So you want to reach the lost with the gospel? Fantastic! Evangelistic courses are an effective method of doing so—particularly in a post-Christian culture. The following are small but crucial steps you can take to ensure you maximize the effectiveness of your evangelistic course.
Start listening. Start working out what people are trying to do, and how they are doing it. Find out what people are trying. What has worked? What hasn’t?
What do we typically think of as human “fruit”? Discussions centre on topics like nature, technology, and, of course, culture—art, music, sports, architecture, literature, science, etc. Other people, taking the text at face value, believe that Genesis 1:28 is simply a command to have babies—and lots of them.
This short booklet sets out what it means to be an 'evangelical', and includes Bible references and discussion questions.
One sinner plus one sinner doesn’t equal zero conflict. You cannot avoid it because marriage is an unconditional covenant and commitment to an imperfect and sinful person.
These days the word love has kind of by default come to mean something like ‘affirmation’. To love someone or something necessarily means to approve every bit of them. To disagree with some aspect of their life or character means you must hate them, or be afraid of them. (Although,
Doing things well and developing new leaders are both valuable and necessary objectives. The trouble is that these two agendas often clash. Training someone up means, almost by definition, that in the beginning they won’t be particularly good at whatever it is they’re learning to do. And they almost certainly won’t be as good at it as you are.
These days, most church services are run with the concept of Every Member Ministry in mind. But, as Rory Shiner argues, perhaps we should return to the days of old where the pastor did it all.
In preparation for the coming Australian federal election, Peter Baker offers ten theological principles to guide us as we take to the polls.
We know what people in our culture will not like hearing, and we prefer to avoid things that are awkward or unpleasant. The problem is that the gospel—literally the best news in the world—contains awkward bits.