Be A Blessing: Fall Series 2022
By: Jonathan Scheffrahn
On September 11, 2022, we began a six-week series in our church called Be a Blessing. It was created here at Grace by our productions team and was based on Ferguson’s book called BLESS: 5 Everyday Ways to Love Your Neighbor and Change the World. We had more than 50 groups participate, with around 650 attendees. In our first week, we started with prayer and the simple act of praying for our neighbors each day by name. A great tool to help with that was the Bless Every Home app, which we encouraged everyone to download. This tool tells you the names of your neighbors and every day sends you five names and a verse to pray for them. As Gary says often, we need to make sure we are talking to God about people before we ever talk to people about God. Then the rest of the five weeks, we focused on listening to our neighbors, eating with them, serving them, and finally sharing our story of how God has changed our life with them. If you missed it you can find all the content from the series at gracearlington.com/beablessing.
Throughout the series, we were inundated with testimonies of how God answered those prayers for our neighbors. Neighbors would be outside for the first time in years and many connections were made, many for the first time. Opportunities to serve our neighbors became plentiful during the series as a result of all the prayers being prayed and moments where we listened to the needs our neighbors shared with us. Our hope is that many will continue to be impacted in the neighborhoods where we live as we continue to walk out Jesus' command to love our neighbors in Luke 10:27.
“And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God [a]with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’” Luke 10:27
Carey & Rhoda Morgan had a neighborhood gathering with the families in the streets surrounding their house. It was a wonderful time to gather together and enjoy a fun evening, eat good food, and even meet some of our local law enforcement officers!
