Proverbs 6:6: Christmas Sermon Ideas Challenge

Here is a great article I got from gospel.com's blog. It's a great opportunity to reach out to our communities and help. For those of you out there that spend hours and hours online playing video games, now is your chance to actually put some of your skills to use.

The Challenge:

Pick a day of the week when you don't have anything planned and commit to serving your community, church, school, etc. Take 2 hours of the 168 hours that are in a week, to help and serve. Just do until Christmas. If you want to go longer, great!

Be a living Christmas sermon, a doer, not just a listener. What says 'saved' better than living a life of service because we are so thankful to our Saviour? So, go out and witness.

Be a virtual volunteer in September!

via The Gospel.com Blog by Andy on 8/31/09

Could your internet knowledge make a difference in your local community? The Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has declared September 14-21 Mozilla Service Week. The idea is simple: during that week, we all look for concrete ways that internet knowledge or skills can be put to work in the service of our local communities.

Here are some of the examples they provide:

Teach senior citizens how to use the Web.
Show a non-profit how to use social networking to grow its base of supporters.
Help install a wireless network at a school.
Create Web how-to materials for a library’s computer cluster.
Refurbish hardware for a local computer center.
Update a non-profit organization’s website.
Teach the values of the open Web to other public benefit organizations.

As you can see, you don’t have to be an expert coder or a seasoned computer engineer to help out.

I think this is a wonderful idea—and easily translatable into a ministry environment. Who do you know in your community who could use some internet-related help? What local ministries or organizations could you help by donating a few hours of time upgrading software or training their staff? If you’re reading this blog post, chances are you have the skills to help a person or organization in your community in some way.

I note that UrbanMinistry.org has already jumped on this—take a look at their virtual volunteer opportunities, and think about how you or your church might get involved in a virtual service project this September.