This past week we gathered up our Una Esperanza O.C. Kids and took them to a Vacation Bible School (VBS) at a local church. There were about 250 kids at this particular VBS and our racially diversified group of mostly Latino kids stood out quite a bit amongst the sea of predominantly blond-haired and blue-eyed kids in attendance. I found this to be a bit disheartening, considering the rather large Latino community in the vicinity of this particular church.
The idea for the Una Esperanza O.C. Kids ministry came about after we led a group of children during a sponsored VBS outreach from another church to this very same community some three years ago. Back then, the church we were attending sent an outreach team into this area offering free sponsorships to their upcoming VBS. The response was overwhelming, and we ended up leading the entire group of sponsored kids during the event. They were so spiritually hungry and receptive to learning about Jesus that we decided to establish the Una Esperanza O.C. Kids ministry for these kids.
We do not presently have any particular church that we call home, and the main reason for us is that we’ve been having difficulty finding a church that seems to live out the biblical model for the church. We believe that the church is here to glorify God primarily through prayer and worship, for training and equipping the saints through sound teaching, and to challenge each follower of Christ in their local body to reach a lost world around us with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We’ve found plenty of churches that focus on one or two of these, but surprisingly, we can’t seem to find one in our area that does them all!
It seems as though the great commission of going forth is the one that often gets lost and the local church itself becomes the end-all to the Christian experience by focusing on numerous events and programs. We live in a world where the vast majority of people around us are lost! Shouldn’t we who call Jesus Lord be living with a sense of urgency for reaching them?
God has not only brought these Una Esperanza O.C. Kids into our lives, but He has also given us immeasurable joy through knowing these kids. The relationships that we’ve developed with these kids are priceless! They each have their own unique personalities and gifts, and it’s an incredible blessing to watch them grow in their faith! We’ll be spending a great deal of time with these kids during these summer months. We’ve already begun our twice-weekly Bible studies and we also have several more events planned for these kids, and hopefully each and every one of these events will point them to our wonderful Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
This post is not intended as a rant against the Church. God has ordained the Body of Christ as a whole to be His ambassadors to the world, and we strongly believe in that calling. It is just so disappointing sometimes to see that calling watered down to the point of primarily focusing on those within the walls of the church. I praise God that a body of believers decided to reach out to these overlooked children three years ago and I pray that God would light a fire under many churches across America to reach out beyond their own walls to a lost and dying world.
