Just Be With People: An Epiphany Sermon Series on Learning Evangelism from Jesus

What do you think of when you hear the word “evangelism”?

Increasingly, our guess is most people don’t have positive associations with this word.  Non-Christians likely think of door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness proselytizers or manipulative TV evangelists.  Even within the church, we often tend to think of evangelism as a “got to” of the Christian faith rather than a “get to,” that requires putting yourself in a really uncomfortable situation to bring up Jesus and eternal salvation in conversation with strangers. 

How did this word, translated from a Greek word that means “to share Good News” become such bad news to our ears?  Can evangelism’s public image could be rehabilitated?  Are there ways of doing evangelism that are actually life-giving, healthy, and dignifying for both the person sharing Good News and the person hearing it?

During Sundays in Epiphanytide, we’ll be looking at scenes from the life of Jesus in the Gospel of John where He interacted with people and shared the Good News of the Gospel with them.  In these days, we hope to discard all the modern perversions of evangelism that have grown so distasteful, and recover a simple understanding of how to just be with people and share good news with them as modeled to us by Jesus.  We hope this series will be refreshing for our faith even as we gain some practical vision for how we can have healthy spiritual conversations with real people we love and want to see come to know Christ in our lives!

Join us Sundays January 15th – February 19th as we relearn evangelism from Jesus Himself in the Gospel of John!