Saturday, March 22, 2008

Beta Version of a Ministry and Evangelism Training Model (part 2)

Now, take these ideas (Service and Contribution) from my last post a step further. Consider Service and Contribution as root elements of a unifying approach for evangelism.
I think everyone is struggling with how to train students to evangelize other students. Our students can be easily labeled as intolerant when they talk about Jesus. Few of them feel effective. Some YP's are literally throwing the old methods out the window (see a great article Tossing Aside the Tract: Why Just About Everything I Learned About Evangelism is Wrong). But once we are tossing out the old models of evangelism as increasingly irrelevant, what do we replace them with? Like others, I've recognized this problem with traditional witnessing methods for years and I've fiddled with my evangelism training models; going so far as to use Brian McLaren's, More Ready Than You Realize (gasp!).
So, assuming that a student is first Living an authentic life in Christ; his next steps toward evangelism can be to Serve the needs of others and then to Contribute by ultimately giving them the message of the Good News.
But I'd like to add one more component. I've noticed that most effective evangelists in our ministry Invite others to our gatherings, and they usually Invite them to follow Jesus too. I don't think that an Invitation necessarily comes before or after any of the other three components of Live, Serve, Contribute So, I'll just throw it at the end.
Now I'll be playing with this 4-step model of evangelism: Live, Serve, Contribute, Invite.
Sonlife ministries' acronym of Live, Love, Lead sums this up too. But "Love" is too generic of a word to be useful. And "Lead" sounds manipulative.
Anyway...I'll be testing this out.

2 comments:

  1. I like where you are headed with this. Sounds like you are on the right track.

    Some times our evangelism hasn't had enough "serve" so our attempts seem shallow though. I look forward to hearing how this is working for you.

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  2. I'm thinking Brent . . . not enough time today to process it all . . . but I'm thinking

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