One of the lies that is promoted by the devil that almost all churches in the western world are almost completely convinced of is that, you can’t do evangelism unless you have “Good” follow-up in place.
What absolute rubbish!
This Lie has silenced so much outreach that it would have to be up there on the devil’s top ten. Consider Phillip when the Lord had gone to all the effort of getting him to the Ethiopian (Acts 8:26-39). What if he said, “Oh sorry Lord, I can’t talk to him, I do not have a prearranged follow-up plan”?
I don’t know about you but I’ve never been keen to tell the master of all of creation that He is stupid.
Don’t get me wrong we should absolutely do a “Good” follow-up. But we should not be letting that stop us from spreading the Good News.
I went to a meeting recently, of a group of missions whose objective is to work on ways of better co-operation. A very worthwhile idea I must say and that is coming from someone who hates meetings with a passion. But on this occasion, I came across a young Bible college student. You know the one: “I’m about to complete college and I know more than you or anybody else in this room for that matter”.
A Question of Evangelism and Follow-up
He was asking me about my mission GRN and one of his first questions was how we handle the follow-up.
I started to explain to him our discipleship material and that we also work through local churches and missions. But the moment I said that follow-up was therefore not our primary objective because there is so much diversity needed. That it is seen as needing to be a natural development of the work at the locality, he dismissed everything.
Now I’ve been there, done that and I know that once he gets out into the field he’ll have that knocked out of him very quickly so this is not a criticism of him but, I’m appalled at the education we are giving our young bible students. We spend so much time emphasizing follow-up that we subjugate the message.
Let’s not subjugate the message. Let’s make follow-up a natural development of the work at the locality.
Having Just rebuke myself
Enjoy
Richard
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