August 18, 2009

It's the Laity, People!

2009 1521 page7 capT WAS A WARM SPRING MORNING IN LOS ANGELES IN THE YEAR 2000. I’d gone downstairs and found a booklet atop the mailbox, with an inscription inside the front cover.

I don’t remember the booklet, or much about the inscription, but I do remember that it was a lay member of the South Bay Seventh-day Adventist Church in Torrance, California, who’d left it there. (She worked across the street at a local elementary school at the time.)
 
Why did the booklet show up? My wife and I, still relatively new church members, were recorded as attending Mark Finley’s Acts 2000 satellite TV evangelistic series that year in Anaheim, and the South Bay church got our address.
 
Not to slight the pastor, but it was a lay member who reached out. (She didn’t know we were already church members, but still, it was a nice effort.)
 
I’ve never forgotten the gesture, even if the details are hazy nearly 10 years removed from the event. It reminded me that if, as Napoleon reportedly said, an army travels “on its stomach,” or on the food it has available, a church grows on its lay members.
 
That’s the beauty of what members of Adventist-Laymen’s Services and Industries, or ASI, bring to the church. These are people with businesses, medical practices, law firms—you name it. They have lives to lead, but they also bring Christ to their workaday worlds.
 
Such dedication is inspiring and exemplary: Jesus didn’t die just for us to be saved and happy. He died (and lives) to motivate us to serve and share with others.
 
The gesture can be simple—leaving a booklet and handwritten invite—or it can involve doing Bible studies with a seeking neighbor. Those tasks are waiting—perhaps they’re waiting for you! 

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Mark A. Kellner is news editor of the Adventist Review.


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