This month will mark a year since we had our weekend ReVive seminar and the follow up book study. ReVive stands for: Renewal, Vision & Values, Insistence on church health, VITAL strategies, and Enacting the vision. The VITALs are: Vision for Evangelism and Mission, Intentional Worship, Transformation to Christlikeness, Authentic community, and Lay mobilization. We learned much about churches, including ours, which have been in decline, likely for decades, and we discussed ways to face this problem. We discussed revitalizing our church. Canon Mark Eldredge poses that the important ideas that uphold revitalization and turning a church from decline are 1) working on having a healthy church, 2) focusing on discipleship of members that will be willing to share their faith in Christ as their Savior and then will help to disciple other people, 3) training our eyes and outreach toward those who are unchurched or who do not know about Jesus who are in our local community, and 4) making sure that we are welcoming, worshipping, serving and giving.
We are a family at this church! We love one another and we are all thankful for how God has worked in us and in our families in the past through the ministry here. We are all so thankful for a place that we can come to worship our Holy God where we know that the Gospel message and God’s holiness come first! Through ReVive we were reminded that our love for Christ because of who He is and what He has done should overflow into ministry that reaches out to our community, giving us pathways to share our belief in Christ. With that in mind, we held our WHO day to discuss the many different groups of people who are in our community and to try to narrow the list by thinking through WHO we can and then should serve with who we are, where our passion is, and what we can do with our time and talents and willing workers. I decided that our mission could better be encapsulated in the statement: Bishop Cummins Reformed Episcopal Church wants to live out a Great Commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
We do not all have the calling to be an evangelist like St. Paul, but we are all called to be ready to give an answer for the hope that we have in Christ. We desire to “love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves” and that must mean telling others about the only God who gives us our very life, reason for living, and hope for the future. We are mostly sowers and waterers, yet sometimes we can be harvesters. There can be no harvest where nothing has been sown. Living our lives as believers in this world while we await the Heavenly Kingdom means being intentional about sowing thoughts, questions, and ideas about our mighty God that may help others to begin to consider or challenge their assumptions. We can do the work of paving the way for the gospel.
Randy Newman in his book Mere Evangelism states, “People’s…often unspoken beliefs about themselves, God, and the world either set them up for belief in the gospel or for the rejection of it…if someone’s presupposition is that they are the source of all truth and they merely need to look within to find answers, it may be difficult for them to consider any outside source as a higher authority. This means that merely quoting the Bible to them may not be the best starting point.” (25)
Perhaps, instead of thinking that we just need to get our “testimony” down pat (although we do need to do this) we can consider that pre-evangelism, or the insertion of ideas about God into conversations with our non-Christian or unchurched friends, family or acquaintances, should be our first task. It’s the job of sowing. We can certainly help one another learn this skill by meeting together, thinking through our own path to belief – how “God paved the way for our own salvation through conversations, actions, and hints long before” any of us came to faith (Newman 25). By sharing these stories with one another, drawing out our memories and details of things that helped us believe, we can then begin to pool ideas of ways we can speak to people we know and influence them to think about God.
John Piper said this about being a disciple: “Every Christian should be helping unbelievers become believers by showing them Christ. That is making a disciple. And every Christian should be helping other believers grow to more and more maturity. That is making a disciple. And every Christian should be seeking to get help for themselves from others to keep on growing. And that is also our discipleship. And every church should think through how all of these kinds of biblical disciple-making find expression in their corporate life.” (from an audio transcript of a John Piper podcast)
So, how do we do this thing of equipping ourselves for pre-evangelism? Together! First, keep doing the things that help us grow in our own walk with Christ – know Him by studying the Word of God, talking to God, worshipping and learning together with God’s people; meet together to work through these ideas of pre-evangelism and stoking our love for the lost who are all around us; intentionally step into relationship with others who are unchurched or not believing through church started ministry or as individuals; pray. Try joining with other church members at the Faith Friday meetings this month. Take time to hear others’ stories, learn how to share about God, and be encouraged to sow seeds of the gospel in the lives of the people God puts in your life. May He bless our efforts to live out the Great Commission and bring glory to our Lord.
