God works through the big and the small

Big is good, but…bigger is not necessarily better.

Easter was about a month and a half ago, and maybe you saw advertisements that looked something like this.

“10,000 Easter eggs, packed with candy and fun!”
“40 thousand Easter eggs!”
“100,000 Easter eggs for your kids to pick up!”
“Thousands of eggs dropped out of a helicopter!”
“Easter bunny skydiving into egg hunt!”

Maybe you and your church reached out into your community via a massive Easter event, and you got to talk with people and love people who would never profess to be interested in learning more about Jesus, let alone open the door of your church’s sanctuary on Easter or any other day.

If so, wonderful! Praise God!

Or, maybe, seeing headlines like those put a pit in your stomach and made you and your church feel at least a little inadequate. Maybe like you’re not doing enough, like you’re less than.

First, there is no enough. We can never be enough. Our identity, as souls loved by Jesus, is and always will be enough. Secondly, comparing your church to other churches is not the name of the game, nor is it beneficial to anyone.

And lastly, a big event can be wonderful, but. . . bigger is not necessarily better.

Within a 10-mile radius of our ministry center, there were over a dozen other big Easter egg events advertised. But 16 months ago, a seemingly small thing happened, a family with three young girls attended worship for the first time. It seemed like a small thing, but following worship that day in January 2022, we had planned an open forum to talk through a ministry plan and brainstorm new ideas. It happened that the family, who was there for the first time, decided stay for the open forum, and they decided to speak at the open forum.

And it just so happened that their idea was a special needs Easter egg hunt. Their former church, of a different denomination in a different state, had held one previously. We looked —there wasn’t one anywhere near us!

Long story short, for two Easters now, we’ve hosted an Easter egg hunt for children with special needs—children with Down Syndrome, autism, and other needs. Children who would not be able to be at an event with hundreds or thousands of other people. But a few dozen? That’s just right.

This year 12 kids came, from five families, and it started unexpectedly down pouring five minutes before the event was supposed to start (one can never trust even the best weather apps). Regardless, we still got to have fantastic conversations, show love, and one of the unchurched families attended worship the very next day and became interested in taking our Foundations course to learn more about God’s grace.

100,000 eggs? A helicopter? No, not exactly, but God works through the big and the small. Whether your church is big or small, your events are large or small scale, God promises to work whatever he wills. And whatever he wills is always best.

So be confident and joyful in his promises, whether your ministry seems big or small. God always works in just the right way, and his grace is always good and always working.

Written by Rev. Nathan Loersch, home missionary at Illumine Lutheran Church in Rock Hill, South Carolina. 

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