There are neighborhoods all around us.
There are streets filled with houses right across from us, and there are more streets filled with houses right behind our tree line. There are old houses and there are new houses. There are trailers and there are mansions. There are public schoolers and private schoolers and home schoolers. There are Caucasian families and African-American families and Hispanic families and Indian families and Korean families. There are children and youth and newlyweds and young parents and seasoned parents and grandparents, and sadly, even widows and widowers.
God has placed us in the very heart of the Friendship Road community – a community of all types of people, each made in the image of God, each separated from Him by their sin, each with the same fundamental need: salvation through Jesus Christ.
For the past few months, Ryan and I have been spending an hour on Thursdays going door to door in an attempt to meet our neighbors and bring them the Gospel. The Lord has blessed our going out and we now have several neighbors that we have visited multiple times and have shared the Gospel with.
But whenever we go out, we are simply overwhelmed by the number of houses surrounding our church! It would be impossible for the two of us to make meaningful contacts with all of them. However, there is a way for us to make significant and measurable progress in seeking to establish Gospel relationships with our neighbors – by each family in our body making regular personal contact with them.
This fall, we are beginning a new outreach effort intended to equip each member for personal evangelism here in the Friendship Road Community: “Adopt-a-Street”. Each family (or a couple of friends!) who signs up will be assigned 15 to 20 homes that they will personally seek to reach for the next several months. Just as we have done in our larger organized outreaches, this will involve going door to door to make initial contacts and then building relationships by visiting the same homes multiple times.
We’ll be letting you know more about “Adopt-a-Street” throughout the month of August. But I’ll close this post by saying, as someone who used to poke fun at those who went door to door, here are a few things I’ve learned this year:
1. It’s more obedient to go to them than to hope they come to us.
2. People can sense when you are genuine.
3. Visiting multiple times builds trust.
4. Some people won’t even open the door for you.
5. Other people, amazingly, will not only open the door for you, but they will let you into their homes, they will let you pray with them, they will talk with you about spiritual things – they will open up their hearts to you!
“Pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ” (Colossians 4:3).