First Richard’s news if you missed it. Now…

A bunch of us were Christmas shopping last night after which bro-in-law told me that he had had his presents wrapped for free by people outside a church in the high street. I said I couldn’t bring myself to do that as it was cheating – I was a Christian already!
OK, I’m making a few assumptions which are really about myself and not about the people doing the wrapping:

• I’m assuming that they are trying to reach out to people who don’t know about God’s love by wrapping the presents and
• I’m assuming that they aren’t particularly intending to wrap everyone from their own church’s presents.
• So therefore I’m thinking that they don’t want to wrap other church people’s presents.

The questions that now go through my head are:

• Should mission activity be a simple extension of what we do for ourselves (the group), just extended out to others? (because otherwise we are saying we aren’t willing to do things for our closest friends what we are willing to do for others) or
• Can mission be doing something that when ‘they’ become ‘us’ we won’t do for those people anymore?

I don’t know – I think that there is more to this than meets my eye.

Anyway, I’m going to give bro-in-law the benefit of the doubt: He is single and perhaps he was trying to meet some generous Christian females from our nearest big town!