The 2024 NAB Fall Offering is scheduled to arrive soon in mailboxes across Canada and the US. This offering for the Ministry Resource Fund tells the story of how Blue Ocean and other NAB resources were some of the catalysts for McKernan Baptist Church starting their English language learning ministry, so we invited Pastor Dan Schroth, one of the lead team pastors at McKernan, to share his thoughts on the importance of this ministry, and others like it.
An Inconvenient Hospitality
By Dan Schroth
Somewhere along the way as a pastor, I became more focused on the health of the congregation I served, some might say at the expense of my concern for those outside of the church. Over the past number of years, I have greatly benefitted from a number of organizations that are walking closely with Jesus as he continues to expand his Kingdom reign. I have been on a wonderfully welcomed learning curve as to how to be involved in the life of our culture.
One of the influences came from the NAB’s Blue Ocean. This gathering allowed me the privilege of meeting with other NAB leaders while also working through some profound lessons on how to engage culture with the life-giving message of Jesus’s tremendous love, healing, and work of reconciliation.
Sandra Maria van Opstal suggests hospitality involves a deepening relationship with both the Holy Spirit and people who may not look like us or share our experiences. Shifting our focus from doing to being allows us to become more fully the community Scripture calls us to be. Though we may begin with hospitality, where we are saying “we welcome you,” Scripture calls us to journey from that place through a place of solidarity (“we stand with you”) and ultimately to mutuality (“we need one another”), where we comprehend just how deeply the global community of Jesus followers need each other in order to be the people of God we are called by Scripture to be. . . .
Want to get a head start on sharing the 2024 Fall Offering with your church? You can find resources at the link below.
This past Sunday, Jeremy Rands, the senior pastor of Monclova Road Baptist Church in Monclova, Ohio, shared a story of God’s providence that begins rather innocuously with a surprise influx of funds to cover the cost of airing their services on the local Christian television broadcaster and ends with the upcoming kidney transplant surgery for Pastor Jeremy.
You can check out Monclova Baptist’s video below where Pastor Jeremy tells the story himself.
At the moment I have all I need—and more! I am generously supplied with the gifts you sent me with Epaphroditus. They are a sweet-smelling sacrifice that is acceptable and pleasing to God. And this same God who takes care of me will supply all your needs from his glorious riches, which have been given to us in Christ Jesus. Now all glory to God our Father forever and ever! Amen. (Philippians 4:18–20 NLT)
How well equipped is your congregation for the ministry of evangelism? How do you evaluate your church’s health in that regard? How would you identify equipping gaps in your congregation’s evangelistic faithfulness? If you find yourself asking these questions, or you think these are great questions to consider, as a pastor or leader in your church, then you will want to take part in Reframe: Equipping Your Congregation for Evangelism, a four-week evangelistic training.
This training will provide an evaluative framework to help you assess your evangelistic equipping efforts. It will help you to recognize gaps you may need to fill and distortions you will want to correct and provide a clearer path forward toward helping your church become more evangelistically faithful.
This online training consists of four, 90-minute weekly sessions that begin October 30 at 1:00 p.m. (Eastern). Register by Monday, October 28 at the link below. Training is free for NAB ministry leaders
To love is to be vulnerable; not only is there the potential for pain (see Hosea), but it has the ability to form us into a new kind of people (see Matthew 5:43–48). When we truly love others like ourselves, we allow them access to our hearts, giving them the unique ability to hurt us even when their actions don’t expressly impact us. When we truly love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we open ourselves to allowing him to shape us in his image, which involves the death of ourselves.
This vulnerability is not territory unknown to God. As Love embodied, he knows intimately what it feels like (see John 11:35). The Sovereign King over all creation set aside his position of power to become a baby born to parents with little to no social standing. God Almighty chose to confine himself into the fragile human form so we might truly know him and call him friend.
If we are to love like Christ in our everyday lives – a love Scot McKnight describes as “a rugged, affective commitment of presence, advocacy, and direction” – we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable like Christ. This Advent season, let’s dive into what it looks like when the God of the universe shows us how to love – a vulnerable, irrepressive, and potent love – and how we in turn should respond. You can sign up to receiving daily devotionals through the entire season of Advent, which starts December 1, by clicking on the link below.
Sign Up for Advent Devotionals
If you are planning to go through the devotionals with your church or small group and would like resources once they become available (the full series of devotionals in a print-ready file, graphics, flyers, etc.), please reach out to us at the link below.