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Sep 25
Let me give a shout out to my oldest son who has set up this new blog format and now has his middle aged dad on twitter. I had my first lesson today. I am amazed at all the people who do this twitter deal. Facebook has been a great challenge to me also. For those of you who are on it regularly know by now that I do facebook about once a month at the most. Maybe that will change. I know a lot of folks waste a lot of time on facebook (in my opinion). What if we spent as much time in prayer. Man I don’t have time to do all the other stuff that I am supposed to do. Pray that I will be more disciplined and have some more time to be more faithful with the blog and do the twitter deal. I can’t imagine anyone caring about what I have going on throughout the day, maybe because I don’t care if someone is drinking a coke somewhere. . .Ha! Pray for me.
We have less than two days until our Harvest Crusade begins on Sunday morning. We believe that the Bible clearly teaches in Ephesians 4:11ff that God has given the church the gift of the evangelist for the purpose of building up His church which includes the reaching of the lost. In my Rediscover Church series, we talked about the important quality of “witness” in the life of the authentic church. In that message, I mentioned that there are conventional methods and missional methods. Conventional methods were characterized under the heading of confrontational meaning they confronted people who a person may not know well or at all with the Gospel. Also included in the conventional method was that of event evangelism. Our harvest crusade would be considered a conventional method falling under the idea of event evangelism. This approach is biblical and as a matter of fact was a front line method of church evangelism, growth, and expansion in the book of Acts. The two occasions in the first four chapters of preaching followed by thousands being saved and baptized fall into this method. Also, Acts 8 account of the Ethiopian eunuch coming to Christ through the combination of Scripture and a willing witness by the name of Philip. So for those who dismiss “conventional methods” dismiss the lead method of the first century church. I do believe that some of our slow down in penetrating the pagan pool can be attributed to pastors (like me) in particular no longer sharing the gospel with everyone they can. Then we stand back and criticize a method that we have long abandoned, so our assessment in some measure is more theory than tried and tested then failed.
On the other hand, I did give most of my attention in the witness message to missional methods which include “authentic relationship” and it taking longer for people to make decisions than it once did. We have done surveys with those who have visited our church and for whatever reason had not joined in a year’s time. We asked them the scary question, “Why have you not joined our church?” Those of us who are the public people fear that we are major reason that people have not yet joined our church. What we discovered is that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed still had not joined any church and there were very, very few remarks about why they had not joined our church. The major reason of the few were our size. Basically people just take longer to make those decisions for a variety of reasons. Some of those may be found in Rainer’s Essential Church. With that in mind, relational evangelism is very important and was emphasized in the message. (A side bar: it really does not surprise me, but many times people pick up one part of a message and in this message, some thought I did not mention the relationship aspect or down played it, when in reality that was the emphasis of the sermon) It is important to have relationships with people who are not yet believers so when opportunities such as event evangelism take place, we can encourage their participation and be their friend and guide through the process. Friendship evangelism works for sure, but my observation through almost 20 years as the lead preaching pastor is that those who reach their friends with the gospel also practice conventional and confrontational evangelism. Those who champion friendship evangelism through the criticism and abandonment of conventional, confrontational, event, and proclamation evangelism have rarely led their friends to Christ, to obedience to Christ in baptism and meaningful church membership. My observation is certainly not authoritative or infallible. While very limited to my 20 years as a pastor and another 10 years as regular witness for Christ and the locations where I have lived, the evidence of what I just mentioned has been so overwhelming and not even close that I have little doubt of its validity.
Knowing what we know, we must pray to the Lord of the harvest, reach out to those in the harvest (our friends and family for sure, but also our casual acquaintances and divine appointments), compel them to come to Christ through our love, our passion, our kindness, our acts of service, and yes also through our words of invitation and the Gospel.
Let’s believe God wants to see many come to know His Son this next week. Let’s do our part in partnership in the Gospel. I hope your are ready. We are going to have a great week. Our motive is right for His glory, our message is life changing and mighty to save. Until next time. . . .Wes