Communitywide Yard Sale

St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, Bellevue, Wash.

In today’s “green” culture it was becoming increasingly important to find ways to reduce, reuse and repurpose thing in our lives. St. Luke’s decided what better way to encourage our members and neighbors to participate in that type of effort than by offering to organize and facilitate a communitywide yard sale coupled with a food drive to benefit a local charity.

The organization and logistics of holding a yard sale are very daunting for some. For others, like the apartments and condos, both to the north and to the south of St. Luke’s, they are not allowed to conduct yard sales on their property. In order to meet these needs, we offered our parking lot, facility and volunteers for this community-wide event. We had tables available, a large storage container was on site to house items before and after the sale and a charity was contacted to collect the unsold items.

St. Luke’s “enlarged their footprint in the community” that day. The hospitality that St. Luke’s extended to the community; the relationships that began between the neighborhood and the church made for a very worthwhile event. Some of our own members met other members for the first time while working the sale.

Outreach happens in many different ways; we will never realize who we might have touched that day just by opening our doors for a yard sale. As we all know, God works in mysterious ways, and a yard sale might just be one of those.

St. Luke’s won a City of Bellevue Neighbor Link Award for this event.

James P. Long
James P. Longhttp://JamesPLong.com

James P. Long was formerly the editor of Outreach magazine and the author of a number of books, including Why Is God Silent When We Need Him the Most?

David Uth: Loving People One at a Time

“The more central the gospel becomes in your ministry, the more you can fly above all of that division because the gospel transcends it.” -Pastor David Uth

Reviving Personal Evangelism

If we are going to see more people saved in North America and more people engaged in personal evangelism, then we desperately need the Holy Spirit to work in all our hearts. Simply put, we need a mighty move of God in our land.

Oak Park Church: Outreach in the City

Rather than solely coming alongside communities following major natural disasters, the church decided to use the ministry’s life-saving—and life-giving—equipment year-round.