It is said if you really want to learn something you should teach it. That’s how I learned about Boniface (675?-754), an Anglo-Saxon missionary to what is now approximately the areas of the Netherlands and western Germany. The lesson about Boniface in the book Great Christians featured a two-page color picture of him chopping down a huge oak tree supposedly sacred to the god Thor. According to legend, when Thor didn’t strike him dead the local inhabitants were persuaded to become Christians. The wood of the tree was used to build a chapel. 

Boniface eventually became Archbishop of Mainz and work to establish Christian churches through Germany. He was martyred when non-Christian tribes attacked. He held a book of the Gospels over his head as they slashed at him with swords.

I am always amazed by the bold Christian missionaries like Boniface. It would have been a lot easier for him to have stayed in the monastery church in England where he was a monk and wonder why the Germans and Frisians weren’t crossing the channel to come to church. I’m being facetious, of course, but it strikes me that the issue for people like Boniface was never how do we get people to come to our church, but how do we bring the church to people.

I once posed this question to a group of people: “What wold you tell a stranger about your church?” One person answered, “I wouldn’t tell them about my church. I’d tell them about Jesus.” Absolutely right.

Be like Boniface. Tell people about Jesus.

Read Romans 10:15 and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne