eyes outward...viewing life through a lens, differently... Creating God space, where God things happen...
worldview
developing an outward focus
Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders: make the most of every opportunity. —Colossians 4:5
been thinking about worldview... how we see our world through our lense / filter...the lense or filter is how we were raised, our experiences, our education, media, travel and other influences that have touched our lives...i'm thinking many people live life with a narrow worldview...
many christians in the usa have such a worldview especially when speaking about evangelism or ourward focus...
most have limited their outward view by accepting what is 'normal' in their particular flavor/background of church...
ie. visitation on one night a week with a planned series of questions to guide the conversation to the point of accepting Christ is one flavor...street confrontaional preaching is another...and what we see on t.v. another... our past experiences both positive or negative are our influences.
I now call this the 'insider view' of evanagelism...how christians view outreach, evangelism...the images/models we have experienced, embraced and methods we now promote.
for example:
when i lived in scotland i worked with ywam...our model of evengelism was mainly, street preaching, mixed with singing, drama and story(i later began to call this russion front or us vs them evangelism, we speak you listen, little direct contact and diologue)...this model was the norm and continues to be their main method of outreach...
later, when training and encouraging the ywamers to look to other cultural current outreach methods like servant evangelism they found it hard to shift from what was the norm/had always been, to embrace other expressions of evangelism.
outsider view...
all people have a worldview...so outsiders have a view of God, church, christians and Jesus viewed through their lense...this "outsider worldview" of christianity, and especially how people have attempted to evangelise them, is primarly fashioned by their experience of media, and direct contact with believers...
i.e. their contact and observation of christians/church...the things they have experienced both positive and negative from christians who have attempted to communicate the good news(packaged in various forms). to be honest some of the forms/methods of evangelism probably has been the bad news instead of the good news...the message good but the packaging flawed.
this moves me to the question, how do we/can we communicate the good news...and develop an outward focus that can effectively touch the outsider and communicate the good news we seek to share?
Action words like:
serve
dialouge
care
love
listen
ponder
ask
encourage
expalin
model
live
come to mind.
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