When I surrendered my life back to the Lord and rejoined the church Christianity
took on a whole new meaning for me. The building, people, and the services had not
changed but to me it was all new. I can remember one of my first testimonies in which I
testified to this. I spoke of salvation as a personal experience and not being in church
because of my parents walk with the Lord. I wanted others to know what I was feeling,
but when I took a better look I saw very little evangelism going on. This actually made
me mad. I could not understand. There were so many more where I had come from.
Why were we not trying to reach them? On occasion an evangelist would come and
present programs to indoctrinate the masses and we would go out on a Saturday and that
would go on, ohh, for about a week! Again I would ask why. Everybody would always
say the same things. They were willing if someone else would. But there never seemed
to be someone else. I would set up booths at public events, I used fund raisers as
recruitment opportunities, but saw very limited results. It never occurred to me that even
deacons may not have the experience to teach somebody to witness. Once whole I
accompanied the pastor on a door to door outreach he offered to let me take the next door,
I quickly declined. In retrospect I was intimidated by him. The last thing I wanted to do
was mess up in front of the pastor. The approach in the book covers many of the things
but the one that really grabbed my attention was taking the burdens off the pastor and
placing them where they belong, on the congregation! It was always amazing to me to
see my pastor jugle his schedule. I can see how a lot more would get done if the masses
could be mobilized with the same care and compassion of the pastor.
Once during a restructuring of our church program, many of the youth programs
...