Celebrate 100 Years of Missions in Your Local Church
January 5-7, 2010, is the official celebration of the centennial of missions in Nassau, Bahamas, but the celebration may begin at any time and is not limited to a single date or the location. With this in mind, here are several ideas how local churches can celebrate this momentous occasion.
Up-to-date technology has made worldwide teleconferencing easy, fast and accurate. Skype, for instance, can beam a missionary live into your missions meeting with a high quality video Web cam. Instant communication can be achieved between your congregation and a missionary in a foreign country.
PowerPoint presentations are another way to show distant lands and photos of missionaries. Although these are not live, the presentation is clear and concise and relatively easy to prepare and operate.
Members could bring foreign money leftover from overseas trips. This money could be placed in a container as an offering towards World Missions.
At a church dinner, members dressed in 1910 vintage wear could bring Caribbean dishes and share discussions about the past, present and future of missions. This would also be a good time for reenactments in the history of World Missions. The church could sponsor a Bahamas trip for church members or help to raise funds to send the pastor or local missions representative to the January celebration.
Sunday school classes or groups, could be asked to write and send birthday cards to missionaries. Thank you cards are always appropriate to send to missionaries. Without missionaries there would be no Centennial.
The church may also want to plan a memorial in honor of 100 years of missions. This could take the form of a plaque or even the planting of a Centennial tree. Every time churchgoers passed the tree on the way into church, it would be a reminder of missions.
These are just a few ways to observe this milestone in Church of God history. Your church probably has even better ideas to make the Centennial personal to the congregation. This is a time for the church to look back and commemorate what has been done and to look to the future and see what is needed to be done.
For more information, visit the World Missions Centennial Web site .
. . . . .
© 2009 Church of God World Missions
