Junction City Church Distributes The Gospel Of John Through Local Newspaper
By Nate Butler
May 2008
Recently, the congregation of First Southern Baptist Church, Junction City, Kansas, decided to distribute the Gospel of John. However, this time, instead of going door-to-door, the Gospel was distributed via the Junction City Daily Union newspaper.
By purchasing the Gospel of John in a magazine format, the newspaper was willing to insert the Gospel into the Daily Union Sunday newspaper and the Fort Riley Post Friday newspaper. The Junction City Daily Union is distributed on the normal Sunday route. The post newspaper is distributed to every home on Fort Riley and to all of the offices including the Headquarters.
The initiative of going door-to-door with the Gospel began two years ago when the Smoky Hill Association, Director of Missions, Ed Pope, gave the challenge to get scripture into each home. First Southern Baptist Church, Junction City, accepted the challenge and began to go door-to-door distributing John’s Gospel.
During the months that followed, they realized that they had taken on a daunting task. As a church, they realized they needed to seek guidance on how to fully accomplish the task. The idea of using the newspaper as a source of delivery began to develop. The initial plan fell through because the booklet was too small and fell from the newspaper.
During a meeting with the Smoky Hill Evangelism and Missions team, assistance was requested to locate a larger size gospel insert. One committee member mentioned that the International Bible Society distributed the Gospel of John in a magazine style. This was the information that was needed.
The Junction City Daily Union agreed to place the magazine style booklet into the paper. The booklet not only went into the Junction City newspaper, but was also inserted into the Fort Riley Post newspaper.
First Southern Baptist Church purchased 8800 copies of the Gospel of John for the distribution project. To personalize the magazine, the congregation spent one Wednesday evening actively participating in this mission project by placing 8800 letters from their pastor, Nate Butler, into the Gospel of John magazine inviting the readers to visit their church. The entire church was involved, including the youth group and the TeamKID group.
Pastor Nate has had numerous comments about the effort. This was an outreach that was simple to accomplish. Everyone in the church played a role either by, praying for the success of the outreach, giving to purchase the Gospel, or by spending their evening preparing the magazine for distribution.
Initial contacts have already been made to reach out to the neighboring community of Chapman, Kansas, through their newspaper distribution. The ultimate goal is to complete the challenge before this summer. If you are looking for an opportunity to impact your community, why not ask your newspaper distributor to allow your church to insert John’s Gospel into the Sunday paper?
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