Mini Eggs and Fluffy Bunnies

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Mark Greene looks at Easter and challenges us to look for the opportunities around us.

It’s Thursday. You’re working for an engineering company and you whisk along to the coffee machine to refuel. And there before you is a bowl full of chocolate mini-eggs. And they’re free. Joy or temptation? Beside the bowl, there’s a little poster with the headline: ‘Mini-eggs and fluffy bunnies. Is there more?’

The poster copy goes on. ‘Any old Thursday today. Good Friday tomorrow. So what’s so good?’ And continues by exploring the cross and the reasons for it, quoting Scripture and Thomas Carlyle, and using a picture of an electric chair to communicate that the cross was an instrument of torture. It’s a direct, uncompromising and very public communication of the Gospel. And no-one is complaining.

It’s one of several similar initiatives that Steve has taken since joining the company from university. He had always been one of those people who talked to others about Christ, so when he started work he wanted to find direct ways to keep doing this.

Adapting his experience of university missions to his workplace, Steve set about letting people know he was a Christian, and challenging them to talk to him about Christ. Of course, he knew he was at work to work and to work well, but he did want to put Jesus on the agenda. Hence his poster campaign and four others like it, which used natural springboards like Christmans and Easter to develop his friendship with his colleagues and to challenge the way they think. He has also gone out of his way to learn his colleagues’ birthdays and to celebrate them with balloons. And a copy of Mark’s Gospel. And some very significant conversations have ensued.

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss this kind of initiative as cranky and only for extroverts like Steve, but the boldness to witness is not, according to Acts, a character trait. It’s a spiritual empowerment. Indeed, seven times the disciples pray for ‘boldness’ to speak. Steve’s way is his way for his circumstances, but nevertheless it’s a challenge for us all: what initiatives am I taking, to get the good news out?

Steve does get some flak from his colleagues, but most of it is good-natured and no-one seems seriously to object. At worst they get free chocolates, and at best they get the Living Bread.

First published in Workwise.