A New Way To Present An Old Message

This past weekend was one of excitement at Crossroads Fellowship. Why was it so exciting? Well sit back, relax, and I will let you know.

Every year at Crossroads we have what is called an annual missions conference. This has been, in years gone by, a half a week where we work very intently at highlighting the work of our missionaries around the globe. We would have a different missionary speaker each year come and share what God was doing in the field they were in, and how we could give, go, and pray about that. Typically a small portion of our congregation was able to make it out to these special meetings during the week. The highest attendance being maybe 25 people, and if we were lucky enough to get the missionary on Sunday morning we might have a service that was attended by 50 - 100 people.

This year though at our National Council I was introduced to a new team called Coffee and Conversations. This team is comprised of a group of young people, twenty somethings, who are led of God to travel the country sharing God's vision for global missions through an interactive coffee house format, with a wonderful live band, and intensive multi-media presentations. The music, much of it original, is very cutting edge and might not work in some churches. The coffee house is done right inside the church building, and in particular we transformed our sanctuary for the event into a Starbucks of sorts.

The team, led by Shuree Rivera, challenged our congregation to consider what we might do about two major ministry projects that the C&MA is involved with. First was how we might partner with Remember Nhu and the Alliance in reaching young children who are sold into the sex slave market in Cambodia. One lady in our church in particular told me of how the time spent looking at that just broke her heart. The second thing was we were challenged about how we might minister to those in Africa suffering from the aids pandemic. Both topics were very heavy and heart breaking. Yet at the end of each service people were looking at them not with frustration, but with hope.

The most awesome thing was that on Saturday night, the night we looked at the sex trade in Cambodia, we had 77 people attend. Many of these were fist time attendees to our church. We even had a large group of youth attend. Now I will tell you up front we bribed the youth to come by holding a skateboarding contest afterward that you had to attend the services of the evening to enter the contest. We paid about $18 for the prizes we gave away, and we probably had 7 -9 teenagers come that would not have come otherwise. So all in all it was a REALLY GOOD $18. The next morning we had 84 people present, and people were actually signing up for ministry opportunities to help in this critical areas. Not everyone in the church attended the special services, but this was by far the best connection we have ever made with missions in the Alliance as a church body.

The week before we had a video teleconference with missionary friends in Mongolia, and the next two weeks we will have a missionary FROM Nicaragua who is reaching Mexicans in the U.S. come and share, and Ivan lay will finish us up as he shares about 38 years in missionary service and the life of sacrifice, which he calls privilege, that he lived as he took the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth. Pray for us as we continue to be led by the Lord in how we might impact our community, our country, and our whole world with the Gospel!