pat loughery

On the first two weekends of August, the two cities that most of us live in have their big festivals. This year, the first weekend of August was Railroad Days in Snoqualmie, and the second weekend of August was The Festival at Mt. Si (formerly known as Alpine Days, as all the signage proudly states).

Over the last two years at these festivals, we’ve taken the opportunity to find creative ways to serve our neighbors. We’ve given away iced down water bottles and Otter Pops, cans of soda and things like that – all based on the servant evangelism model. In order to not compete with the food vendors who were selling water and soda and cold treats, we stayed outside the main festival area and caught people on the sidewalks on the way in or out.

I think those efforts were successful, not because many people who received an Otter Pop joined us as a church, but because we were able to do a simple, practical thing to show God’s love to people. I think servant evangelism projects are fantastic, and they’re better at forming those who serve than those who receive.

This year we wanted to do something that had more intrinsic value to people, something that would be more generous. I had heard an idea I liked from Harvey at Valley Vineyard a while back – at their local festival, one of the things they do is have everybody in the church who has a digital camera to bring it to the local parade, take a snapshot of those around them, give them a business card for the church’s website and let people download the collected photographs from there. I thought it was an awesome idea, and our leaders started talking about that, and then we hit upon an improvement.

One of our crew is a portrait photographer. She’s used to working with kids and families, and she’s trying to get a side business off the ground here. Why not shoot digital portraits for people? In fact, why not also print them on-site, upload the image to our website so that people can grab them for themselves, and do the whole thing for free as a way to serve our neighbors?

So that’s what we did.

Over the last two weekends, we bought booth space in the two festivals, rented portrait backgrounds, flash kits, stands and other goodies from Glazer’s Cameras, set up a booth and manned it during regular festival hours, and shot portraits for people for about 30 hours, all told.

As soon as we applied for booth space, both festival organizers contacted us and told us they really liked our idea, and wanted to see if we could extend our hours – from our planned Friday night and Saturday to include Sunday also. So we faced a choice: graciously decline the invitation so that we could spend our time in worship; worship in the morning and do the booth in the afternoon only; or, consider that our “service” truly was to minister to our neighbors. We discussed our choices and chose option 3, agreeing that we weren’t going to gather for worship on those two weekends and instead man the booth on Sunday mornings as our incarnational mission.

I was very proud that as a church, we came to that conclusion as a result of how we wish to express ourselves as a church. We’ve talked a lot about seeing Sundays as time to equip and train us for the work of 7×24 service in God’s kingdom (instead of being the main target to invite outsiders to). This was a great opportunity to express that belief.

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