Thursday 11 July 2013

My 5 Organic P's

What does it look like to be an Evangelising Church?  I have been pondering this question for a while now.  Does it mean to have a solid series of evangelistic events or tent meetings?  Does it mean a church that has a strong door to door ministry? Is it a church that sends a group of members to the High Streets with a handful of tracts and a few loud voices?  Is it a church that runs annual Christianity Explored courses?  While I think all these can be good methods of Evangelism, I don't believe in themselves they mean a church is fully committed to evangelism.

From experience I know that a good programme can actually be a way of hiding the fact that many members in a church don't actually want to share their faith at all.  A regular gospel event can become someone's excuse to say "Well they do the evangelism for our church..."

In my role as Pastor of Outreach at CEC I don't want to be just developing programmes.  Obviously, it will involve that kind of thing.  But I want it to go much deeper, I want every member of our church to be a part of reaching Chessington for Jesus.  I believe there is a basic foundation that a church needs to be an evangelising church.  A foundation that supports and strengthens programmes that are built on top of them.  It was dubbed recently (by Gareth), "Ben's Organic P's".

So here they are:

1. A PASSION for the Gospel
2. Understanding our PURPOSE in God's mission
3. Building genuine relationships with the PEOPLE around us
4. Devoted to PRAYER for their salvaion
5. Always being PREPARED to share our faith

Over the next few weeks I want to outline each of these five points.  I will try to demonstrate why I believe they are Biblical and share how they may look practically.

I look forward to seeing what you have to add.


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