BLESS Sunday is March 17th and I want to bring your attention to the importance of it. Evidence in most churches today reflects that our evangelism temperature is low. Our life’s work is disciple making. This is the core of our family business. Our product is more followers of Christ. But too often, we are too busy and too distracted that we are not meaningfully connected to the people in our sphere of influence that God places us in.
Researcher and writer Thom Rainer states from his studies that on average only about five in every 100 adults in churches are actively sharing Jesus with others. He also states that only a meager 6-7.5% of churches would be categorized as “effective evangelistic churches”; churches that have at least 10 per 100 adults actively sharing Christ with people. I would love it if all 75 of our churches were living as effective evangelistic churches! I would love for us to be known for our high evangelistic temperature and passion for intentionally helping people take steps closer to their Savior. I would actually love if the reality was more like 20% of adults in churches living evangelistically. That would be a game-changer and systemically shift the tone and culture of our congregations.
The BLESS portal on the ECC web page has amazing resources for you to tap into including the brand new BLESS Journal for Teens that our very own Erik Cave helped create. I trust you were one of the 449 of our 875 ECC churches that walked through BLESS since it begun. I pray that your people received one of the 316,791 bulletins that were ordered. In the portal you will find sermon series ideas, flyers/posters, PPT’s, creative ideas, Spanish language resources, and more.
For those of you who have been around the Covenant for a while you will remember earlier iterations of our intentional evangelism work with Bring My World to Christ and 72. BLESS is in the same lineage with commitment cards that are collected and brought to the conference and ECC Annual meetings for prayer and celebration. I urge you to use March 17th, or another Sunday, to challenge and resource your people. Let’s bring a flood of cards as we commit ourselves to Begin with prayer, Listen with care, Eat together, Serve in love, and Share our story – to go and make disciples! Mark your calendars and make plans to fan your church’s fire. Let’s go and BLESS some people, Peoples!
Introductory letter from the BLESS portal:
Welcome to BLESS
Make and Deepen Disciples is excited to introduce you to a new way of thinking about evangelism. We know that God has always sought to reach and restore the world through blessing. Since the time of Abraham, God has blessed his people so that we might bless those who do not know him. We invite you to practice these five simple practices with those in your spheres of influence—friends, relatives, acquaintances, neighbors and colleagues—the people outside of God’s family—with the hope that we may help them travel further in their journey toward making faith commitments to Jesus. As we seek to authentically BLESS others daily in the midst of your deepening relationships with the people in your life, we believe God will use each of us to bless our world with Christ!For his glory and kingdom,
Michelle Sanchez
Executive Minister of Make and Deepen
