So many of you pray for BBQ4Jesus, and I wanted to thank you for that first thing. It makes such a difference – when you pray, heaven moves. That’s the reality of this outreach – it is fueled by prayer. It makes such a difference, and I don’t think I can ever thank you enough for that.
Because prayer is so important, I wanted to let you know my vision for this outreach that I’m praying about.
I think God has more in mind much more for us than we’ve done so far. God’s vision is always greater than our own. In spite of my limitations, I want to share what has been in my prayers and on my heart for this outreach.
First, it’s important for us to be more involved in praying specifically with and for the people we serve. Paul from Christ’s Body almost always finds someone to pray with during the outreach. But I think that we should do more, and make it more obvious. Having a little pop up prayer canopy that announced that we were available for prayer would be a help. And during this outreach, one of our number was blessed to be able to pray personally with one of the people in line. This was a first for us and I take it as God’s encouragement on expanding this phase of our outreach.
Second is something I’ve mentioned before. I am currently a single point of failure (SPOF) for BBQ4Jesus. At this point, we have other people trained in every phase of the outreach except the actual smoking. This prayer is that God would bring someone on who He has chosen to come alongside me and learn how we do this, and be of a spirit that they would love to do this. Once He provides His person, then the next step would be for Him to provide them sufficient resources (smoker, etc) that they can do this without spending the night at my house – since the meat cooks run 16 hours and more.
Third is something else we need to do more of is providing God’s word to the people we serve. Everyone needs God’s word, but it seems to me that this is a ripe mission field for providing God’s word to the people. As of now, we’ve given away around 100 copies of a very classy leather bound pocket gospel harmony called “The Life And Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth” put out by an organization called PlusNothing out of Fort Collins, Colorado. It is based off the Easy To Read (ERV) translation of the Bible and is available in both English and Spanish.
There has been a great need for this, and every time I come, it seems I still don’t have enough copies of these books – especially in Spanish. The reason why I love these books is that homeless people have trouble carrying a big heavy Bible around with them, since they carry their lives on their backs, and this is a thin pocket sized version of the Gospels that easily fits in a shirt pocket. I tell them “It won’t weigh you down, but it will lift you up”. Although it’s not even a full New Testament, it is a fantastic introduction to Jesus and his teachings. Perhaps in the future God would have us expand this to providing time to help them study His word.
Finally, I want to give more people the opportunity to come along side us and support our outreach in terms of time, talent, and monetary resources. I specifically mentioned smoking above, but the more God prospers His work in BBQ4Jesus, the more opportunities there are for people to come alongside God’s work in BBQ4Jesus. We are always looking for God to provide people to help prepare the food, to smoke it, to serve Jesus in the guise of homeless people, to help clean up, to pray with them, and to help fund this work. We are now a 501(c)(3) charity and for convenience, we have a Zelle tag: BBQ4Jesus for those whom God has called to provide monetary support.
As always, we rely on God for everything. Please continue to keep us in your prayers, and pray specifically for these things above, and that God would continue to direct us and we would continue to be obedient to His direction. We are praying expectantly that God would show himself strong by answering these prayers
In Christ,
Alan Robertson