September 16, 2007

 

Offering the Most Important Invitation

The “Listening Sessions” have proved to be a wonderful opportunity to meet many of the members of our

congregation. Lame and I deeply appreciate the gracious folks who agreed to open their homes and host

these gatherings. We also owe a deep debt of gratitude to everyone who took the time to come and spend

a couple of hours talking about the mission and ministry of our congregation. Our prayer is that we will

see God accomplish great things because we have been faithful to listen to him and to one another.

Many of you know that one of the things we did was rank the ministries in which our church is engaged.

I have not completed the statistical analysis of all those rankings, but I can confidently report that near the

top of the list was “Invite people to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.” Nearly everyone put that in

their top three. In spite of such a high ranking for this ministry emphasis, our Evangelism Committee is

languishing and some of out leaders are wondering how we can increase our effectiveness in offering this

most important invitation.

Starting this Sunday I will be preaching through several passages from the Gospel of Luke. They are passages

you will recognize as quite familiar; but we are going to look at them to see what they have to teach us about

God’s heart for evangelism. We are going to be asking the question, “What is Jesus trying to teach us about

inviting people to a saving relationship with himself?”

On Sunday evenings we will also be focusing on evangelism, but with a emphasis on developing more practical

skills for offering the invitation. We will be working with a resource developed by our conference leadership

entitled, “By All Means.” You will be interested to hear from pastors and lay folks across South Georgia the

ways God is at work in their midst to bring people into the community of believers.

As we make progress in restoring our sanctuary, it is crucial for us to focus on improving our ability to do one

of the things we believe is most important. That’s one more way we can be extraordinary.
 

 

Ashley