ast year the church proposed three simple goals: read the Bible, serve the community, and meet together more often. This year, we added a goal: be more evangelistic. This fits with our overall mission to be servants, students, and messengers. The church expressed wishes to first of all be equipped to share the gospel, as it can be a daunting task. We’re in the process of equipping ourselves and will eventually launch out into the unknown to share the good news with family, friends, and even strangers. We ask for your continued prayers. And we would ask that all of the readership join us in this process of learning, praying, and sharing faith.
Step one was to put our goal into concrete and measurable terms. We worked on this in the last two weeks, playing with the language of the goal. What we’ve settled on is this (my translation from the Spanish): “To be a church that shares its faith and the Gospel. We will all define what ‘the Gospel’ is, in our own words, and by year’s end we will all have at least one experience sharing our faith with someone.”
While we finalized our goal, we also talked about obstacles to sharing our faith and whose responsibility it is to share their faith. While almost all of us recognize that we have the responsibility to share our faith, many of us expressed fear of rejection, lack of knowledge leading to hesitation, and plain lack of experience and a good strategy for doing “evangelism”.
This past Sunday the church embarked on the exercise of defining “the Gospel.” We all sat down with pen and paper and wrote out what the good news of Jesus is in simple and brief terms. I think this is an excellent exercise that every Christian should do at some point. We talked a little about differentiation of testimony and gospel. Everyone has a story about how the Gospel has affected them and this is an important thing to be able to recount. The Gospel, the “good news”, is just that: news of something that has happened. We talked as a church about the news of what Jesus has done, and how that news has affected our personal lives and changed us forever. This combination of gospel and personal testimony is something that our friends and family need to hear, especially if they are not already Christians. It’s so interesting to hear everyone’s unique perspective on the Gospel and what certain facets they emphasize.
We have plans to dig further into the scriptures about what the Gospel is, pray hard over a list of people we want to share with, talk about how to bring up topics of God and faith in everyday conversations, and what to do when someone is interested in Jesus. I’ll keep you updated on how our journey goes, and I hope you will consider participating with us this year. I encourage you to sit down and write out your gospel and your story of faith in brief, relatable terms – an “elevator pitch” or, as Jeremy likes to say, tweet length.