One of the best days for witnessing is also one of the darkest

To some it is Halloween, Reformation Day, or National Evangelism Day. To others it is the final day of Black Cat Awareness Month.

Whatever you call October 31st, mine was a busy one full of wall-to-wall witnessing.

I started the day by taking a trip to Philadelphia with Zach, a guy I am training to lead the new evangelism ministry at Royersford Nazarene.

Zach is a newer believer and had never gone out and shared the gospel before. I’ve got to say, it was a lot of fun getting to watch him do it for for the first time. The guy is an absolute natural at handing out tracts. All I had to do was wind him up and watch him go.

We handed out 400 tracts and a couple handfuls of bibles. I’m pretty sure Zach had the best day of his life. People don’t realize how rewarding it is to go out and serve the Lord like this… until they try it. This is one of the reasons our ministry is so focused on helping churches raise up their own evangelism teams.

After Philly, I swung home to grab my kids and headed north. Halloween is the perfect night to hand out tracts because people come to you expecting you to give them something. But since we don’t get trick-or-treaters where we live, we visited our friends Josh and Julianna.

I stayed back at their house hovering over the candy bowl (I’m not saying I ate my weight in Peanut M&Ms, but I’m not saying I didn’t eat my weight in Peanut M&Ms, either), handing out tracts to trick-or-treaters. Meanwhile, my oldest rode around the neighborhood on a scooter, hand delivering tracts while dressed like a robber.

My youngest was dressed like a rooster for a while, until he said it was too hot to stay in the costume.

All told, we handed out 200 tracts on Halloween night, to add to the 400 seeds planted in Philadelphia earlier in the day.

I know a lot of people don’t like Halloween because they think of it as a day of darkness, and to be quite honest, I was never that fond of the day myself, for different reasons. (It always seemed like a waste of money to me to buy a costume that you used precisely one time.) But I think we’re thinking too small if we don’t see this “holiday” for what it really is, which is one of the best built-in days for witnessing on our entire 12-month calendar.

If you are not already using Halloween to hand out tracts, please consider doing so next year. You will have some fun and do some good.

-JDM-