Your next month

This class is worth nothing as information. It is a way of spending the next month, or it is nothing at all.

The challenge

Within one month, identify one person of peace and begin meeting with them regularly to read Scripture together.

One person. Not a programme, not a campaign. If in four weeks you are sitting down with one person and an open Bible, this class did its job.

Four steps that fit in a month

Week one — pray and list. Set the 10:02 alarm. Write down every name that comes to mind from the places you already are: home, work, the school gate, the shop, the team. Ten to twenty names, no filtering.

Week two — watch. Go through your week with the five marks in mind. Who asks a real question? Who lingers? Who brings something up again? Mark the names. Add the ones you had forgotten.

Week three — serve and ask. Pick one. Do something useful and unremarkable for them. Pray for them out loud, by name, for the thing they actually mentioned. Then ask the small question: “Would you like to read some of the Bible together and see what it says?”

Week four — meet. A time, a place, one passage. If they say no, you have lost nothing — go back to your list. The prayer was never wasted, and neither was the serving.

If your work already opens doors

If you are part of anything that serves people — a clinic, a meal, tutoring, a sports team, a food pantry — you already have the hardest part. Access ministries of that kind put you in front of people at the exact moment they are open, and the only thing usually missing is the question at the end.

Do not turn the service into bait. Serve because it is right, and ask because you would want someone to ask you.

Questions worth sitting with

Use these on your own, or with your group.

1. How has your picture of evangelism changed — and what were you carrying that you can now put down?
2. Who in your circle right now shows two or more of the five marks?
3. What would have to change in your week for you to actually meet with someone regularly?
4. Which of the four moves — stay, serve, share, send — do you consistently skip, and what does that reveal?

A prayer to close

Lord of the harvest, send us to the people you have prepared, and teach us to recognize them when we find them.

God is already working. The people are already there. What is in short supply is workers — and that is the one part of the shortage you can do something about this month.