Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Evangelism Training Workshop
On Saturday we had an evangelism training workshop for the church. The concept was a two hour workshop focused on approaches and encouragement to share your faith. We wanted to show them that there are a lot of different techniques you can use when you are evangelizing. In doing that it provides them exposure to different techniques that suit varied personalities. Some people will love using the law and ten commandments to show people their need for Christ. Others will feel more comfortable sharing a testimony of how God has personally transformed their life.
We also included a lot of encouragement about why we should evangelize, including two video clips. One was of a thirty second enactment of the rapture coming in the middle of a church service. The other was an audio clip we heard at the school of Evanglism about a little old man who handed out tracts on George Street in Sydney Harbor (can you think of a more relevant place to be using that as an encouragement??) for 40 years without hearing of a single salvation, and then all of a sudden before his death he is met by this baptist pastor from London about all these people who'd come to know the Lord after receiving his tracts.
If you'd like to watch either of those videos here are links:
Rapture Video (view on youtube, downloadable at the potters house)
Man from Sydney Video (one thing to note on that particular video site: if you do not have ad blocking software that blocks the popup ad, click the x button on the popup that appears...do not click "ok" unless you want spyware installed on your computer)
We presented our material using powerpoint, having each of us take turns speaking on different topics. At the beginning there were a couple of glitches due to an out of order slide and conversion from powerpoint to open-office format overlapping some of the text and pictures, but overall it went really smoothly and we were thankful we'd been able to get the powerpoint to show up on the projector at all. The setup to make powerpoint project on the projector instead of the computer monitor is a little complicated, but the right people were able to be found beforehand to help us set it up right. Praise God he listened to all the prayers for this event!
Originally we wanted to have a "go out and practice this" practical ministry experience time immediately following our workshop, however, due to the second cafe outreach being scheduled a few short hours later, the timing just didn't work out. So please pray that another opportunity would arise where we could go out and practice evanglizing with the locals from the church.
After the two hour presentation, we spent another half hour just answering questions from the audience, which was a huge blessing all around. The questions were extremely relevant to what we'd just presented and showed an understanding of the material (it hadn't just floated over their heads), and gave us more opportunity to share about personal experiences we've had evangelizing, and how God has worked through those experiences.
