Applause

Yesterday I had a great conversation with a person wondering why our young adults weren't more "missional." After asking them to define their terms, what they were wondering is why we didn't do more service projects outside the church walls for people in need.

I mentioned to the person that this past weekend, a group of our young singles joined young singles from another church to make sandwiches and take ice cold water to hand out to homeless people on the street in downtown Fort Worth. Some of our young singles weren't able to be there because they were just finishing a repair to the roof of an elderly woman's home who couldn't afford to fix the roof or air condition her home - something both of our guys groups do on a regular basis. Sunday morning, three of our singles skipped our Eikon Sunday School class to work with the children of a homeless family at Beautiful Feet - a homeless ministry here in Fort Worth. One of our girls groups regularly folds clothes at a crisis pregnancy center, while another plays with terminally ill kids at Cooks Childrens Hospital. And, just last week our young singles ministry gave $3500 to help a foreign missionary have back surgery she couldn't afford. And that's just our singles minsitry... we're fairly "missional" every week.

The person who asked stood there with her mouth wide open and said, "I've never heard about any of that."

I responded, "That's kind of the point."

Although we could probably make a bigger deal about the "missional" stuff our young adult ministries do, there's a spiritual rationale behind our silence. Jesus says "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven" (Matthew 6:1-2).

Our externally devoted lifestyle isn't a publicity stunt. We don't send out press releases, or try to get on the news. We don't care if we get applause or not... We'd rather miss the applause than miss the reward.