As we move through the month of February, most of the hastily made New Year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside. The gym memberships have started to go unused and are on their way to being forgotten. The diets have been abandoned. The daily reading plans are becoming a source of dread. The marketers have made their post-New Year money and turned the page towards Valentine’s Day and what follows.
The reason that people make resolutions is because they know on some level there is a disparity between what they wished they were and what they wished they were doing and what they actually are and what they actually do. We all know on some level that there’s a better way of living and being than the one we usually settle into, but it takes real attention and focus to change. And there are important changes for all of us to make. None of us is fully living up to what God has called us to. There’s sometimes a significant distance between our best intentions and our real actions.
One important change that we all can make is to increase our commitment to engaging other people with the message of freedom, mercy, forgiveness, and rest that we have in Jesus Christ. And the Christian Education Council would like to challenge you to do make just this change in 2026, to make this a year to commit to upping your engagement with other people!
In 2026, the CEC challenges all SDBs and SDB churches to purposefully participate in targeted, intentional engagement with friends, neighbors, and strangers around them to open doors for increased ministry in our lives and communities. We are encouraging you to invest outwardly in the places where God wants to move in your and through you for the benefit of others. By “intentional engagement,” we are talking about purposefully engaging those around you with the explicit purpose of building bridges to them that could carry the Gospel. These engagements could fall on the spectrum between a complete Gospel presentation all the way to simply chatting with someone by asking them their name or if you can pray for them. The goal of this is not to count conversions, though obviously we are hoping for that outcome. The goal is for all of us to actively increase our attention outwards as we actively seek for those in whom God is working or may desire to work. We are hoping that all SDB churches will track the engagements of their members and attenders and use this campaign to build momentum in your church and among our spiritual tribe. As a baseline, we are hoping that every church will have as many engagements as they have members/attenders in 2026.
The CEC desires to aid and encourage all this activity and will be generating content and checking in periodically throughout the year with your churches to find out how your efforts are going. If you and your church discover that you need additional assistance to take the next step in your engagement, we will move to support you and provide whatever assistance we can as you walk forward. If you have stories of how God is moving in you and your church as you engage, we encourage you to send them to me so that we can celebrate these victories on mission together! May we all convert our good intentions into concrete actions that can accomplish God’s will for us!
