Cookbook evangelism serves heaping helping of gospel

HONDO—The pastor of First Baptist Church in Hondo cooked up a new recipe for helping his church members share their faith.

Early last year, Ross Chandler approached his congregation with the unconventional notion of cookbook evangelism, an approach he learned from Bruce Webb when Webb was pastor at Central Baptist Church in Jacksonville.

“The cookbook is not an ordinary cookbook. The recipes are secondary,” Chandler said.

“The church members write what Jesus Christ means to them and their testimony along with the recipe.”

The goal of the cookbook evangelism project was to give church members an opportunity to deliver cookbooks personally to all 2,700 homes in Hondo and share the hope of Christ with the residents during last December.

The initiative enabled the Hondo church to get a head start on Texas Hope 2010, a Baptist General Convention of Texas challenge to present the gospel to every Texan by Easter 2010.

“When everyone started giving the recipes to us and we read some of the testimonies, we were blown away,” said Keni Rodgers, one of the coordinators for the project. “We quickly realized that with so many testimonies from members of all ages, we would be able to touch everyone who read it, with one story or another.”

Recipes and testimonies

In order to get the congregation excited about the endeavor, the planning team published recipes and testimonies in the Sunday bulletin, gave several humorous skits explaining the event and even had a recipe sampling lunch so church members would know how the recipes tasted.

While the cookbooks were being printed, former pastor Les Chaney set a Saturday delivery date, recruited volunteers to deliver the cookbooks, promoted delivery to the community through newspaper ads and organized all the details for that day.

“On the delivery day, more than 200 people from our church that averages slightly less than that in Sunday School each week showed up to deliver books,” Rodgers said.

Teams of two or three people were able to reach the whole city in Hondo within five hours, sharing hope and love and praying for the needs of those they met.

Goal was to say 'we love you'

“When people asked why we were doing this, our goal was to say we love you and we want to give you a Christmas gift and tell you that Christ loves you,” Chandler said.

After that experience, members became comfortable sharing their faith—even door-to-door evangelism, which many previously found intimidating.

“A lot of church members are really busy and they may not have the time to go on a mission trip or to help with a long project,” Chandler said. “But everyone has one day where they can help.”

Besides seeing members’ faith grow from serving in the cookbook outreach, the church received many letters of appreciation from the community and saw two families join the church. The members have also set another day to deliver the cookbooks again this Christmas to reach out to D’Hanis, a town near Hondo.