Halloween

We are happy to celebrate cultural or historical holidays like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, or New Year’s Day. We love religious holidays like Easter and Christmas. But Halloween…

Halloween has quite a mixed history, and so we don’t always know how to approach it. And living on mission during Halloween can seem daunting. Sadly, we live in a culture where the idea of knocking on your neighbor’s door and having a conversation sounds completely alien.

Many of our neighborhoods operate on an unspoken understanding of “If you ignore me, I’ll return the favor.” Since the invention of the automatic garage door it has been possible to go months without even seeing the people you live next to, never mind actually talking to them.

However, once a year culture lobs us a softball called “Halloween,” and with just the slightest amount of intentionality the stranger down the block can become a friend. You just have to be willing to swing the bat.

This coming Halloween offers a great opportunity for many to engage in new relationships with those around us or to revisit some old relationships with new missional intentionality. Regardless of what you think of the holiday and its roots, the culture we have been sent by Jesus to reach is going to celebrate Halloween. We all have in front of us a wide open door for missionary engagement in our neighborhoods.

If you are looking to be more intentionally engaged this year, here are a few ideas for how you can more effectively walk through the open door that Halloween presents to us as Jesus’ missionaries.