Fueling Evangelism

This Monday started the new bimester at Bethel Bible Institute and with it began a whole new slate of classes. The new schedule finds me teaching Dynamic Evangelism to a class of seven first-year students (from front to back: Diana, Alejandro, Karin, Alicia, Lázaro, Bernardino, and Adrián.) This marks a sort of coming of age for me as a missionary. This is my first class that I am teaching on my own, completely in Spanish, but to me, much more is riding on these next set of weeks than solely an opportunity to “cut my teeth” teaching. What I desire is that these students not only understand me, but also learn.

The course, Dynamic Evangelism, is a subject that strikes fear, guilt, or both in the heart of many Christians in the U.S. and, I’ve come to find out here as well. Three of the seven students told me that they hope to be able to learn, through this class, how to get overcome fear that they have in talking to others about Christ. What I hope to do is to assist these students to begin making evangelism part of their lifestyle so that it becomes, not a dreaded task that they have to do, but a natural outgrowth of their Christian lifestyle.

I was reading another Guy Muse’s M Blog yesterday, and it seems as though he has the same idea. His post: What is the most effective way to evangelize is about finding God’s method to “continuously evangelize,” and he and his group is waiting for God to answer the question.

So we begin this prayerful foray into the experimental task of reaching people: How do we open minds and hearts to the Gospel? How to we pull away all that is culturally and traditionally bound to what we call Christianity in order to present the message of Christ to a culture that has deemed our message obsolete? How to we remain faithful to the biblical message and yet relevant to the society in which we live?

Stay with us as we embark together on this adventure with God. Follow along with our experiences, which I hope to post frequently, and above all pray for God’s direction and intervention in our class and in the work that takes place because of it.