Last night our staff got together and tried to deliver 28 welcome bags to people that have just moved into our area.  We have a partnership with Welcome Wagon and it gives us the opportunity to meet people that are new.  The reason we did it was to see how it might work when we are doing it on an ongoing basis. We decided to take a little while and do it ourselves before we began asking people to help in what could be a very exciting ministry. 

In some cases the people were not home and so we left the goody bag with a note.  We did not take a lot of their time and we gathered back at the church to see what we learned.  We discovered a number of things.

• This is not a hard thing to do.  Anyone that has any interest in people can be effective at it.
• People are open.  Most of the people were home and we did not have one bad response.
• They seemed to be pleasantly surprised that someone cared enough to come.
• We found that some already had a church but many did not and they were appreciative of our efforts.

This is going to be a great opportunity for us as a church.  This will certainly be a ministry that will help us share the gospel in some significant ways. 

One of the most thrilling things about the evening was to find that several of these people had already had exposure to our church and in one case had already been invited by one of our members.  That is the way it is supposed to work. 

We had 20 people become a part of our church this past Sunday.  Our staff has sought to reach out to these people but in almost every case, I can point you to someone in our fellowship who had a significant part in their coming.  You should be encouraged and challenged by that fact.   It is just another indicator that it is people like you that make the difference.   Who could you invite today?