Being a follower of Jesus Christ and being in full-time ministry consume my every waking thought. This is what it would be like for you to spend the day in my flip-flops. Every waking thought is not only thinking on Kingdom things and the incredible Savior that I have but ministry (children's, youth, young adult) as well. Then you hear something or God reveals something to you and from that point on every waking thought is about that. Recently at our annual vision meeting, our Pastor shared some statistics with us that really stuck in my thoughts. He stated that 80% of our city is un-churched, 85% of our county is unchurched, and one of the cities within our county conservatively is 90 to 95% unchurched. These are shocking numbers; this means that 8 out 10 people are unchurched.
This is where my “every waking thought” is consumed with the W's, what can we do about it, when can we do something about it, and where do we come into play. Along with how we do it, how soon can we get started, and then there are several other questions that come along the way.
Up to 95% of one community is unchurched. These are huge numbers! How do you begin looking at solutions when from the first look it seems too overwhelming? Just this week I was watching a 2007 documentary on” The Pixar Story” where I learned an insight into ministry. In the developing of a computer animated cartoon they discovered that every scene is made up of little triangles and that one scene could have over 1 million little triangles. The numbers were over whelming but it made them think differently about solutions. 95% of the community that is unchurched causes you to begin thinking differently about the way you can reach into their lives and introduce them to Jesus Christ.
Right away, being a youth pastor, I began thinking how to impact the youth. I thought about having a presence at baseball, basketball, volleyball, soccer, softball, football games and etc. would be ways that I could look at reaching into this community. We do not have a church there this is a city that is 20+ miles away and we have 80% unchurched in our own community.
We are doing things in our own community to reach the unchurched, with an initiative that I began when I first took my position as Student Ministries Pastor. We now have five churches setting aside all of our denominational and associational boundaries to come together as one youth to worship one God once a quarter, and with the intention of equipping the students to reach their campus for Christ.
One thing that I would like to do with you, my online community, is to open up conversation and create some innovative “outside the box” thinking of creative ways to impact a rural community that is 95% unchurched. I would like to create a forum where this could take place, be it on this blog or through e-mails. My e-mail address is fluid2819@yahoo.com . Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and hopefully respond. I am looking forward to hearing and discussing some creative and innovative ways of impacting a community for Christ. If you are anything like me I know that you're “every waking thought” is consumed with your relationship with Christ and your own ministry.
