I love introductions. This is probably a little weird. Most people pull toward the familiar and are unsettled by meeting people, making small talk, and trying to move a conversation along with someone with whom they're not sure how much they share in common. So I recognize I'm the odd one out. 

If I were to meet you, I might tell you some other things I love to do:

• Ride my bicycle
• Spend quality time, probably on a hike or a walk to a park, with my wife and daughters - Rachel [32], Addy [7], Maggie [5] and Lucy [1].
• Play my guitar
• Read a book or listen to new music (and dance a little with my girls!)

But, maybe above all these, I truly love to get to know people. It probably began in my early childhood when I met many, many people who came to stay at our home on short-term mission trips. For the first 18 years of my life, I lived as a missionary kid in Tijuana, Mexico, and meeting new people was a staple of living on the mission field.

Fresh introductions are fundamental to the work I feel I've been called to do. Introducing others not to me, but to Jesus. I have a deep desire to pray and work towards both our Harvest high-schoolers and those who are outside our church to have fresh encounters with Christ. You might have heard about Jesus all your life, but suddenly you see who he is and what he has done for you in a new way. I'm confident both these groups need to encounter Christ. Why? Because He is the One I need most, too.

Early in the Gospel of John, one of Jesus's disciples named Philip finds Nathanael and tells him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth." Nathanael immediately resists. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Rather than responding with an argument, Philip wants to create an introduction to the real person of Christ. He says simply: "Come and see."

This is a wonderful description of how I see my charter as a pastor for youth and evangelism: "Come and see." At the Boardwalk Chapel, we saw an excellent beginning to pairing the work of youth and evangelism together, as 31 of our Anchored youth became a little more comfortable with sharing their Savior with others. As they did this, they were learning to sharpen their own hunger for the real person and work of Christ.

The Samaritan woman, in John 4, also said these same words after she had encountered Christ. She returned to her village and said, "Come and see the man who told me everything I ever did" (John 4:29). May we all come and see Him and bring others to see him too!

In His Service,

Pastor Adrian Crum