Thursday, October 4, 2012

« Благовместие» = Sharing the gospel together




Every Monday our team meets for «Благовместие» - it’s a time when we go out together to do evangelism.  We love the play with words: “благовествие" = "to share the gospel" + "вместе" =  "together” = «благовместие».  Why do evangelism together?  We have several reasons:

·         it keeps us accountable to take the initiative to go out to share the gospel,

·         one of us is usually courageous when another of us is not so courageous, so the courageous one helps the not-so-courageous one be more courageous,

·         one person can pray while the other shares,

·         when one person doesn’t know what to say, the other can jump in,

·         we can encourage each other through our fears of sharing the gospel,

·         we can rejoice together at what we saw God do and how He used us to help a non-Christian begin to think about their relationship with God.

We have started going through together a short series of studies on “Heart-motivated Evangelism.  We meet for 30-40 minutes to go through one of the studies and to pray together just before we go out to share the gospel.  We divide up into pairs and go to a campus or to a specific place together on campus to share the gospel for 1-2 hours, and then we come back together at the end to talk about what we learned about sharing the gospel and what we saw God do.  We finish by praying for the people we talked to about the gospel. 

On the last 2 Mondays we have shared the gospel with 6 Muslim guys, a Chinese student and a Russian guy as well as have tried to start spiritual conversations with students from Ecuador and Libya. 

This is the highlight of our week.  I encourage you to «Благовместие», even if there are just two of you.