Missions
Telling people about Christ is the responsibility of all Christ-followers. “Telling” is many times referred to as “missions” which I believe involves two primary activities: evangelism and outreach.
Evangelism:
For missions to be evangelical means that individual Christ-followers are willing, able, and engaged in spreading the gospel – telling people about salvation through faith in Jesus Christ; this is how we are evangelizing the world.
For evangelism to be truly effective, we must share our faith through relational pathways – some of which we already have in place in our lives: family, friends, neighbors, and the other associations with people with whom we interact everyday. By working through these relationships, many of the relational barriers that stand in the way of sharing the gospel are already broken down, giving us a greater means to share the good news of Jesus Christ.
Evangelism involves sharing, talking, explaining, answering questions, challenging, inviting, and involving and is primarily accomplished personally by each and every member of the Quarry Ridge family. Evangelism training is accomplished through education, classes, seminars, publications, meeting missionaries, and more.
Outreach:
Mission work is also an outreach.
Quarry Ridge engages in evangelism that first takes into consideration the physical, emotional and societal needs of the individual. This is one form of outreach: meeting some or all of these needs in order to earn the right to be heard.
Outreach means that we are reaching out to the world around us with the love of Christ through our actions, our service, and our financial support. Outreach is touching lives with the love of Christ through actions and service in hopes that we will be given the opportunity to share Christ verbally, and leading them to seek out the claims of the Savior we’re trying to live out before them.
Outreach involves going, serving, doing, visiting, working – as well as sharing our wealth in financial support. The people of Quarry Ridge have opportunities to share the love of Christ through 1) our financial gifts to the world, and 2) our actual hands-on work in the world.
We must remember that we’re sent by Jesus into the world around us to make disciples and teach them to obey everything He commanded us. That’s His Great Commission to us. (Matthew 28:18-20) In other words – people come because we talk to them about Jesus, and invite and involve them in our spiritual journey and our experiences in the Body of Christ.
If we don’t tell them about Jesus Christ – who will?
