Emergent Brethren

At Community of Joy, we really want to be a place where relationships matter…. so when we renovated a church into a ministry center in a great diverse neighborhood, we set out to meet the neighbors.   Yesterday, Sept. 23, we held a Pork Roast after our worship gathering for the neighbors.  We went door to door in a two block radius of our building two weeks ago and handed out or left invitations to the festivities… the invite also included worship.   We also put out a large lighted sign inviting the neighborhood.   Everything was free… we also challenged our folks to invite 3 people to come.  I am happy to say that we doubled our normal worship attendance yesterday and had neighbors coming from all directions…. don’t know how many came… I would venture to say aroudn 150 – 200 in all….check out my blog for more info and pics…. www.martinhutchison.blogspot.com.   There was no agenda other than saying we are happy to be here and we want to be a positive force in the hood.  What are others of you doing to engage your communities?

I subscribe to Off-the-Map.org’s ezine. Today, they have an article by Steve Sjogren, former pastor of the Vineyard in Cincinnati. Now, he is lead pastor at Coastline Tampa Church. He’s got an interesting article here that should spark some agreement or disagreement.

“During your weekend services, do a spot check before you speak. Tally up how many vehicles sport some sort of Christian symbol. Usually churches that are seeing many come to Christ and have an internal book shop that sell these things have a high percentage of people who sport these on their vehicles. Enthusiasm to declare Christ is magnificent, but there is no worse way to do this today than by putting a symbol on your vehicle. . . ” To read more of this article, go to:

http://conversationattheedge.com/2007/09/09/its-time-to-remove-christians-symbols-on-cars/

What do you think? In our culture, is it a good idea to have a Christian symbol on your car? Does it help or hurt your witness for Christ? Does it draw others into conversation with you or separate you from others?

Jeff Glass