Last year, Angel and myself were at a church camp where the speaker talked about turning your everyday celebrations into evangelistic events, whether that be birthday parties or New Years. Or how about a wedding? I’ve certainly known others that have made their wedding evangelistic, so Angel and myself decided we would try it out as well.

We actually decided we wanted to have two celebrations, one in Angel’s hometown of Pattani and one in our ministry location, Phrom Khiri, 4 hours north of Pattani, one week later. Angel was much more invested in planning the celebration in her hometown, while I was more concerned about the celebration in Phrom Khiri.  Only I wasn’t really sure how to go about planning. So we ended up spending 80% of the time planning for the Pattani celebration and then ran around like crazy in the final 3 days leading up to the Phrom Khiri celebration.

But praise God that He made things work out for both events.  In Pattani we had a number of people from both B and M religions come out for the reception and we were able to share gospel with them. In Phrom Khiri, we ended up with 150 of the 200 guests being non-Christians and were able to share Christ through testimony, song, interviews and speeches. When giving out invitations in Phrom Khiri, we also gave out tracts about God’s love and for wedding favours, we gave out calendars with Bible verses for each month on the theme of God’s love and salvation.

In the Phrom Khiri celebration, we were able to enlist the help of pastors in the 2 main cities in the province as the MC’s and we also interviewed two pastor couples about the meaning of Christian marriage. We had others involved in helping us with music, one group from 2 churches and another of non-Christian neighbours. All in all, planning for this celebration helped us build closer relationships with local Christians and also with non-Christians.

In addition, having 50 or so Christians come to the celebration, a number of whom had roles in the celebration and gathered to pray for us as the end, really seemed to have an effect on the atmosphere in Phrom Khiri. One of the local guys, Scott, whom I had help with music, for the first time, said he and his wife would like to attend church. The very next day, we met another neighbor attending church in the city for the first time.

How about you? What's your next everyday celebration can you turn into an evangelistic event?