I firmly believe that the key to any discipleship program is doing the word.  One way that we’ve encouraged those in our DOTW Discipleship Groups to do the word is by designating the fifth Sunday of any month as “Field Trip Sunday.” In other words, the fifth Sunday is dedicated to doing the word as a congregation or at least, as a family group.

Below are some examples of how we’ve utilized field trip Sunday during the month of Sharing Your Bread.

• Last year members of our congregation shared a meal with homeless men and women at a local homeless shelter. Surprisingly, we encouraged church members not to go into the shelter as volunteers or bearing gifts, but rather as one of the throng of homeless people waiting to be served. This act wasn’t really meant to be the “be-all-end-all” of service, but it was meant to establish the foundation for service as church members began to do the word. We learned that Jesus also ate together (instead of serving) with tax-collectors and sinners and he used the meal-time to call sinners to repentance.
• This year we did two things for field-trip Sunday. First, a few of us hopped in a car and headed down to Albuquerque, New Mexico to participate in a Voice of the Martyrs Conference. Pastor Foley is able to do this from time to time, but for many of us it was a new experience. We were able to talk, share and even cry with people over God’s heart for North Korea. And one of the members of our group even provided food for us for the whole weekend! The night before we left, he stayed up very late to prepare a wonderful mix of peanut butter balls, homemade gluten-free bread and dumplings. He modeled God’s care and love for each of us in how he provided this food!
• There were some of our younger members who weren’t able to go to New Mexico, so their field trip was to preach the Sunday sermon. On Sunday, everyone, who was present (men, women and children) was tasked with preparing and preaching a 5 minute sermon on the assigned Scripture verse. Why? Because every Christian should be ready to preach, pray or die at a moment’s notice and we wanted to train even the children to be ready to share God’s word to their friends at school.
• One young lady in our fellowship considered her university to be her field trip. She had a friend who had recently decided to start an “unwise diet plan.” The girl in our fellowship decided to cook her friend a healthy and well-balanced meal and bring it to the university to share together. She not only got to teach her friend about healthy eating, but also shared with her about Jesus.

We’ve also fed and ate with the homeless in the park, held evangelistic parties in our home in which we shared our bread and invited both new and old friends over for dinner. These are just a few of our “unremarkable,” but important field trip Sundays of the past.

Even if you aren’t an official part of the DOTW Discipleship Groups I would encourage you to use the fifth Sunday of this month to do the word that you’ve been studying this month and share with us in the comments what you did, what the results were, what you learned and what you would do differently next time!