So FRIDAY... we had our last day of lectures on Fear of the Lord. I expected it would probably just be another normal day of lectures, maybe a wrap up kind of day, hit some points home... oh how I was wrong. I walked in and there were no tables set up for our lectures, so I was like hmm... doing something different I guess. So we started the morning off with some worship. We all stood around in a circle and just kind of started in prayer. I really love this base... especially when it comes to prayer. People are so passionate about prayer, and the Spirit moves in crazy ways during that, and I get all riled up and stoked on Jesus... and so on, its awesome. So we started off with prayer... and that led into singing God of Wonders. That was a pretty sweet time of worship there, and then it gets better. After God of Wonders finished, the speaker who was leading us just with his guitar kept going in the same chord progression and people started like... making up their own lyrics... and then people would pick it up, and everyone would start singing it was SOOOOOOOooooooooooo fun. It was scary at first to start singing something random... but that didn't last too long haha, it was great. And then after that we broke up and just went into time with God/prayer for others. So I got prayer from people and I prayed for people and it was awesome and incredible and Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. We finished that prayer time, the speaker was like "once I got you guys going, its tough to get you to stop" which was funny. After the prayer time we had a time to share and confess areas of our life that had sin and that we needed to address which also was awesome. That is basically that story... it was heaps fun.
Evangelism Part 2
Saturday night, I helped with Night Care. Basically, every Saturday night a bunch of guys from local churches run a free sausage and burger stand in a park across from City Hall, right in an area with a bunch of bars. So basically we do ministry with a lot of drunks but it is really cool... even with the drunks having conversation or you get people that aren't drunk too, which is sweet. Last time I went, I had maybe one... decent conversation... but today I felt so much more comfortable. I started off hanging out with one of the staff on my school (5 of us from my school went) and just kind of watched what he did. There were a couple things he said that really started to hit home after the night ended in relation to how you should approach evangelism. Jesus and Christianity are sometimes "dirty" words. People are turned off the second you say them. The body of Christ is important yes, it is SO important, but sometimes addressing that to people right off... just turns them off. We are called to love above all else. Jesus wasn't a "Christian" but he drew SO many people because of his love... because of his supernatural abilities and other things I guess. So instead of starting off with just pushing Jesus, start off with love, start off with that you are doing this event because of love, because you like community and see where that goes. So I talked to 4 people... well 1 of those people was like a group of 6. I sat down beside one of the guys, and we started talking about this event, and he was so impressed with just the willingness that we had to come help, and he really affirmed how important ministry like this was. He said it was cool that people didn't force anything... which comes back to our call to love, and they will know we are Christians BY our love. I had a conversation with a couple other of his friends too, just kind of explained.. briefly why I was here, and then they all went to a bar. It was a cool little chat though. The next conversation I had was with a younger guy who was in Newcastle with his friend on his 18th birthday just hitting the town. I really felt like I got an impression of innocence about him. He wasn't like the others, he enjoyed what he was doing, but it didn't seem to be what he really did in his life. He had a shirt that was from a youtube user that he supported that he found a lot of ways to relate to the guys story. This youtuber basically video blogged his life, and his challenges, and I was like do you see yourself in some of those? And he was like yah definitely... and we talked about he used to go to church before his parents divorce and he hasn't since.. but I really felt like he was searching, I didn't get a chance to go much farther in the conversation, but I really felt like in some ways he opened up... I was thinking this morning "who tells a random stranger about his parents divorce?" I know that I have been told that culturally Australian youth are much more open but I really think God was there in that conversation too. There was another conversation with an older man.. it was good, but I really want to talk about the last conversation. It was funny, last night I didn't talk to anybody really for the first good chunk, and then I just went from person to person talking, it was awesome. The last conversation was with a guy from Sydney who was just kind of in Newcastle. I had a chance to share my testimony, share the hope that Jesus has put in my life, share the purpose I have in my life because of Jesus, share that I am doing what I am doing because I love people, I love conversations and I love community. He was so receptive to it all too. I talked to him about what he thought of church and everything. He said that he went for like... Christmas and Easter, but that was all. In my mind, I am going, thats not great but THAT IS A START! (Or maybe that is me just now... I don't know). He talked about how he really felt the difficulty about church was being accepted... and being challenged intellectually. So that gave me two thoughts... maybe he had bad church experience, and that he was searching. I talked to him about Christianity being about relationship, and the church is important yes, but relationship, living our daily lives in accordance to Jesus... that is what is SO important. I also really encouraged him to jump into a church, to look for one, just give one a try, it will definitely be worth it. He left a bit after that, but he said that he was definitely thinking about trying harder to look for a church.
I really like what I am reading
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