S2S Sisters: "The Power of Love: Evangelism" by Faith Zook

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. Hello everyone, and welcome to Strength to Strength Sisters. It's so lovely to have everyone here that is live wherever you are around the world, and for those that are going to be listening in to the recording, welcome.

Today I'm very excited to present or introduce Faith Zook, so she's on here and she's going to talk about the power of love evangelism. I think this is something that's going to be very crucial for me to hear about in my life.

It's a powerful tool that we have to, well, save people, of course, and bring them to the light of Jesus Christ, and I'm so interested to hear in her talk. I'm going to give you a little bit of information about her. So Faith is a homeschooling mother of seven children, three boys and four girls. She also does in-home babysitting and currently watches two two-year-old children full-time. She is a pastor's wife and a member of Hamden Mennonite Church, Baltimore City, Maryland. Faith and her husband, Nathan, have a heart for city missions. Faith has lived in cities for the past 25 years. Faith has her college degree in biology and secondary education and her MS degree in biological sciences.

Faith tutors online college students in biology and chemistry for Palisippi State Community College. Faith's hobby is playing the cello, and she teaches private cello and piano lessons in her home. She currently plays cello in the John Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, and she's also the author of a book, Pilgrims in the Library, and she also enjoys taking long walks with family and friends. The family currently resides in Gulliford, in the Gulliford neighborhood in Baltimore City.

Wow, Faith, you make me feel like I am not busy at all.

Okay, well, I'm very looking very much looking forward to hearing your talk, so I'll pass it over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Christina, and thank you all for having me on this. So to get started here, my topic is on evangelism. So we're going to think about ways that we as women can do this in our own cities and towns that we live in. So what do you picture when you hear the word evangelism? We might have different mental images that come to mind, maybe passing out tracks door to door. That would be a good way. Maybe a table or a booth at a street festival with flyers and information to hand out to people who walk by, and smiling faces behind the table ready to talk about their faith.

So that could be another way. Maybe we picture a big mass choir going to sing at a mall or a city market. So that'd be another way that we might picture evangelism happening. And yes, these are all definitely ways to evangelize others, definitely. So certainly formal evangelism can be done that way.

And this is how my parents became Christians, actually, was a Baptist minister coming around door to door, knocking on doors here in Baltimore City, Maryland, and passing out tracks and telling the good news of the gospel to people. And that's how my parents became Christians. He was hoping to talk to people and develop a personal connection with them. So the Baptist minister did that formally. He was doing that as an evangelism tool, and that worked. My parents ended up accepting the Lord and becoming members of that Baptist church. So that's definitely ways to do evangelism, certainly. And I don't want to minimize any of that because it is super effective. But let's also think about evangelism, how it starts with the everyday places.

It involves our daily life paths and very mundane, day-to-day, everyday things that happen. Anything that brings us into contact with the outside world counts as evangelism. We can use it in that way. So when I was about 12 years old, one summer I went to an orchestra camp. I went with my sister, and it was at a nearby college. I play the cello, as was already mentioned. So my sister and I went to an orchestra camp for a week, and we stayed in the dorm rooms. We ate our meals at that college dining hall, and we played our musical instruments all day long. We made instant friends with the girls that were right across the hall from us at the dorms.

And then we became good friends where we walked to every activity together. We did everything together. There was another girl in that group that I developed an instant connection with. We were both being raised by our mothers in single-parent homes in a divorce situation. We were both the same age, and we both just loved the smell of Plumeria lotion from Bath & Body Works. I can still picture that smell now when I think of her. I don't know. We just connected on that. There was nothing special about what we did together. I did not hand her any gospel tracks with the Ten-Step Plan for Salvation printed out in bold letters. I never sang her a hymn about the way of the cross, although that would have been good to do, but I didn't do it.

I didn't even write down any Bible verses on little yellow sticky notes and leave them on her dorm room mirror. I did not gather my church mission committee and have a meeting every week to decide the best way to reach the people of her city. I did not write letters to my friends and family, asking them to donate money to me so I could cut back on my work and witness to her. Instead, I met her at everyday places that week, and I was friendly, and then we became pen pals. I invited her to come and stay a weekend at my house, come meet my family. She went to my Mennonite church with me, and then I went and spent a weekend at her house.

We kept writing letters. After a couple of years, she began writing about some tough issues she was dealing with at school and in her home, and I could relate with her struggles. She asked me to tell her how I was so joyful, even in the middle of difficult times. She asked me how she could get that joy in her life, too. So I wrote about the plan for salvation. I wrote about the hope and the joy that I had in Christ, and I carefully copied out Bible verses for her on my letter. She actually became a Christian believer and now lives a new life full of the grace of God. So I don't think my point is, I don't think there's any one method that will reach everyone, but I do know that we can start as an individual, no matter how busy we feel or how old or young we are, with one-on-one conversations for the people that God has placed in our lives.

So I'm going to talk a little bit from the Bible about the Samaritan woman and Jesus because I love this story. It's the perfect example of evangelism, and we can learn lessons from how Jesus approached the woman and some of the things that he said to her. So it's taken from John 4:4-42, and I'm not going to read it for you today. It's a long passage, but I'd love it if you all could read it maybe after the talk or in the coming week and contemplate how Jesus did ministry here and how he evangelized and what lessons we can learn from it. And I'll go through some of those today.

So this story takes place where Jesus is passing through the land of Samaria. He's on his way to do mission work somewhere, preaching, but he meets with a woman while he's there, and he's sitting beside a public well. So this would be a place where the people might gather to get their water, and he meets this woman and begins to have a conversation with her and ends up going deeper into her life, and she becomes a true believer at the end of the passage. So let me rephrase the story a little bit for you using my own words. It was another hot and dry day in Samaria, and Jesus found himself passing through the little town of Sychar.

He was on his way to another ministry place, and he had a very busy schedule, but it was time now for a rest break. The disciples went off to gather food, but Jesus sat down by the well. Now, the well was a town gathering spot. Everybody could come there to hear the news of the day, socialize, and meet their friends and neighbors. So Jesus' act of sitting down by the well means that he was signaling he was ready to have a conversation. He was at an everyday place, and he needed something. He needed rest. He needed water, maybe a bench, a spot to eat a meal. I know when I'm out in the city walking around places, sometimes my children and I are just looking for a bench.

We just want somewhere to sit, relax, and get our food out. So that's what Jesus wanted to do. He was alone at this time. His disciples, who were usually with him, right, the other 12 men, they were off buying food for the whole group, so they weren't with him right then.

Now, Jesus had a reason to be there. He was not just out to harvest souls that day, and yet he was because he knew who was going to come to him that day. So when the woman approached the well, Jesus spoke first. He wanted to have a conversation with her. He makes some statements first as to this woman to get her thinking about who he is and to realize that he is living water. And she's kind of clueless at the beginning of the conversation. She doesn't really understand what he's getting at and what he's talking about. So he quickly moves the conversation away from the general need for water, which they both share, into this woman's personal life and personal history.

So his conversation quickly becomes personal. The woman ends up becoming a believer, and not only her, but many others in her city believe because of her testimony. This is an amazing story full of lessons for us and how to witness and reach out to others. Can we offer others that living water, too, just like Jesus did? So here's a few lessons, some things that I get out of this story.

The first thing is that Jesus is in a public place. He's in a place where people gather. He's not in his own home. And as far as we understand it, Jesus didn't really have his own home, but he's out walking around ready to meet people. And myself, I know some of you might feel the same as me, but I'm actually I love being a homebody. I'm really happiest when I'm in my own home. And people who know our family might be amazed by that because we get out and about so much, but I think a lot of that is due to my husband because Nathan really likes to travel and get out and do things and see the sights.

I am very contented to just stay inside all day and get my work done and do my laundry and get things done around the house. That just makes me feel like I had a very profitable day, and going out might feel a little bit like outside of my it sort of stretches me a little bit. So if we another part of this, though, I wanted to just mention of going outside is that it's hard. It's hard to get everyone ready, and it's gotten easier as my children have gotten older. But when they were very little, it was actually very difficult to get everyone ready to go. We had to get all the shoes on, get all the snacks out, or lunch packed.

We can't go anywhere without food. Someone's going to be hungry within about an hour or less. We need water bottles. We need sweatshirts. We might need coats. It's just a time to sort of collect everyone. So I feel like our family has so much inertia that we're stuck in the home that it's hard to get us moving out. Now, once we're out, we're fine, right? We're out of the house. But to get us moving takes a lot of effort and willpower on my part. And some days I just don't feel like doing that. But I have less chance of interacting with others, though, if I just stay home all the time.

Now, an exception to that would be social media, emails, phone calls. So those of you that enjoy being indoors, you might reach out that way. So that would be what I would feel is a way of getting out that Jesus in Jesus' time, they didn't have that. But I would include that as getting out because you're not just staying to yourself or not interacting with others. So a phone call or emails or social media, those kinds of things are also what I would include in the getting out, kind of being more public and being available if people want to talk to you.

So that was the first thing that we're noticing, is that Jesus is in a public place. Okay. The next thing I'm going to notice so first, I'm going to make some observations, and then I'll give you some more stories to go along with that.

The next thing I notice about this is time. Jesus leaves time in his schedule to have a conversation. Isn't that hard? That's so hard sometimes. Jesus gets this woman to think deeper than surface matters, but how does he do it? Because he takes time. He presents the truth, and he doesn't try and make it sound politically correct. He doesn't really sugarcoat anything. He pushes through her defenses to get to the heart of each issue that he wants to talk about. So time is another is a second thing. So one was public place, and two is time. And my third point to make is it's an everyday occurrence. Going to the well we might think about today going to the well.

Oh, that must have been such a rare thing. Oh, did they do this once a week? No. They did this every day. So think about your everyday lives. It's something that they just did. It was just part of it was a habit. They did it. It was part of their routine. So think about our routines, our everyday lives.

Now, some things with that are common connections. Jesus makes a common connection with this woman about his need for water. Another thing I like about this story is Jesus gives the woman dignity. He doesn't view her as a project or as a mission assignment. He gives her the dignity to understand that she's a person with emotions and a person with a history. And he seems to enjoy the interaction. He thrives on it so much that he forgets his need for food. So when his disciples come back to him and let me see where is this at. I'm in the passage right now.

The disciples come back, and they're so amazed that he's talking with a woman. And then he said and then they say to him, "Hath any man brought him anything to eat?" And Jesus says, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work." So Jesus isn't sitting there feeling the hunger pangs and not able to work around that. He actually enjoys this conversation so much, he kind of forgets that he's hungry. That might seem hard to imagine, but I think we've all been in that situation before where we're having such a good time that we kind of can forget to eat. So he's enjoying it. So let's remember that as well.

Another thing I get out of this passage is Jesus is okay talking to a stranger by himself. He doesn't have to wait until the disciples get back so that they could have a meeting and strategize about how to reach these Samaritan people. He doesn't wait for permission to evangelize. He just goes ahead and does it with the one individual that God has put in his path. He's not waiting to gather up a whole collection from the whole city, right? He's starting with the one. So this all makes it feel more real and practical and attainable for us today if we think about it that way.

Okay. So now let's talk about some stories in modern life that could relate to Jesus' example of the Samaritan woman. So the first thing I had mentioned is showing up in a public place. If we go to public areas, then we get chances to talk to other people. So if you don't live in a public place where every time you step out of your house, you're going to see another person like me, that's okay. I mean, if I step out of my house, I might see the woman who goes back and forth on an electric scooter over and over, repeatedly in front of my house. I don't know why.

I might see her, and I could talk to her. Or I might see the other lady who sits on the wall across the street from my house. Once again, I'm not sure where she lives or why she sits there, but I'm just saying the moment some of us step outside, we're going to see people. But if you don't, that's okay. There's public places you can drive to occasionally, at least, and you will see people there. So we'll get into some of those public places.

So I'm going to tell you a little story now about what happened when my family lived in DC. So we lived there for about 14 years before we moved to Baltimore, and we've been in Baltimore about four years.

So it was probably about seven years ago, I started to get some dizzy spells, some vertigo, and it was nausea as well. So it was really nasty. And I just thought it was my pregnancy because I was eight months pregnant at the time. But then I thought I had a stomach virus. It just wasn't going away. After I dealt with that about a week, I woke up dizzy at 4:00 in the morning one morning, and I was so miserable. I just got in my old clothes, and I drove myself to urgent care. I leaned out the window so I could throw up whenever I needed to. When I got into the room at urgent care, there was a kind nurse, an older lady, and she bustled around to get my vitals.

And she kept kind of looking at me funny, and she finally had to ask me, "What religion are you?" And even through my dizziness, I said, "I'm a follower of Jesus." I always start with that. And I told her. Then she didn't seem clear, and I said, "I'm a Mennonite." Oh, no. There was no reaction, nothing. She just kind of stared at me. She had no clue what a Mennonite was. "Well, it's sort of like the Amish," I said helpfully. I kind of shy away from telling people that because I know all the differences between Mennonites and Amish, so I don't want people to get confused about those. But it does help sometimes to just kind of give people perspective about who I am. "Well, she looked even more confused now." "Well," she said, "I've watched those shows about the Amish on TV, but I knew you wasn't an Amish lady when you came in because your cap's not white like theirs is.

Yours is." And she kind of looked at my covering for a while and said, "It's sort of yellowish." Well, I was wearing my oldest covering. It had a few holes where I'd put the pins in too often. It had a permanent dent in the back from some well-deserved naps in the van, and it certainly was not a true white anymore after years of use. But what did she think I was going to do, dress up to go to urgent care? "Yours is yellowish," she concluded satisfactorily. "So I knew you ain't Amish." Well, I just basically started laughing hysterically because it was 4:30 in the morning, and then I got dizzy again, so I had to calm down.

I tried to tell her some differences then between Amish and Mennonite, but I'm afraid the only take-home message that woman got is that Amish wear the white caps, and Mennonites wear yellowish stained caps with extra holes here and there. But she still talked to me, and we actually had a face-to-face conversation, and I existed in front of her. I showed her that a conservative Anabaptist is there living out a life, a biblical commitment, not just on a TV show. Going out into a public place brought on a real conversation. It gave me possibilities for contact with others.

Now, I'm just going to tell you I can find it here. I'm going to tell you another way that my family and I in church have done some public contact with others. And I'm sure a lot of you do this in that singing at Christmas time, Christmas caroling. So I'm going to share with you a story which my husband put in his book, if anyone's ever interested. This is written by Nathan Zuck, my brother's keeper.

And I'm just going to read you one paragraph from his book. He says about Christmas caroling several times every year, "I have now started doing this with my neighbors in Washington, DC, and my congregation in Baltimore." That was when we lived in DC. "Well, when a cappella Christian songs may not fit into every neighbor's culture, people are often delighted that someone cares enough to sing for them. Two years ago in Baltimore, one man was so overcome with emotion when he saw 17 people from our church standing in the bitter cold outside his front door. He began crying and said this was the first time someone had cared enough to knock on his door in several decades of living in Baltimore."

So that's another great way. We actually carol to our neighbors with just our family, and we invite three or four people from church. So we keep it really small and simple. We also carol as a church as well. But it doesn't have to be a really big thing, and it still really touches people's lives. And Christmas is a great time to spread the good news where it's a little more socially acceptable to do it, and people will actually listen to Christian gospel words presented in song where they might not go to listen to a sermon. Okay. So that's another idea for us.

I spoke about time there, and time is a really tough one for me. Some of you probably don't struggle with this. It's a little easier to take the time out. But me, I feel like it's hard for me to want to give up time in my busy schedule to have a conversation. So this is a challenge. We all have busy schedules. We all have places to go. We have people to see. And so it's hard if we're in a hurry to get somewhere. And you notice that Jesus left time for that. Now, when we lived in DC, there was a little grocery store that I walked over to with my younger children. I put my older children in a choir, and I would walk over to the grocery store.

So I had a specific amount of time to get my groceries. I only had it was just a little over an hour. But I mean, till I walked over and then walked back to choir, the children were about done. So I knew I had my time constraints, and so this was tough. So there was a really, really friendly worker there, and she was so sweet. She was maybe about 20 years older than me, somewhere around that age. But she was so friendly, and she always had questions for me every time she saw me. She asked about television. She asked about homeschooling. She asked about baby care. She wanted to know how I made my dresses, just a whole variety of topics.

Each time, it was a different subject. But she would say something like, "I know why your children are so well-behaved. It's because you don't have TV, right?" Or she would ask, "Do you sew your own dresses?" And then we would start talking about modesty. So the first few times, I started to feel a little panicked because I knew I had to get back to my children's rehearsal one time to meet them. So I actually started avoiding her if possible. If I saw her down a certain grocery aisle, I would quickly dash into another one. So if I saw her restocking shelves, I was off. I tried not to run into her. And the store only had one serpentine line for checkout.

So I spent my time in line just praying I would get any cashier but her, but it made no difference at all. She would spot me, and she would call me over to her checkout station so she could chat with me while she beeped my groceries through the scanner. One time, she even made me wait behind another customer at the checkout station, and there were other cashiers saying, "Come, come over here. I can take you." And she said to them, "No, no. I got her. I got her." So I waited there where I could have been checking out already. And when she scanned my groceries, her hands would move slower and slower, and sometimes they just plain stopped while she was talking to me.

And I would stand there looking at her hands and think, "Come on. Can we beep? Let's keep beeping. Beep, beep the groceries." I was so frustrated because I was always running late to pick up my children from choir. I would rush in at the last minute. I didn't have time to use the bathrooms. I didn't have time to nurse the baby. I didn't have time to give my younger children their snack.

It was getting really stressful for me. But I realized after a few times like this that if I planned on the conversations, planned to have them, and headed to that grocery store just a little bit earlier, I would feel relaxed, and I would have the time I needed to talk to her. I could start budgeting it in. So I started leaving extra time. I would drop my children off early at choir just in case a conversation would pop up. And if she wasn't there that day or maybe didn't well, she always talked to me if she was there. But maybe if she wasn't there, then I would have a little extra time in my day, which is totally fine too.

But I started planning it. We had so many great conversations, and it actually made my shopping experience so much richer because I was taking time out of my busy life to meet her where she was. I didn't have to hide behind other customers anymore. I didn't have to dash down the frozen food aisle fast because she was in the produce aisle. I didn't have to sneak into another cashier line to avoid a conversation. I could accept delays with grace and look forward to our interactions. So with proper time allotted, which doesn't always happen, I know I'm the queen of being too busy. But if we can somehow allot that time, we can have a conversation that could get to the heart of an issue and go beyond surface.

So I'm also going to talk about the next point, which is our everyday lives. We have the same physical needs as the people around us. So common points of connection are where our lives will interact or intersect, right? You've heard about intersections in math. So our lives are going one way. Other people are going another, but we will intersect over needs that we all have. For Jesus, it was water at a well. What is it for us? It could be a local public library. We all want to read a new book. Maybe we want to participate in some children's programs at the library. We might need papers printed off. The library, for me, is kind of like my second office because we don't have a printer.

So I go there a lot to print documents, at least a few times a week. Maybe we just want a quiet place to study. So these are areas of common connection for us is a library. And now I'm going to tell you a little bit about I've written a book called Pilgrims in the Library. So you can get these from Christian Light Publications if you're interested, but maybe some of you have read it already. And I'm just going to share with you a little story in this book as well.

So I had an uncomfortable experience at our local public library once. Some teenage girls started laughing at me, and one of them asked, "Are you a pilgrim?" I recognized her lack of education, the question, probably high school dropouts, but I answered her politely, "No, I'm not." And then I turned back to the bookshelves. The girl began to harass me and make fun of me. "Why are you wearing a costume then?" she asked mockingly. My children gathered around me, watching, listening. I didn't respond, but I began thinking about leaving. But Ms. Arela, the spunky young Jewish librarian, was enraged. She piped up and gave the girls an earful about respecting people of different religions. The girl's supervisor then moved over with a questioning look.

She had not heard the confrontation, and she defended her goals to the librarian. We sneaked away while the two of them were arguing, and it was a bad argument. They were yelling at each other. They were very irate, so I don't know what went wrong there. But later that evening, we came back to the library for an event. We overheard some small boys sitting behind us talking about the big blowup at the library earlier that day. They had heard there were pilgrims in the library who were being harassed. I smiled and nudged Nathan. "I guess now I'm a pilgrim," I whispered. One of the boys continued talking in a knowledgeable voice behind us. Ms. Arela gave them a talking too.

She told them to leave the pilgrims alone. Now, Ms. Arela and I became really good friends, and I feel like sometimes I feel like our friendship kind of began over this interaction. I can't remember. We just basically said hi to each other before that. So even though it was a bad interaction with the girls and their supervisor, it was a good interaction with the librarian. She and I became good friends out of this, and we ended up having her over for dinner and having a lot of good conversations. So even if you go to the library and have some maybe not so good interactions, it could lead to good conversations with other people, though, around it.

And I see my time. I got to keep moving here. It could be college. Maybe that would be a point of interaction. Getting a degree and focusing on that goal gives us common ground between Christian college students and the unbelievers around them. We can come together in a study group or tutoring sessions with a shared goal of just learning the material. Conversations and deeper religious subjects can occur when we spend time with others in a college setting. It could be grocery stores. Already got into that. So that's another place where it's not going to be a forced interaction. It's going to happen naturally. And I think that's kind of what I'm getting at, is we're looking for ways we could have natural interactions.

Maybe it's getting exercise. It could be a daily walk at a park, a local park, or maybe a neighborhood that brings us into interactions with others, inviting a friend or a neighbor to take a walk with us, or just meeting a stranger as we're out hiking on trails. It could be while we're waiting. And this is a big one. Sometimes those white spaces in our lives when we're just waiting for something else to happen are times when we should be open to conversations with others: airports, trains, bus stations, doctor's office, waiting rooms, dentist, maybe a line at a grocery store or a line at a fast food. We need to be okay with answering questions during those times, even though our mind might be focused on what our order is going to be or what we're going to say to the doctor.

But we need to be available for a conversation or speaking into others' lives while we're just waiting for something to happen. I think another thing that stood out to me about Jesus and the Samaritan woman is that he didn't view her as a project. He viewed her as a person with dignity. So as we talk to non-Christians, it should just be a regular part of our lives. It should mean friendship and care and trust and love. It should be seamless where we can go from an everyday kind of what you might call small talk into a deeper conversation. No pretenses put up. Just be yourself. Don't put on a show or try to act like you have everything together because none of us really do.

Your family's not perfect, but you know Jesus, so you can share that with the unbelievers. You don't have to be perfect.

Also, you can give your neighbors the dignity of helping you sometimes. My neighbors have helped me so much, and I feel like I'm not a very good Mennonite because good Mennonites really help their neighbors and do a lot for them. But I feel sometimes like my neighbors have helped me more than I've helped them. I mean, every time I've had a baby, somebody's come over to help babysit for me. There was one woman in particular. They've cooked a lot of meals for me. There's a gourmet baker who lives across the street from us. That's not his real career. I think he's a lawyer, but he makes the most amazing treats.

The last treats he brought over was grapefruit rinds that were dried. He made them. He dried them. He dipped them in some kind of a sugary coating and then chocolate, a bitter chocolate. So they were bitter and sweet. And anyway, I'm digressing here, but they were so good. So I feel like the better thing is for me to bring him cookies, which we have also done. But it's amazing when we can step back a moment and be okay with being the one who is served. It's okay for our neighbors to serve us sometimes. I feel that gives them dignity. Then we're acknowledging them as people, as someone that can serve us. We can eat their food and complement it and enjoy it.

We don't always have to be the one that's on the giving end. We can sometimes be on the receiving end, and that will speak volumes to them as well. So when we lived in DC, our Mennonite church was far away. It was often Baltimore where we are now. So we didn't actually see much of church people. So my friends and interactions were kind of about the neighbors around me. It sort of forced me to have conversations and time spent with them. Those were the people that God had placed in my life at that time. Our neighbor a few doors down invited us over the one cold winter evening for roasted chestnuts. She had a little fire pit in the back of her house, and so we sat around that, and we had a good conversation around the fire, and the chestnuts were roasting.

But they took longer and longer. The wind was blowing the flames away, the smoke away, and the chestnuts weren't roasting, basically. But I honestly didn't care at all. I can kind of relate with how Jesus felt about you're hungry, but you kind of forget about the food because the conversation is food for the soul. So I think maybe we've all had times like that when we can kind of relate. We actually ended up going home, and we never ate a single chestnut because they weren't even cooked. But that's all right. She wrapped them up later and brought them over in foil so we could taste them. But I enjoyed visiting with her more than I enjoyed the promise of food provided.

So I think that's what Jesus meant when he says to his disciples, "I have meat that you don't know about." I feel like we have to take individual responsibility for evangelism. We can't expect somebody else at our church to do it for us. The Bible tells us in 1 Peter 3:15, "Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you, a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear." When I was 16 years old and my younger sister 14, we got the idea that we could reach out to a government housing project complex. We could have Bible story songs and the love of Jesus to share with them.

So we went ahead with our idea. We tracked down connections to get the use of our Mennonite school building for just a few summer days. I think we ran it for two weeks. We assigned helpers. We got drivers for pickup and drop-off for the children. We organized our friends at church to help us pass out the invitations the week before. We had the idea, and just a couple of months later, the Bible club, the first of many, was happening. It was not perfect. Yeah, you can read more about that in my book. Certainly not perfect. It had so many kinks that had to get worked out. But we didn't wait. We acted quickly. That way, we could reach the children before they turned into teens, before they joined gangs, before they committed crimes. "Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white, already to harvest," John 4:35.

So there is definitely a place for church evangelism and outreach committees. Don't get me wrong. My own church has this, and I'm on it. But we also keep the committee really small so we can act quickly to address a need. The calling that Christ gave us was for each of us to go into the world and preach the gospel. So it doesn't work to wait on each other. We have to take personal responsibility for the people God has placed into our lives. No one else can reach the people that you know in the same way that you can. So remember that.

Now, I like how Jesus pushed through the Samaritan woman's defenses, but I'm a little torn about this one because it's really hard to do it. If somebody puts up a wall and you can tell they don't want to talk about spiritual matters, it's hard to push through and do it anyways. They might be reticent to go into their atheism because your children are there. They might not want to offend you and risk losing the friendship. They might not want to go into all their issues with the gospel message. Maybe it brings up old hurts and frustrations for them. When one of our neighbors in DC told us over a dinner and our children were sitting right at the table right next to us, and he told us that he was an agnostic, so we were talking about religious matters, I couldn't let it go. "How can you say you don't know if there's a God when you look at creation, the world around you?

I can't even imagine not believing in God," I told him. "Even through all my college classes, I never once doubted that there was a God." What experience made you feel that way? And this helped us to get a conversation started. He didn't want to talk about it that much in front of our children, though, so we had to continue the conversation later. This was just kind of a tip of the iceberg conversation, but I still felt like we were digging into something that he needed to think through. He needed to consider it more carefully. It's easy to rattle off an excuse, but he needed to think through. So just making people dig deeper or maybe asking them some questions about why they believe that could help them to get started on their own journey of faith.

No one is beyond faith. So the power of love, that's what our topic is today. And Jesus showed love to the Samaritan woman. I've talked about so many ways he showed love. And you know all these ways in our lives. How do we show love? It's time. Time to sit and talk with other people. That shows love.

It's going into deeper issues and caring about the eternal soul. That's showing love. Going beyond surface matters. Showing a care. Jesus rejoiced. Rejoicing in talking to someone is showing them love. He rejoiced to talk to this woman. He actually enjoyed the interaction. He gave her his full attention, and he promised her living water. He gave her dignity. So all of these are ways that Jesus cared for her. How can we do the same for those people around us? Time. Not being afraid of going deeper with others. Care for their eternal destiny. Rejoicing in the sowing and the reaping for the kingdom. We can show them love to others in the greatest way possible when we care about their eternal souls.

The Samaritan woman says to Jesus I'm sorry, says to the other Samaritans, "Come and see a man which told me all things that ever I did. Is not this the Christ?" We want to get people to that point where they ask us, "Is not this the Christ?" So I just encourage each of you ladies, which I'm sure you're doing an excellent job where you are, to reach out to the people God has given you, the people that you can reach, not anyone else but you, the ones God has placed in your life, to keep on doing it and doing the best you can for the kingdom. Thank you so much for listening. I'll take any questions that you have.

Thank you so much, Faith. That's a wonderful talk.

Yeah, I'd really love to read your book as well. Thank you. I like how you were saying in everyday occurrences and making them a routine. Last summer, I thought, "Okay, every afternoon I'm going to sit out on my front lawn." We live in this city. People walk by all the time. And it was so hard to do that every day. I couldn't believe how many times I didn't do it. And I don't know why. I think I'm not sure.

Maybe I need to push a little harder and just really make it a routine in my life because there's days where I'm in my house, and sure, I do homeschool, and I'm busy, but I'm like, "Wow, I really didn't even get out of my house. And how am I going to talk to my neighbors and people walking by if I'm just in my home?"

So that kind of gives me encouragement to really make it a routine. Maybe after I do this, that's when I go outside or something like that. Yeah. But yeah, I will open it up for questions. So if anyone has a question, please turn your camera on. And if you can't do that or don't want to, you can send a message to the chat as well, and we can read it. I want to say thank you for sharing, Faith. That was really encouraging.

I really like how you mentioned about giving others your full attention. Yeah, that is something that's hard to do in a conversation or even as you're passing them on the street. Don't just ignore people. Give them your full attention.

And also not being afraid of going deeper. That's something that stood out to me because I think that's something I am afraid of. It's scary to go deeper with someone because, yeah, it's kind of vulnerable. And I'd be curious if you have any maybe practical ways of how you can go deeper with someone.

I don't know. If it just doesn't seem to happen, for me, it's hard to know the right questions to ask or yeah, how do you go deeper with someone? Maybe it just takes a lot of time to get to know them. But I'd be curious if you have any more thoughts on that.

No, that's a really good question. I feel like it's going to depend on the person because you know better the situation or person you're talking to, how they are going to respond. And you can tell kind of signals if they don't want you to talk about something. And I think we do need to respect that because another issue with this is God plans different people to speak, different Christians to speak into that person's life. So it might not be you. It's good to investigate and see if it is. But sometimes I feel like I've started a conversation with people, and it never went as far as I wanted it to. We just started into some of their issues.