Fairs!

One of the things we’ve decided to do as a church this summer/fall is get involved in some public events to help tell people about what we’re doing.

Why are you doing that?
One of the problems of being a 168 year old church is that people who have lived here for a long time have a pretty established viewpoint on each organization in town. Someone might drive by your place 500 times a year for 5 years and have no clue what you are really all about. So we feel like we need to go where the people are and tell them about what’s happening at Romeo.

What events are you doing?
The idea is to have at least one per month for a while. We may do more and we may do less, but for the next 5-6 months we want to be out at a big public event. The first two “big events” are both fairs. In fact, where we live the fairs are really about as stuff gets. Tens of thousands of families will make their way to both the Armada Fair and the Romeo Peach Festival and we’re hoping to get a chance to talk to them.

Isn’t Romeo a pretty churched area?
No. As I pointed to in my message last Sunday… Romeo is actually more of a mission field than anything else. With about 5-6% of people in our area attending a local church, there is plenty of work to be done. It’s our prayer that more churches in town will also jump on the bandwagon and do some innovative things to reach the lost here. While we want to grow our church, we don’t think we have the corner on the market for “good church” in our community. To make a significant impact for Christ all of the churches are going to have to work together.

What are you going to be doing at fairs?
I’m not much of a fair guy myself. Essentially, at both fairs we’ll have a booth and we’ll be talking to people who drop by. We won’t be canvasing the fairgrounds with tracts or putting stuff on people’s windshields. I don’t feel like that’s an honoring way to present our church or Jesus. Instead, we are doing more of a permission based thing as people who are willing to talk to us will talk to us and those who aren’t, we’ll just be friendly.

Aren’t you going to do _________?
Well, if you go to fairs and you have ideas… let us know! Likewise, if you know of a big event in the Romeo area that we should have a booth at or participate in, let us know.

But we’ve never done this before!
I know, isn’t it cool to do new stuff? I agree with my friend Jonathan, change and growth are signs of a healthy organization. We should expect that a healthy organization would morph and grow and otherwise change.