Congress offers practical
approaches to evangelism

United Methodist News Service
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Pastors and church leaders came to the Congress on Evangelism this month looking for “how-to” instructions for winning souls to Christ. 
More than 950 people, including United Methodists from the Philippines and Norway, sought to learn how they could “Let the Good News Roll” at the 2006 Congress on Evangelism, Jan. 3-6. The annual congress provides evangelical methods and methodology to make 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, Columbus, Ohio, immediate past president of the United Methodist Council on Evangelism. It sponsors the congress and is affiliated with the General Board of Discipleship. 
During the congress, church leaders focused on how to win people to Christ in individual and corporate ways.
“Evangelism is to bring people to Christ and to bring them to a relationship with him,” Exman said.
Jesus is called the evangelical who said that no one gets to God but through him, Exman noted.
“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,” he said.
But pastors often do not know how to extend an invitation to discipleship, Exman said.
“An invitation is a long and tried and true standard of evangelism,” he explained. “Many of our seminaries teach theology, but they don’t teach as much ‘how-tos.’”
To address that, 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 to teach the how-tos of bringing people to Christ.
Bishop William Willimon of Birmingham, Ala., outlined differences between preaching and evangelism. Evangelism, he pointed out, is a claim about who God is and what God does, and it’s a claim about reality.
“Evangelism is something God does,” Willimon said. “Evangelism is an act of God.”
He said a lot of preaching, including his own, is far too “anthropocentric and not theocentric,” or is modern or individualistic when it should be cosmic. 
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, senior pastor of Windsor Village UMC, Houston, told participants that before anyone can do evangelism, that person must make certain he or she is whole, healed and well as a result of applying the spiritual disciplines in his or her own life. 
Caldwell, who heads the denomin-ation’s largest congregation, said that to make local churches grow, leaders who have a heart for God are needed, and they must have five characteristics:
> Be Christian.
> Be consecrated and tithe.
> Be competent.
> Be compassionate.
> Be community-minded.
“Once you get yourself together and your leaders together, the church will follow,” he said.  
The Rev. Billy Abraham, professor of Wesleyan studies at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, told the gathering that bringing people to Christ requires a recovery of nerve to say that regardless of what is happening in the world, God created his kingdom and invites people to become a part of it.