Last Sunday, with toilet brushes in hand, Laura and I kicked off the church's acts of kindness ministry. The idea behind this is to share God's love to our community by having small teams of people go out and serve others by meeting their practical needs. Serving in this capacity has the potential for an almost limitless amount of ministry endeavors based on the amount of needs within a community. The first need Laura and I took on was a glamorous one: cleaning public restrooms.
Showing up at a business with a cleaning bucket in hand and asking permission to clean the bathrooms, “because we want to show you God's love,” takes a bit of boldness and a lot of humility, but the results were surprisingly energizing. We cleaned with no-strings-attached and we got the expected response of, “How much is this going to cost?” We enjoyed seeing their rigidness crumble when we replied, “It's free. We just want to show you God's love.”
In two hours we cleaned a bar, a sports equipment store, a pizza joint, and a gas station. That may seem like slow progress as far as the workload goes, but we were pleasantly surprised to find the recipients of our kind acts were full of questions about us and the church. Herein lies a strength for this ministry: we did not set out to invite people to church or use this as a promotional tactic. Instead, we set out to show people God's love, and in doing so by such a simple and radical way, the grace-filled act naturally invokes questions as to why, setting a stage to tell of the church without all the typical barriers involved.
Not everyone was inquisitive as to why. Some people simply said “thank you” and went on with their work, but the neatest thing I found by doing this was an appreciation shown by everybody involved--nobody was rude. This experience was quite emboldening for a Christian like myself who has become discouraged over the years with the responses I've received with traditional approaches like door-to-door evangelism. I think acts of kindness better suit our reserved culture and makes evangelism easy for Christians who aren't naturally inclined to preach a powerful sermon to a complete stranger (which is like 99% of the flock).
Overall, it was a wonderful and even fun way to spend an afternoon, and I am looking forward to doing it again and getting more people involved.
