Blessing not Selling

Yesterday I wrote about quantity leading to quality. Another part of our philosophy is "blessing not selling" I would love to claim this pithy little phrase as my own but unfortunately it belongs to someone else.

Before we left for Ibiza we spent a little bit of time with a chap called Floyd McClung he said a number of inspiring things to us and gave us some really good tips and advice. This phrase stood out the most; he said "concentrate on blessing not selling" we really took it to heart and we have successfully adopted it and used it with all our teams ever since.

I don't need to sell Jesus, I need to bless my community, I need to be kind. Gods great kindness leads us to repentance. We want to be incredibly kind, we want to bless, assist, love, help, care for, show compassion, pray with, listen to, hug and generally bless people. We then trust that they see God in this.

Of course we do enter into discourses, and realise that most people do come to faith when someone actually verbally shares the gospel, but that moment is normally the tip of the ice berg that people have arrived at through a whole load of other experiences.

We once had a team member get so involved in an argument with a worker in the west end, that the worker said "will you just f**king shut up and listen to me" he got angry with our guy, and our guy had forgot the motto of blessing not selling.


In his eagerness to convince someone of the truth he had forgotten to be the truth. He needed to relax trust the Holy Spirit and allow the truth to shine through him. He had boiled his evangelism down to an argument, a head discussion (which I know works in some situations) when really he should have blessed and shown love.

So if you are trying to impact your community with the Love of Christ concentrate on blessing not selling. As we have done this over the years I have had hundreds of beautiful conversations and wonderful holy spirit led chats, the kind that many street evangelists would love to have. These moments didn't come from me shouting "turn or burn" or giving out tracts that said "you won't be dancing like this in hell" they came and continue to come as we have concentrated on blessing not selling.

Thank you Mr McClung