I had a great meeting today with an experienced and seasoned pastor. I meet with him a lot to talk church, life, and how to be the best pastor I can be. It's worth it. No matter if your a pastor or not, I would highly recommend finding someone older than you to bounce ideas off of and reach your potential.
Today I talked to him about my frustration with churches that cannot seem to find a balance between fellowship (looking inward) and outreach/evangelism (looking outward). My heart and the reason I got into ministry was evangelism - reaching others with the Good News of Christ - what He did for me He can do for you.
It's not that I'm against fellowship. I believe that it is a Biblical concept and one that needs to be built into the life of the church. The problem for me is that churches have a natural tendency to curve inward (fellowship) and not outward (evangelism). The easiest thing to do is to hang out with who you already know. The hardest thing to do is to go outside of one's comfort zone and share Christ. Churches have no problem with fellowship, but it has a big problem with evangelism. A church that has fellowship as the focus is a church that is not a church at all - it is a country club; a well intentioned country club, but a country club no less.
A church that is all evangelism is not Biblical either. To much focus on evangelism can lead to abuse of church members and completely ignoring aspects of discipleship and serving one another.
You can probably tell, though, that I come down on the side of evangelism. I have a passion for it and want to see more of it - at my church and other churches. We need to come up with creative ways of presenting the Gospel in contextualized ways.
Probably the hardest part of evangelism is where it starts - with a realization of what Christ has done for you. If you can't do that, you are useless in evangelism. You have to be aware of and live out Christ in your life in order to share that with others. If Christ in your life is just a cultural thing, you have nothing to share.
Let's love each other in the church as we love those outside the church. Can't have one without the other.
It starts with you.
Today I talked to him about my frustration with churches that cannot seem to find a balance between fellowship (looking inward) and outreach/evangelism (looking outward). My heart and the reason I got into ministry was evangelism - reaching others with the Good News of Christ - what He did for me He can do for you.
It's not that I'm against fellowship. I believe that it is a Biblical concept and one that needs to be built into the life of the church. The problem for me is that churches have a natural tendency to curve inward (fellowship) and not outward (evangelism). The easiest thing to do is to hang out with who you already know. The hardest thing to do is to go outside of one's comfort zone and share Christ. Churches have no problem with fellowship, but it has a big problem with evangelism. A church that has fellowship as the focus is a church that is not a church at all - it is a country club; a well intentioned country club, but a country club no less.
A church that is all evangelism is not Biblical either. To much focus on evangelism can lead to abuse of church members and completely ignoring aspects of discipleship and serving one another.
You can probably tell, though, that I come down on the side of evangelism. I have a passion for it and want to see more of it - at my church and other churches. We need to come up with creative ways of presenting the Gospel in contextualized ways.
Probably the hardest part of evangelism is where it starts - with a realization of what Christ has done for you. If you can't do that, you are useless in evangelism. You have to be aware of and live out Christ in your life in order to share that with others. If Christ in your life is just a cultural thing, you have nothing to share.
Let's love each other in the church as we love those outside the church. Can't have one without the other.
It starts with you.
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