So I’m officially back from Epicentre’s evangelism retreat and I am thoroughly rocked, encouraged, blessed, challenged, changed, and transformed. There was sooo much that went on that I’ll just start spewing out points that the Lord has been showing/teaching me and then I’ll cap it off with a really cool story!

  • This retreat totally transformed my paradigm on evangelism. I always thought that evangelism was about sharing a message and getting people to say a prayer at the end. That’s important, but that’s not all there is. Think about how many times Jesus did that in his ministry. Not many at all, yet how many disciples did he make? His primary ministries upon preaching “The kingdom of God is at hand” were teaching, loving, and healing. He did it so much that people jumped into the kingdom of God.So this weekend, we went around mostly doing the latter two, because we were so used to defining evangelism as just the first.  We went out on the streets, to parks, to malls, to invade people with the love of God. We wanted to bless people, pray for people, heal people.

    And so my old self would say, “that’s not evangelism”. But my new paradigm says that evangelism is doing anything that Jesus would do to bring people into the kingdom of God. This of course, is a thought, still in development.

  • This is really closely connected with the first point. I was really challenged to live by faithLiving by faith is a phrase that’s perhaps really abstract and something we can’t connect to, but I realize that it’s really simple.

    Living by faith simply means seeing life with the eyes of God. It is only then that we understand what Jesus meant when he said, “nothing is impossible with God.” It changes your whole perspective on everyday life.

    And when you see life by faith, you start seeing people by faith. And when you start seeing people by faith, that’s when you are like Jesus to the world. You talk to them different, you love them different, you treat them different, you approach them different, etc..

    So this whole weekend, we were trying to ‘walk around by faith’, blessing people, praying for people, healing people, sharing Jesus with people.

  • Our speaker Dan Mohler is really a man of God. He is an inspiration for my life.
  • Sometimes I may put up a front that evangelism is natural for me, but in honesty, this weekends showed how it really wasn’t as I was exposed to my insecurities and fears.There are many times where I’m just unwilling, scared, unsure, etc.

    But this weekend was such a freeing experience. Jesus was just speaking into my insecurities and proclaiming truth over my life and what He expects of me. And so evangelism this weekend was such a natural thing for me, as I tried to live out the life of Christ in me

  • Evangelism is not something for a place and time, but it’s a lifestyle of being Jesus to people.