The letter to the Ephesians offers a prayer of thanksgiving for all its readers. In fact, the writer says passionately: “I do not cease to give thanks for you…” (1:16). What if we repeatedly said things like this to one another in our churches? In my first congregations, volunteers did everything. The culture of the congregation was to accept that this was “the way it was.”
A change began to occur, however, when we started to say “thank you” publicly. At the board meeting each month, we chose eight to 10 people to thank in the newsletter. At the end of the year, we gave silly awards to people to thank them for notable volunteer work. These included: “passion” tea for our passionate treasurer and a toilet plunger with ribbons for someone who had tackled a sewage disaster. We tried to say thank you to each other as a joyful habit and to have fun doing it. Something changed in the culture of our congregation. We found grace and lightheartedness to share with one another alongside the hardworking hands and hours of service we gave to our church.
This message is excerpted from the Bible study “Receiving grace: A study of Ephesians” by Heidi Haverkamp in the September/October 2024 Gather magazine.
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