From time to time I want to go back to my roots for the sake of any new readers who might be joining us. I started A.M.O.K. when I was a volunteer youth leader at a local church. I was praying to God for a way to make my teaching stick with my students and I felt the Lord leading me to use art as a teaching tool, so that’s what I did and the rest, as they say is history. A.M.O.K. stands for Arts Ministry Outreach for the Kingdom. In truth, I have sometimes wondered if it really ended up representing what I do. You see A.M.O.K. never really became what I envisioned. My original intent was to create a ministry where we would do musical theater productions and art exhibitions where believers would work along side people just seeking to do art in the hopes of opening doors to the Gospel among the people creating the production. When it came time to present whatever was created, my hope was the presentation would also include presenting the Gospel to the audience. It was all about outreach, and truth be known, I would still love to do exactly this.
The difficulty was, I was never able to form the rest of the team. I don’t have all the skills to do everything that it would take to get this kind of a project done. So instead I decided to do what I could do with what I had. I started to go out into churches and do one person presentations designed to share the Gospel and encourage others to use their gifts in the churches to do the same. It’s been a real blessing that has taken me to many wonderful places and allowed me to grow and flourish. I think this is a valuable lesson. We often will get ideas and even God-given visions that are somewhat ahead of their time and it is at that point that we have a choice. We can either lament the fact that we don’t have everything that we need to do everything we dream of, or we can look at what we do have and figure out how to do something great with what we have.
I never abandoned my vision for A.M.O.K. and my suspicion is that one day I will do exactly that. In the mean time, I intend to keep growing in all my skills to the glory of God, and doing as much as I can as often as possible. the Bible says we believers need to make the most of every opportunity. That doesn’t sound like sitting around until everything is perfect. It sounds like looking for opportunities, or with God’s help, making opportunities and running A.M.O.K!
What are you doing with what you’ve been given?
AMOKArts 