Outreach Activities

I have the great privilege of pastoring a church of introverts. That's an exaggeration, because we do have a few outgoing types. By and large most people in our church really are happy with their own company and would as readily stay at home as go out to parties.

So I know that when we start thinking about reaching the lost, it's going to be a stretch for most of us, including myself. You can be sure that street preaching will not be on anybody's radar, unless by a major miracle of the Holy Spirit.

I've found over the years that planning for evangelism actually brings us closer to Christ and causes us to grow deeper in our faith. For that reason alone, it is like a spiritual discipline that grows us.

I encourage every cell group to have a prayer list of people whom we believe the Lord wants us to pray for. I ask the members to pray about who they should put on the list. Then we draw up a common list so that we are praying for a dozen or so people in our private prayers as well as when we meet as a group.

Planning an outreach also requires prayer for what we should do, whom we should invite, the weather, courage to invite someone.

Because satan is committed to us not sharing with others, just the process of inviting someone is a form of spiritual warfare. It seems like every demon in creation gets between us and the person to be invited. Finally we take that leap of faith and ask them to come to the event.

The event happens and hopefully a good time is had by everyone. Then we go home and play over the conversations we had and we realise that there were twenty opportunities to share the gospel, but we didn't take them. But maybe next time we will be more mindful of the nudges from the Holy Spirit.

The next week the friend mentions how much she enjoyed the picnic/ barbecue/ walk and was pleasantly surprised that the christians weren't quite as weird as she had expected.

Without realising it, the whole process of evangelism makes us grow in our dependence on the Holy Spirit. The result of concerted prayer for some unbelievers and reaching out to them in love is that they come a little closer to the kingdom and we come a lot closer to the King.

As my youngest son says, “It's win-win!”