Is your church being a light?
It is not a bad idea to have ministry outreach to the community. Food drives and the like have the potential to demonstrate the love of Christ.
What is the most vital thing we share, though? Christ said the body is more than clothing or food, so folks must walk away with more substance than this. They might not know what they need or, worse yet, punt your offering back in your face. People want free stuff with no strings attached, including obligations to hear some preaching. But this is precisely what they need.
I was thinking about this when I remembered a quote from Walter Kaiser in Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament.
What is the most vital thing we share, though? Christ said the body is more than clothing or food, so folks must walk away with more substance than this. They might not know what they need or, worse yet, punt your offering back in your face. People want free stuff with no strings attached, including obligations to hear some preaching. But this is precisely what they need.
I was thinking about this when I remembered a quote from Walter Kaiser in Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament.
Without the light of revelation, the whole fabric of society was put at risk. That point was also made in the Book of Proverbs, which warned, “Where there is no revelation…, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18, my translation). The Hebrew term used for “perish” is the same one that appears in the golden calf episode in Exodus 32:25, where the people “cast off all restraint” and “ran wild” in acts of sacred prostitution in front of the calf they had just created (p. 18). …
The only known cure for this is the cry that was heard in the Reformation: post tenebras lux, “After darkness, light!” That is why Calvin and his successors reasoned that the only way light was going to come to God’s people and to the city of Geneva, Switzerland, would be through the preaching of the Scriptures (p.19).
