting the many varied activities that happen within this congregation.   We pampered and decorated, children coloured and created, we gave away stuff just 'cause we could. 

We met people we didn't know.  We told them our stories, about why we worship this God, and why this Church is such an awesome bunch of people to explore Faith together with.

And the community came.  They accepted the freebies, ate the sausages, drank the coffee, let us pray for them, and listened to us.

“There's a bit more to this than an old pipe organ then.”