For about the last month or so, blog posts asking questions about carol services abounded. If not carol services specifically, just Christmas more broadly. What, so the posts and articles ask, are you doing to take advantage of the evangelistic opportunities afforded by the Christmas period?

Such as there is an evangelistic opportunity to be had in your community, these are not bad questions to ask. For us (as regular readers will know) there really isn’t much in the way of evangelistic opportunity at Christmas at all. We are in a deprived community surrounded by South Asian Muslims the majority of whom simply have no interest in, or thought for, Christmas. None of them are looking for a carol service to attend, few are that interested in Christmas celebrations and it is all seen as something the Christians do that we just don’t get involved in.

The only reasons for us doing anything Christmassy at all are because we think it looks bad as a general witness in our community to not be in church when they expect we would be (even though they wouldn’t come themselves) and some of a Christians themselves just think it is nice to have some Christmassy things. So, for those reasons, we might have an extra carol service and perhaps have a Christmassy Sunday and the Christmas Day service. But we’re fairly clear there isn’t much evangelistic opportunity to be had in them, we’re doing them for the sheer joy and benefit of the believers who think they’re nice things to do.

But I wanted to ask a broader question here. It is a particularly important question for people in communities like ours – that is, in ones where Christmas isn’t really anything for the people you are aiming to reach – but a similarly important question even for those of us for whom Christmas presents a real open door for the gospel. For all ours posts about what we’re doing for Christmas and how we’re going to take the seasonal opportunity, now the festivities are over, it seems worth asking a new question: what are you going to do the rest of the year to take advantage of the evangelistic opportunities in your community?

The truth is, this question isn’t only pertinent at Christmas. There are those churches who gear their entire evangelistic effort around Christmas, maybe also at Easter, but it tends to mean for 48 weeks of the year, there isn’t a great deal of evangelism going on. Similarly, there are those who might take Christmas and Easter as opportunities, but focus their main efforts on the summer in which missions and camps abound. But the same question holds: what are you doing the rest of the year?

As great an opportunity as Christmas and Easter might bring in our wider British culture, and as helpful as making use of camps and missions during the summer might be, scripture seems to emphasise the local and the regular. There seems to be a good pragmatic case for suggesting that relationships over the long haul produce better results than a couple of weeks of intense, but ultimately singular one-hit evangelistic effort. If we want to see our churches growing by conversions and we want to see the kingdom increase, a few weeks of effort focused on Christmas, Easter and summer holidays are unlikely to do much for the gospel in our communities. This is all the more true if we focus our evangelistic effort on everyone going on camps and missions outside of our community throughout the summer.

So, it seems worth considering this question: what will you be doing the rest of the year? How will you reach your community throughout the next weeks and months now that Christmas has ended? Will you be doing things that actually engage people in your community or will you press on with things that have long passed any real usefulness? Will you do anything at all or spend the whole time thinking about what you’re going to do for Easter? How are you going to reach and engage with your community now when there is no obvious cultural holiday onto which you can pin anything in particular?

Now is a good time to be asking these questions. As you are entering a new year and people (including our members) are in the mode of thinking about new starts, resolutions and whatnot, it is a good time to engage them with this question. What will they be doing to reach your community and those in their networks? What will the church do to ensure they are actively seeking to reach the community in which they’ve been placed rather than just passively waiting for cultural holidays and pinning all our hopes to a few times a year?

For those of us who do have ongoing works and ministries, now is a good time to ask how they’re going. Who have we actually reached and engaged with the gospel through this thing? How many of these ministries have led to anybody coming to faith? How many people have come along to the church through these things? Are we doing things that are fruitful or not? If not, what else might we do that may be more effective and have more kingdom value?

We have a pressing task from the Lord Jesus. We have been called to herald the gospel and to proclaim the excellencies of the one who called us. There are matters of eternity at stake. We do our communities a real disservice when we do not have any ongoing vision for how we will reach them. We do them a similar disservice if our ongoing strategy, though regular, isn’t actually engaging anyone because the community either don’t know it’s there or, worse, know very well that it’s there and are actively choosing not to come. For the sake of our lost communities, and for the sake of the Lord Jesus who has his people in each of them somewhere, we need to be thinking about how we will reach and engage them with the gospel throughout the year and to evaluate whether the ways we are going to do so are actually achieving anything of value at all.

So, let me ask again: what are you going to do for the rest of the year?