Dear Church,

Part of the Church Together plan that you have called me to implement is to increase our capacity to reach out to our neighborhoods. To help fulfill that responsibility, the Wages and Benefits Committee and the CLB have reviewed and approved a proposal to hire two, 10-hour per week Ministry Coaches on our church staff.

I’m pleased to announce that Denny Gross and Ezekiel Otieno have accepted invitations to serve with Blooming Glen as part of our Neighborhood Engagement Team, effective September 1, 2024.

Denny Gross will serve as Outreach Events Coach. His primary role is to recruit, equip, deploy, and support persons who will lead efforts to invite our neighbors to get to know us. Denny is strategically placed to do this ministry. His games ministry is well known across Upper Bucks County, and he has already formed important partnerships with other local churches. I look forward to the teams he will form to take the games ministry to events like Perkasie First Friday, and I look forward to his coaching the teams that will implement events that attract the neighborhood to our campus, like Fall Festival.

Denny’s role also includes building relationships with the unchurched and the dechurched in the Pennridge communities. This is a big role, and it could look overwhelming. But Denny has a heart to reach people for Jesus, and the unchurched and dechurched seek Denny out for faith conversations. Denny’s work on the church staff isn’t to run a bunch of programs – it’s to build teams of people with calling and capacity to serve in outreach to our neighbors, and I am so excited to work alongside Denny in this opportunity.

Ezekiel “Zeke” Otieno will serve as Small Groups Coach. His primary role will be to recruit, equip, deploy, and support persons who will lead small groups of people interested in following Jesus here at Blooming Glen. These small groups will help form a greater reliance on the scriptures, a deeper practice of compassionate candor, and project generosity and hospitality as Jesus-centered virtues. While our Sunday School program remains the primary way the long-term community at Blooming Glen work at fostering these discipleship values, Ezekiel will be launching new efforts with those who are unchurched and dechurched, with skeptics and exiles who feel alienated from church as usual.

Zeke has already been doing this sort of ministry – leading small group Bible studies of young adults, and so we look forward to providing him with a platform to learn and grow in a ministry of evangelism through small groups. He is also going to be an active pastoral intern this next year, beginning a process of discerning God’s call on his life.

I urge y’all to pray for and encourage Ezekiel and Denny as they begin this new chapter of their walk with Jesus. We still have two coaching positions to fill. One is in Children’s Ministry, and the other is in Family Engagement Ministry. Pray that God will raise up the right individuals to serve as part of the Blooming Glen team, helping to manage core ministries of curating worship, community care, and common mission in collaboration with our Elders.

God has got a plan for us. I don’t know all the details of that plan. I do know it involves building teams of people with a passion for constructing authentic relationships with the unchurched and the dechurched that are expressed in worship, through mutual care, and in generosity and hospitality. I know God’s desire for us is a Blooming Glen Mennonite Church reliant on the scriptures as God’s story by which we live. A church committed to healthy, peaceful practices grounded in caring deeply for one another and challenging one another directly. A church that is generous and full of grace because that’s who Jesus is. Denny and Zeke are joining Michael, Michelle, Gretchen, Conrad, the two Jens – Hunsberger and Yoder, and me, to help make real the vision of church unleashed by the good news of Jesus in the neighborhoods of Upper Bucks and Montgomery Counties.

How ‘bout it? Are you game for what God wants to do?

Let’s go, Church!

Pastor Jeff

jeff@bgmc.net

What do you think of when you think about changing the world?

I came to the Christian faith in the mid-1970’s in a time of gigantic optimism. Our generation would win the world for Jesus. Communism, illiteracy, and poverty would all disappear as people in the Eastern Bloc and the global south joined with us in the USA and Western Europe to accept Jesus as their savior. My generation would lead a heroic effort to give our lives in ministry and service across the street and around the world. And we would usher in the millennial reign of King Jesus.

It hasn’t quite turned out that way, has it?

There are maybe a thousand reasons why we failed to change the world…beginning with the belief we could change the world. Only Jesus can change lives. But my generation, in our hubris, thought Jesus had turned that over to us.

Not so much.

According to their 2017 book, “The Simplest Way to Change the World,” authors Dustin Willis and Brandon Clements put forward a whole new way to change the world – hospitality. The world is not changed through programmatic excellence or stellar preaching or exciting concerts. The world is changed one front-yard cookout at a time.

Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, says it this way: “I am growing increasingly convinced that if every one of these kids burning with passion to write a hit Christian song or make that hit Christian movie or start that hit Christian ministry to change the world would instead focus their passion on walking with God on a daily basis, the world would change…Because the world learns about God not by watching Christian movies, but by watching Christians.”

It is unlikely that any of us at Blooming Glen are going to transform the world all by ourselves. But everyone of us can open the door of our home and invite our friends in to experience how we walk with Jesus. It’s as simple and as hard as that.

What do you think of when you think about changing the world?

How about, “Dinner’s ready.”

Let’s go (eat with our neighbors) church,

Pastor Jeff

jeff@bgmc.net

P.S. August is a good time for coffee on Friday afternoons and breakfast on Monday mornings. Join me at the Broad Street Grind Friday, August 23 and Friday, August 30, at 3:30 pm and ask me anything that’s on your mind. Join me Monday morning, August 26, at the A&N Diner at 7:30 am and ask me anything on your mind. I’d love to hear what you are thinking about.