Congress on Evangelism Offers 'How-Tos' for Winning Souls
More than 950 people, including Methodist leaders from the Philippines and Norway, gathered for an annual congress in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month to learn how they can ''Let the Good News Roll.''
More than 950 people, including Methodist leaders from the Philippines and Norway, gathered for an annual congress in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month to learn how they can “Let the Good News Roll.”
The 2006 Congress on Evangelism, held Jan. 3-6, offered participating pastors and church leaders guidance on how to bring people to Christ, providing evangelical methods and approaches to effectively gain disciples for the Lord.
“Evangelism is important because God mandates that we are to go and preach to the whole world that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life," said the Rev. Gary Exman of Columbus, Ohio, immediate past president of the Council on Evangelism of the United Methodist Church.
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The Congress on Evangelism was sponsored by the Council on Evangelism and the General Board of Discipleship of The United Methodist Church. According to Exman, the 50-year-old Council was created to “‘propagate’ evangelism in local churches, districts and conferences across the denomination,” the United Methodist News Service reported.
Evangelism is particularly important to the United Methodist Church because 75 percent of their congregations are in small-town and rural settings, according to UMNS. Methodist leaders – who make up an estimated 95 percent of those who attended – hope the Congress will “teach church leaders how to evangelize and to foster church growth,” said Exman.
The Methodist pastor of 39 years noted that evangelism is bringing people into a relationship with Christ who said that no one could get to God except through him.
"We must challenge people, even in this politically correct day, in appropriate ways – which we Methodists are very careful to not offend if possible – to bring people to Christ, which Jesus called us to do," Exman said.
However, he noted that pastors and church leaders do not know how to invite people into a relationship with Christ.
"An invitation is a long and tried and true standard of evangelism," Exman explained. "Many of our seminaries teach theology, but they don't teach as much 'how-tos.'"
Bishop William Willimon, who leads the denomination’s Birmingham, Ala., area, commented that evangelism is a claim about who God is and what He does.
“Evangelism is something God does. Evangelism is an act of God,” he said.
But Willimon said preaching is far too “anthropocentric and not theocentric,” or is modern and individualistic when it should be cosmic, UMNS reported.
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, pastor of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas, told attendees that a person has to be whole, healed and well from applying the spiritual discipline in his own life before being able to do evangelism.
Caldwell, whose congregation is the denomination’s largest, said leaders must possess five characteristics: be Christian, be consecrated and tithe, be competent, be compassionate, and be community-minded.
"Once you get yourself together and your leaders together, the church will follow," he said.
The Foundation for Evangelism, based in Lake Junaluska, N.C., has provided financial support for each of the 13 United Methodist theological schools to have a professor teach the how-tos of bringing people to Christ in response to the fact many seminaries do not teach in-depth the how-tos, according to UMNS.
