Servant Evangelism Report 1
This week my servant evangelism opportunity was volunteering at the campus food bank at the technical college where I do campus outreach. Last year I was the food bank coordinator and received an honorarium from the Students’ Association, however in this case it was strictly on a voluntary basis and I was more than welcome to return because of this existing relationship. In the past the food would be delivered, however the agency no longer is able to provide that service for our location and so my first responsibility was to use my van to pick up the food from the distribution center and bring it to the campus and unload it with a group of 2-3 other volunteers and the new food bank coordinator (who is currently doing a campus ministry internship with me and will be assuming the campus outreach role in the fall). We organized the food into about 30 hampers based on family size and composition and then students then have a two to three hour window to come and pick up the hampers which contain about a week’s worth of food. The interaction with the students who are accessing the food bank is generally brief as it only takes a few minutes to do the pickups; however it opens doors relationally when you see people on campus later as you have personally interacted with them and they now have a positive association with you as they know you care about helping them. While this is all positive, the real value of the servant evangelism opportunity is that you have several hours of lounging with the other student volunteers at the food bank as there are long breaks between when the students come to pick up the hampers. This unstructured time is the real window of opportunity for the Gospel. I spoke with one of the regular volunteers who I worked with last year by the name of Stephanie Patel. She is an international student from India who comes from a Hindu background, but is only marginally connected to her faith tradition and outright rejects certain tenants of it as being archaic and impractical. We discussed her belief about the concept of God/god and a Creator and I shared my conversion testimony about how I came to faith as a Christian and how the concept of right and wrong helped bring me to the point I recognized that I needed Jesus, because I knew that I had done wrong. In response she shared how she had come to the point of believing that faith was part of her traditional culture, which she has left behind to come to Canada out of a desire for a new life and how she wants to embrace a modern view of society and the world. As such, sharing my testimony about retaining the faith I had been raised in was a little bit paradigm busting for her as traditional Christian faith is strongly countercultural to the dominant liberal views of Canadian society today. She had sort of inferred that nobody who was progressive and integrated in to Canadian society held onto their traditional faith. I sensed that our conversation was making her reconsider her evaluation of her faith background, but I could also see that she had grounds for not embracing her Hindu background that weren’t related to adapting to Canadian culture and I could begin to see connections to how Jesus and the God of the Bible actually connects to these deeper questions and longings of the heart that she has been wrestling with. Despite the fact that I did not lead her to the Lord in that conversation, I believe that she moved one or two steps closer to Jesus on the Engels scale and has some points to ponder in the interim. I look forward to connecting with her again at the final food bank of the year in two weeks, as I believe she is graduating this year and I my wife and I are preparing to move to another city to being planting a church in the fall. Thus, there is a sense of urgency on my part to do all that I can do to bring her to faith.