Ministry

Author Rachael Groll discusses her book, Go: Beginning a Kids Outreach Ministry

One way the church can achieve a more personal connection with members and visitors is by starting a greeting card ministry. A simple card pulled from the mailbox can put a smile on someone’s face.

With the flip of the calendar, our thoughts shift to personal resolutions for the new year. But do we think enough about others? Maybe. Maybe not. During this leap year, we get a bonus day—366 days rather than 365—to make a difference in the lives of others. Let’s consider how, month-by-month, we can focus outside ourselves. We truly can be the hands and feet of Jesus through our words and actions. It just requires some thought, creativity, effort, and time.

We’ve all heard the Christmas story dozens of times. I expect many of you can even recite sections of Luke 2 telling of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.

Yet, while we Christians are intimately familiar with details of the holy birth from shepherds to angels to the “no room for them in the inn,” many are not. For them, it’s just a story and they’d rather focus on holiday gifts and secular celebrations.

For those of us in ministry, we recognize this also as a season of ministry growth. Newly-christened planners, schedules, and a desire for routine predictably produce a new crop of kids into children’s and youth ministries. New leaders, both paid and volunteer, join ministries.

Looking out the window of the airplane, I watched the coast come into view. After almost a day’s worth of travel, we were almost in Costa Rica.

Across the aisle my daughter and her friends digested the same image with nervous excitement. A new culture. Language barriers. Cold showers. Weird food. The thoughts guiding their conversa-tions couldn’t possibly measure up to what God was preparing to do in and through them.

The camp soon offered me the position of program director. I accepted with no idea of what I was getting myself into.

The night before staff training, my grandmother died in Colorado. I waved goodbye to my parents as they left without me for the funeral and I drove the hour to camp with tears streaming down my cheeks.

How does your church connect with your community during the summer?

When I thought about that, I looked to churches in my southern Minnesota city of some 25,000 for specific examples of summer outreach. I discovered four ways of connecting—via food, entertainment, evangelism and service.

One of my earliest music-related memories is lying on my parents’ orange couch listening to reel-to-reel tapes of Broadway musicals. We didn’t own a large selection of recordings, but we had The Sound of Music, several Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and The Music Man, my favorite. I loved the jolly songs and the story of the inept little band that magically turned into a huge, marvelous marching band, complete with 76 trombones. It wasn’t the love story that I cared about; it was the band.

There was a lot of certainty when I grew up in the church: Doubt is a sin. It’s just wrong. To doubt means I’ve lost my faith and need to get saved again.

But being told I was faithless or just needed to have faith never removed my doubts. To doubt is human. We are taught to be doubters in a difficult world full of lies and near-truths. To survive, we need to question and doubt.