Jesus said in Acts chapter 1 that ‘ye shall be witnesses unto me’. Our primary mission as Christian is to testify to the Lord’s goodness before not yet believers.For nearly 20 years Living Word has gone to the mission field, conducted street witnessing and organized servant evangelism and community outreach. I am so thankful for what God has done. Recently we celebrated one million souls won to the Lord through the efforts of our soul winning teams.
Recently the Holy Spirit has impressed me with the fact that we aren’t tapping our full potential. The vision for outreach has been limited by what the Outreach Department can organize, lead, fund and staff.
In order to grow our influence we need to decentralize ministry. The church needs to experience what I call a ‘lay liberation movement’. In order to do that our staff must recruit, train, equip and motivate outreachers to function on their own.
It’s good to gather for service projects and soul winning events but its purpose should be to train the believer to outreach independently. I call it homegrown outreach. Like my mom used to say “homegrown is always better than store bought”.
Over my next few blog posts I am going to feature outreach efforts of laymen who are compelled to share God’s love on their own.
Posts
Recruiting, training, equiping and motivating us as outreachers is a great idea. Practicing this at church in a group is great but we need to be taking what we have learned and use the knowledge in our personal lives to affect family, friends, co-workers and people we don't know. Also, maybe the outreach staff can "hire" volunteers to organize and lead without the need to compensate them.
ReplyDelete