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The Bible shows that God is eager for all people to respond to His love and accept His mercy. Not just people from comfortable middle class western suburbia. His love stretches to all levels of society, all ethnic groups, and to every tribe, culture and nation. He wants everyone to accept His offer of friendship. At Barton we know how importantly God takes this, and we're not planning to sit in isolated comfort and do nothing about it. There are many areas and ways in which we can be active (and must be, if we're not going to be hypocrites). Here are a few of them... Work - The people we spend most of our time with. Children's clubs - Jesus said that our trust in God should be as uncompromising as a child's. God is worth meeting however old you are. Local area - The community in which the church is based. Our neighbours. Practical help - One smallish church can't meet the practical needs of everyone, we don't have the people or the money. But that doesn't mean we just give up and do nothing. The rest of the world - Especially those parts where there are no or only a few Christians. Sending others - If you can't do something, you delegate it to someone else who can, right? Our church members can't all fly aeroplanes delivering famine aid, translate the Bible into some of the languages which don't have it yet (almost 5000 of them) or work in Moslem countries where Christians aren't supposed to talk about the God whose love means more than life to them. But we know people who do (they get called missionaries, for some reason), and we can support them in their work in many different ways, including by praying for them, writing to them and giving. Our "missionary" friends"Missionaries" is a word we use too much, or not enough, depending who you ask. Isn't the whole church made up of missionaries? People living their lives as Christians in strange and interesting places (say, the local university)? But the word is usually used to refer to people who have gone to other countries, as if that raised them to some form of higher being than a mere human. But anyway, Barton is a church which has a number of members and friends in the "missionary" category, or training to be so. Because the web is the sort of place it is, and some of them are working in interesting places, we won't mention anyone by name, but they are working with the following organisations : |
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