As I've been thinking about coming on staff at a nascent church plant in a rapidly growing city, I've been struggling a lot with the concept of evangelism.
I hope to reflect on evangelism in the next few posts.
For the last couple of days, I've been reading Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Evangelism. In this book, Webber maps out a template for evangelism - in a post-Christian world - informed by various principles and models derived from the ancient church.
The church today is a mile long but only an inch deep. As a church, we have witnessed many "conversions" but have not given much effort to disciple and train those individuals who have supposedly been "born again".
Webber thinks that we need to rediscover the three "b's" of evangelism highlighted in the ancient church: believe, belong, behave. As Americans, we are influenced far more by the compartmentalized world-view of the Greeks than the holistic world-view of the Hebrews. We want to separate evangelism, discipleship/spiritual formation and worship. But this can't be done.
Here is my definition of evangelism:
communicating the gospel in word and in deed to those who are outside the circle of faith in expectation that they will believe in Jesus Christ, belong to his church, and behave in light of his Kingdom ethic.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment