GBC Community Update: Sharing your faith-watch for opportunities

Good afternoon.  I hope you’re making this a great week!  You can tell a provincial election is underway by all the sign popping up. Regardless of your political preference, may we all be in prayer that God’s will would be done through the process and in the outcome. Remember to pray for our politicians!
 
 
Reminder: Repair Café is Saturday here at GBC!
Have something you need repaired?  A piece of jewelry? Clothing? Electronic device?  Come on out to the Guelph Tool Library’s “Repair Café”! Saturday from 11am to 3pm here at GBC a variety of skilled trades people will be out to fix items for no charge.
This is an initiative of the Outreach Team and being held in conjunction with the Junction Neighbourhood Group.  Please pray for this event that we would have the opportunity to let our lights shine through this tangible act of service.
 
 
Oasis Camp is still looking for a few more leaders
Oasis Camp will run the week of August 1 to 5.  Our theme for this week of camp will be “Monumental – Celebrating God’s Greatness”.  We’re looking for leaders!  If you’re newer to the GBC family, you’ve likely heard of our Oasis Summer Day Camp.  This is a large ministry of ours which we run each summer at Guelph Bible Conference Center. We’d love to have you as part of the team!
 
As in prior years, we will be asking all potential volunteers to complete a brief application form (please note: references are only required for first-time leaders).  The leadership team will select leaders with first priority being given to those who attend GBC, are involved with GBC’s ministries, or who have a family connection to GBC. 
 
If you have an interest in being involved in this year’s camp ministry, please complete an application form available on the info table at the back of the auditorium and return it to Dan Chapman.  If you have any questions you can ask me, or Dan. It’s going to be an AMAZING week of Ministry!
 
 
Join us on Sunday in-person or on our livestream as we start our new spring series “In focus”-God’s call on this church
Sunday we continue our new series for the spring. We will be bringing focus onto God’s call for this church.  After our 100 Days of Prayer in 2020 we felt God calling us to bring focus onto 4 specific areas of ministry: outreach, small groups, prayer and our Sunday morning experience. Since then this has guided much of what we do here at GBC. So, We’re going to examine this from a biblical perspective.
This Sunday I will be continuing the topic of outreach examining the study of Jonah. Why is it that if there was no chapter 4 Jonah would have been seen as an amazing missionary?  How does this pertain to today? Find out Sunday!
Remember, you can join us as we gather in-person or you can connect through our website www.guelphbiblechapel.ca  our YouTube channel as well as Facebook LIVE
 
 
Thought for the Day: Watch (and ask) for opportunities...more thoughts
Tuesday I examined the idea of looking for opportunities to share our faith with the world around us.   While I will often be given the chance to share the hope that I have, we can also ASK God to give us these openings and then we just have to keep our eyes open to see the opportunities when they pop up.
Great!  Here’s another thing I watch for:
Questions from others. 
Although most everyone who knows me knows I’m a Christian, it doesn’t mean I’ve exhausted my opportunities to share my faith.  When someone asks me about an element of my faith, like one of my athletes did recently, or I see an opening in a conversation, I just share a little bit unless the person wants to keep talking. For example, someone once asked how I could forgive a person who’d treated me badly. I got to share very briefly that I could because God had forgiven me for so much as well. That was it. The person didn’t have any more questions and we moved on to another subject. But other times, a person has wanted to keep talking, and we’ve talked about God for a long time. I try to listen to what they’re interested in and just share that so I don’t come across as being pushy.  The key here is to be connected to the Holy Spirit and wait on the Spirit’s prompting, not rushing, but also not being passive.  More on this next week!
 
In His grip,
Pastor Chris