{"id":6609,"date":"2021-06-15T09:05:17","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T17:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/?p=6609"},"modified":"2021-06-15T09:05:17","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T17:05:17","slug":"kicking-off-the-2021-summer-reading-project-b-l-e-s-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2021\/06\/15\/kicking-off-the-2021-summer-reading-project-b-l-e-s-s","title":{"rendered":"Kicking Off the 2021 Summer Reading Project: B.L.E.S.S."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through B.L.E.S.S. by Dave and Jon Ferguson, I\u2019ll post my thoughts here. They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2021<\/a>. The schedule is online<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Dave Ferguson and Jon Ferguson are brothers who planted Community Christian Church in Chicago. It\u2019s grown large (the church was drawing 6,500 attendees before COVID) and they\u2019ve written several books to help their congregants serve Christ more effectively. This summer we\u2019re going to take a look at their book about evangelism: B.L.E.S.S. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

B.L.E.S.S. is an acrostic built out of the five practices the book advocates: B<\/strong>egin with prayer, L<\/strong>isten, E<\/strong>at, S<\/strong>erve, and S<\/strong>tory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week, we\u2019re looking at chapters 1 and 2. Dave describes his struggles trying to share his faith (although the book is co-authored, they wrote it in Dave\u2019s voice to make it less confusing), shares encouraging data about how open people are to talking about God, and at the beginning of chapter two drops this gem about an email he received:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026Two teams of missionaries\u2026went to Thailand. While both teams went with similar goals, they carried two distinctly different strategies.<\/p>

The \u201cConverters\u201d group went with the sole intention of converting people and evangelizing. Their goal was to \u201csave souls.\u201d<\/p>

The \u201cBlessers\u201d group explained their intention like this: \u201cWe are here to bless whoever God sends our way.\u201d<\/p>

The study followed both the \u201cConverters\u201d and the \u201cBlessers\u201d for two years. At the end of that time, the researchers discovered two key findings:<\/p>

First, the presence of the \u201cBlessers\u201d in the community resulted in tremendous amounts of \u201csocial good.\u201d It appeared, according to the study, that this group contributed to the betterment of society, community life, and the creation of social capital. The presence of the \u201cConverters,\u201d however, seemed to make no difference.<\/p>

The second discovery\u2013and this was very surprising\u2013was that the \u201cBlessers\u201d saw forty-eight conversions while the \u201cConverters\u201d saw only one! The \u201cBlessers\u201d group saw almost fifty times as many conversions through being a blessing than the group that was only trying to convert the people around it.<\/p>B.L.E.S.S pages 17\u201318<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve never seen that study and can\u2019t comment on its rigor, but it intuitively makes sense to me. A similar line of thinking led to the way I close our on-campus services each week. If you\u2019re part of Chi Alpha, you\u2019ve heard me say the following dozens of times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs you leave, remember you\u2019re not just leaving a meeting. You\u2019re leaving as part of a community, if you want to be. We\u2019re Chi Alpha, a community of students earnestly following Jesus in the power of the Spirit. Our name reminds us of our mission: Chi Alpha stands for Christ\u2019s Ambassadors because we represent a King and we do what ambassadors do. We make friends on our sovereign\u2019s behalf and we advance His interests wherever we find ourselves. And since<\/strong> our King is in the blessing business, that makes it our business too. Go forth tonight with an eager expectation to see how God will use you to bless others.<\/strong> Go forth with faith in your heart, hope upon your countenance, and love upon your lips.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those aren\u2019t just idle words I say, they express some of my deepest convictions about ministry. And so my hope is that reading this book together will help us become even more effective at being agents of blessing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blessing people is always good. When we bless people at a minimum they receive our love, and at maximum they receive both our love and God\u2019s. In other words, the worst case scenario is that they are blessed, and the best case scenario is that they are both blessed and also transformed by God\u2019s grace. There\u2019s no bad outcome \u2014 it\u2019s either good or it\u2019s great!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through B.L.E.S.S. by Dave and Jon Ferguson, I\u2019ll post my thoughts here. They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2021. The schedule is online. Dave Ferguson and Jon Ferguson are brothers who planted Community Christian Church in Chicago. It\u2019s grown large \u2026 Continue reading \u201cKicking Off the 2021 Summer Reading Project: B.L.E.S.S.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Some initial thoughts from our ministry's summer reading project. This summer we're reading a book about blessing those around us.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[235,115,293,294],"class_list":["post-6609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-reviews","tag-evangelism","tag-missions","tag-summer-reading-project","tag-summer-reading-project-2021"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-1IB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6609"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6614,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions\/6614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}