FAITH, EE & Personal Evangelism

For many years Calvary has used the FAITH program as its primary personal evangelism strategy.  This program has had much success in training people to share their faith and in winning many people to Christ. There have been times in the past when FAITH involvement consisted of close to 15 evangelistic teams going out every Tuesday night.

About a year ago, our Spanish Language Ministry went through the FAITH training and began to form teams.  In the process, Pastor Rolando Aguirre felt that Evangelism Explosion (EE) was a better fit for the context of our SLM than FAITH.  So they began to use the EE strategy.  Nevertheless, FAITH (English) teams and EE (Spanish) teams met at the same time each Tuesday, shared a meal, received assignments, went out to visit and returned to report and celebrate.  During this year, the EE (Spanish) teams have grown to nine.  We praise God for this rapid multiplication!

During this same period FAITH (English) leader and learner participation has diminished to the point that there were not enough teams to be able to do the fall 2010 semester.  While we can conjecture on the various reasons why this might have happened, we think it is more important to see this as an opportunity to refine our evangelism and discipleship strategy.

I personally see the principles of the FAITH program to be:

•  personal evangelism
• training of others
• multiplication
• accountability
• celebration
• connection of new believers with a small group as an objective
• fixed day & time

Of these, the fixed day & time can sometime be an obstacle for those who wish to be involved in personal evangelism and it also may not be the best time to find those prospects that we are seeking to visit.

In the meantime, we are implementing an alternative strategy we are calling the "Building Bridges Initiative" for now.  This initiative seeks to retain all of the principles of the FAITH program with the exception of the fixed day & time.  The Building Bridges Initiative will seek to involve individuals from the congregation through their Bible Fellowships in contacting prospects in order to develop a relationship with them, share the gospel and connect them to a small group.  The contacts may be done in a home, a coffee shop or a restaurant.  They will be done on the day and time that is most convenient for the team and for the prospect.  Furthermore, these contacts will seek to ensure a discipleship relationship that will continue after the person has made a decision to follow Christ.  This is an ambitious project.  For the time being, we are piloting the first part of this initiative through the pastoral staff and other former FAITH leaders.  Eventually, we will expand the involvement of teams and the kind of on-going discipleship that we would like to see take place.  The process of implementation of this will take at least one year.  So the plan for 2010 and 2011 is to implement the "Building Bridges Initiative" as the primary strategy for personal evangelism and, eventually, personal discipleship.

Whether it is FAITH, EE or "Building Bridges," I am glad that Calvary has a heart for personal evangelism and I am committed to encouraging and equipping leaders to do this in a more effective manner.