On Saturday, March 1, over 90 people came to The Net, a training day in evangelism and evangelistic preaching, at Enfield Evangelical Free Church, organised by United Beach Missions and Roger Carswell and sponsored by 10ofthose.com .
Johnny Prime, pastor of the church, set the scene for the day as he showed from Luke 5 that the Lord Jesus is the loving people-catcher who catches sinful people for the purpose of catching others. As we preach the Word of God we throw out the net to others even when conditions may not look ideal.
Paving the way for Jesus
Roger Carswell then challenged those present about our message – ‘If we are not paving the way for Jesus Christ and him crucified we are not preaching the gospel’. He went on to mention the need to preach with imagination, love and urgency – ‘be kind, you do not know what battles people are fighting’. Also, there definitely needs to be an appeal for a response.
Jonathan Carswell recommended some very helpful resources and during the coffee break the bookstall was busy with people wanting material both to give away to non-Christian friends and to read for themselves.
Paul Windsor (Langham Partnership) joined the gathering via Skype and was very helpful in sharing tips and pointers on how the preacher should prepare a message. Time was then spent in smaller groups, discussing what had been heard and looking at how Christians are to develop their own evangelistic gifts.
Quick-fire seminars
The afternoon had a slightly different feel – with 15-minute quick-fire seminars looking at children’s work, one-to-one evangelistic Bible studies, church and youth missions.
Tim Howlett, United Beach Missions, outlined the value of short-term summer opportunities. People return to churches with an enthusiasm to tell others about the Lord Jesus Christ. He said that as we have freely received so we should be willing to give up a week to share the good news of Jesus.
The day concluded with a plea from Roger for us to be evangelistic people. Spurgeon once said: ‘I could scarcely content myself even for five minutes without trying to do something for Christ. If I walked along the street, I must have a few tracts with me...’.
This was the first time this day was run and the organisers are already thinking of running it in other locations around the country.
