At the beginning of the summer my community group, which consists primarily of college students, was dwindling in size (as is typical for a group of this demographic). The night following the completion of the Doctrine series, there were only four of us who were able to meet for community group. That night, as the leader of the group, I felt like we just hit a wall. I felt like we (mostly I) had no direction, no plans, no game, and no foreseeable fruit. So I shared my concern with the “diet” version of our community group. It turned out to be one of the most fruitful discussions we’ve had. We were able to solidify the demographic that we wanted to bless (college students and our immediate neighborhood), decide how we were going to do that, and choose what we would be studying to guide us for the summer (Psalm 119).

To give some context, our group, Pre-Destiny’s Children, was meeting on the Seattle Pacific University campus until the dorms closed at the beginning of summer. Then we met at my house in Ballard for a couple of weeks, until I moved out unexpectedly early to a house in Magnolia, where we have been meeting nearly all summer. As a side note, three other guys in my community group also live in the house with me and a few of the other guys in my house have been able to visit our group, which has been really great! Obviously, the sheer amount of inconsistency in our meeting place, demographic make-up, and frequency of attendees has made it difficult to maintain direction this summer. Fortunately, none of our trivial practicalities make God any less God, and He has continually shown Himself to be faithful to His people and beyond, in and through our group.

The night that we decided who, how, and what our community group was about we also decided to plan for a neighborhood BBQ. Seeing as how we had just moved into our new house it was perfectly fitting that we walk around our neighborhood and invite as many people as possible to attend. A couple weeks before venturing out into our neighborhood, one of the young ladies in my community group told me that her mom was coming to visit the Tuesday before the Saturday BBQ. I quickly found out that her mom has been a missionary with Precept Ministries in Singapore for 18 years and has amazing stories to tell about sneaking the Bible behind the Iron Curtain in Russia back in the day. It fit perfectly! My group was just about to go out to minister to our neighborhood and develop some relationships in hopes of serving our neighbors and inviting them to know Jesus, and God dropped an experienced evangelist in our midst to help us with the task and build us up for it! How awesome of Him!

On the appointed night we went through our neighborhood and invited many people, but the response seemed weak and was fairly discouraging. We prayed for the BBQ for a long time, knowing that regardless of our neighbors’ lack of enthusiasm the attendance and outcome of the BBQ belonged to God.

Saturday rolled around and, like typical college students, we hadn’t gathered much together beforehand, so we made a couple trips to Fred Meyer to stock up. Around 4 p.m. we started grilling, hoping that our neighbors would show up. In the first 45 minutes our neighbors from across the street came over, but they were the only people there besides our group and four people from Adam Christiansen’s group. But to our surprise, as the night went on, several other neighbors came over and by the end we had about 25 total come, stick around, and eat some food and chat. It was great! It turned out far better than we expected or even hoped for.

All of our neighbors were grateful for us, as college students, hosting a neighborhood BBQ. They were excited to get to know us better too. There are many good stories that will have to be left for another time (like a crazy, sex-addicted French truck driver from down the street, and the $11-a-pound halibut from a fisherman and his wife), but all in all it was remarkable how God brought us together and enabled us to develop relationships with our neighbors.

The next morning as a few of us were leaving for church we saw several of our neighbors who had attended the BBQ. They once again affirmed how good a time they’d had, further encouraging us and confirming that our service had not been in vain.

~Ryan

Photo courtesy of Natasha C Dunn at Flickr.com.