‘A little Jesus…’

Looking to build up community involvement among their youth, First Methodist Church began an outreach project that has been helping them spread the love of Jesus.

“A Little Jesus Goes A Long Way” has been the motto for the project since it started and has been it’s main focal point. To do that, church leaders purchased cases of miniature Jesus pieces in different colored sashes for the children.

Their task after that was simple: Take one, hide it somewhere in the church and leave it for someone to randomly find with the hopes it brings a little Jesus into that person’s life.

“Our children’s director, Abby Tomell, had seen the project,and I was going to mention it to her,” First Methodist Rev. Matt Seals said. “By the time I was, however, she had already ordered 300 of them. After that, the kids put them all around the church for folks to find and the idea of it is ‘A little Jesus goes a long way’ because everybody needs a little Jesus.”

Tomell actually happened upon the idea while viewing TikTok and immediately thought it was something not only important for their youth, but one they’d really enjoy.

“I saw a similar TikTok on it and I thought that it would be something that would be a fun object lesson for the kids,” she said. “They do so much better when they have something that’s tangible and they can put that little life lesson behind it. It also gives them something to actively do instead of just sitting there listening all the time.

“So we ordered a whole bunch of them; then they hid them all around the church for other people to find and then take out into the world. Because it’s like we’ve been saying — a little bit of Jesus goes a long way.”

Whether on a window, next to a pew, inside a fish tank, to cabinet meetings in Asheboro and even as far out as Hawaii, those Jesus pieces have gone far beyond the doors of First Methodist since the outreach began. What was only meant to be a small fun project of a few pieces has blown up to more than double of that initial batch.

“As people find them, if they want to keep them, they can; if they want to take one and put it somewhere else in the community, they can do that as well,” Seals said. “When I found out that Abby had ordered them, I told her to order about 200 more. After that initial batch of 300, we’ve since ordered 300 more because it has been a very big hit and since then we have a total of 600 that have gone out.”

That huge success came as an even bigger shock to Tomell who never dreamed that it‘d grow that much when it all started.

“It was just a really fun thing to try and being able to see all those mini Jesus (pieces) pop up all over our town and landing in different states and countries, that is incredibly exciting,” she said. “For them to be able to hear back that this project that they started and that they had their hands on has been able to travel so far is really cool.”

“I didn’t expect it to get this big, not even a little bit,” she added with a laugh. “It was just something fun for them to do and so I’m really excited that we’ve had to go back through and purchase even more for them to go ahead and keep doing it.”

While the project was meant to help get the youth involved and to teach them the message of “A Little Jesus Goes A Long Way,” Seals said there’s a great lesson for eeryone to learn from this.

“I think for me, as the pastor, the lesson that I want everybody to notice is, first, to follow Jesus, meaning that we acknowledge that He’s with us always,” he said. “He’s not just a Sunday morning thing because we take Jesus with us everywhere we go.

“Secondly, is the reminder that He is with us, as scripture says, the advocate, the Holy Spirit comes and is our guide our comforter, the one to remind us of everything Jesus has taught us. But then also, it’s a good reminder that our faith isn’t something that we’re supposed to keep to ourselves, Seals continued. “Matthew 28, Jesus says, ‘Go and make disciples of all the world’ and we’ve gotten comfortable with leaving Jesus in the box called the building of the church, instead of taking Jesus outside into the world.

“So doing this gives us a chance to tell folks about Jesus,” said Seals. “Whether you see one somewhere in the community, and somebody says something about it, that allows us to say, ‘let me tell you about Jesus’ — because again, a little Jesus goes a long way and this world needs a lot of Jesus right now.”