At the end of April we celebrated our 4th Austin Dog Fair!  You can click on the link here to watch a video recap of 2012.  In addition we outlined some of the ways the dog fair is a win for our church below:

For the last year I have been gathering local pastors to pray for and serve north central Austin and on Sunday while we were hosting the dog fair there was another church partnering with a neighborhood to clean up Northwest Park and Shoal Creek.   That means the body of Christ is having a tangible influence in multiple places in our community.

We had over 50 people from our church come together to help make it happen, which is awesome as our church is partnering together to have greater influence in the community.

We had over 20 people outside of our church get involved to help host the dog fair so it is a picture of catalytic activity!

We had lots of people from North Village there talking to people, hearing their story, and some of  were able to have spiritual conversations about what Jesus is doing in their life.

We left a positive taste in the community.  Here is a portion of an email we received after the dog fair:

 “Hi!  We just wanted to say thank you for putting on this event!  It was a great opportunity to raise awareness for our rescue.  Also, I have to compliment you–your volunteers and organizers are really great people–helpful, friendly, and thoughtful.  In our rescue we have what we call “ambassador dogs.”  They are the best of the best–the dogs we bring out when we want to impress people with how beautiful, friendly, and smart the breed can be.  Your ambassadors did you proud!  Please thank them for us!” 

2 Corinthians 5 refers to the follower of Christ as an “Ambassador” and it says, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us.”  Isn’t that great!  At a dog fair the body of Christ was being put on display through North Village Church and people saw it as beautiful.

This is important to remember because sometimes as a church we can wonder, “Why are we hosting dog fairs, food drives, talking to neighbors, praying for people, inviting them in our home”, and we can become tired, and sometimes even cynical.  However, Scripture teaches us it is through the body of Christ that Jesus is being put on display for the world to see, so that it might bring glory to God and soften hardened hearts.