This is the 4^th article in the series on setting up your own outreach program, or ministry of helps.

You have Prayed, taken an inventory, and achieved a vision. Now it is time for the real work to begin. Since you have some high level information such as what your ministry is, what resources you have, and a place to work from, this next 2 steps are crucial.

Who will you serve and who will you partner with. If you step out in faith alone with some guidance as to whom you will serve you may spend allot of time going in circles. When Jesus sent out the disciples, He sent them out in pairs. The Scripture states, where 2 or more our gathered, I am in their midst. It is important for numerous reasons who having at least on partner before moving too far in your ministry.

Whom to Serve.

                These are going to be your lambs. You will be praying for them, crying for them, pushing yourself to the limits physically, mentally and emotionally. So it needs to be a group of people you have a real love for. Yes there are times I believe God may choose a group of people you have a prejudice against. He will do that to teach us love and to break down those barriers.  If with all the praying and seeking God, you still do not know who you are to serve. Ask yourself who do you gravitate towards? When you are with a specific age group, cultural group do you feel recharged afterwards? If the answer to that question is yes, this may be a good indication of your potential service community.

Partners in Crime.

            You need at least one partner that shares your vision. It can be a spouse, family member, friend, church member. If you have no one in your life that shares this passion you must find someone. It is hard enough with a partner; it can be dangerous without one.  You will be more effective if while you are sharing God’s love with someone you have a partner who can be supporting you in prayer. I can pack meals for 50 men in 30 minutes. With my wife and daughter it takes 10 and is much more joyful. When we minister to the homeless in our town, the men enjoyed the picture my (at that time) 9 year old daughter drew for them as much as the food, Bible, Tracts. She gained allot from it too.

Article One
Article Two
Article Three

I found this article on another blog. It is a great article on avoiding Christian lingo when you are witnessing and evangelizing. I watched a youtube video of an open air preacher, who really should maybe look for another gig. He was using many words, that only Christians know. He also was yelling harsh words about women in general asking them to leave! LOL As someone who is in the Information technology industry, I know every social group has it's own terms and language. What you have to realize is this is actually a wall communities use to keep others out. Paul said he was all things to all men. So we need to be cogniscent about how we are communicating God's message. I am in the process of writing special book for new converts. One of the things I have been convicted on, was to make sure it is free of Christianese.

Speaking your audience’s language
How to avoid ‘Christians’, by Rusty Wright
When you seek to communicate the message of Jesus to those outside the faith, do you ever feel like you’re not getting through? There can be many reasons for this, including their own resistance, spiritual blindness, spiritual warfare, ego, personal pain, anger with God, disappointment with God or Christians, etc. But a major reason might be that you just are not speaking their language.
Read the full article here;

http://www.internetevangelismday.com/preaching-effective-sermons.php

While reviewing the content of the Online School of Evangelism, I saw this parable. It is on numerous websites and I thought it woudl be great to reporduce here. Share it with your congregations or in your newsletters or bulletins.

The Parable of the Fishless Fishermen
Anonymous

It was good to be a member of the Fishermen's Fellowship.

They were surrounded by streams and lakes full of hungry fish. They met regularly to discuss the "call to fish," the abundance of fish, and the thrill of catching fish. They got excited about fishing!

Someone suggested that they needed a philosophy of fishing, so they carefully defined and redefined fishing, and the purpose of fishing. They developed fishing strategies and tactics. Then they realized that they had been going at it backwards. They had approached fishing from the point of view of the fisherman, and not from the point of view of the fish. How do fish view the world? How does the fisherman appear to the fish? What do fish eat, and when? These are all good things to know. So hey began research studies, and attended conferences on fishing. Some traveled to faraway places to study different kinds of fish with different habits. Some got doctorates in fishology. But no one had yet gone fishing.

So a committee was formed to send out fishermen. As prospective fishing places outnumbered fishermen, the committee needed to determine priorities. A priority list of fishing places was posted on bulletin boards in all of the fellowship halls. But still, no one was fishing. A survey was launched to find out why. Most did not answer the survey, but from those who did, it was discovered that some felt called to study fish, several had even earned doctorates in Fishingology, a few went into furnishing fishing equipment, and several went around encouraging the potential fishermen. One fellow developed a program called Purpose Driven Fishing, and he became world famous and wrote a book on fishing with a leader's guide and DVD of fishing principles. What with meetings, conferences, and seminars, most recipients of the survey just simply didn't have time to fish.

Now, Jake was a newcomer to the Fisherman's Fellowship. After one stirring meeting of the Fellowship, he went fishing and caught a large fish. At the next meeting, he told his story and was honored for his catch. He was told that he had a special "gift of fishing." He was then scheduled to speak at all the Fellowship chapters and tell how he did it.

With all the speaking invitations and his election to the board of directors of the Fisherman's Fellowship, Jake no longer had time to go fishing. But soon he began to feel restless and empty. He longed to feel the tug on the line once again. So he cut the speaking, he resigned from the board, and he said to a friend, "Let's go fishing." They did, just the two of them, and they caught fish. The members of the Fisherman's Fellowship were many, the fish were plentiful, but the fishermen were few!

Reprinted from; http://blessedquietness.com/journal/fishless.htm

I am going to share with you an easy program that is a great way to connect with the local neighbors around your church building. It is as good, if not better than a VBS program. It is also a great way to add a new spiritual dimension to your current membership. When you first look at it, it may at first seem a little tough. I introduced it to a church with a weekly membership of around 100 people. Once we implemented it, everyone involved shared how much they enjoyed it. We saw significant improvement with our relationship with our neighbors. VBS attendance grew beyond members, and we had many visitors the next year. The cost was pretty small except for time. This is what we did.

1. Created nice prayer cards with a stamp attached
2. Visited every house and delivered a prayer card
3. Pray for the Lord to make the cards fruitful.
4. Pray over every card New Years Eve from 6:00 PM - 12:01 AM

1) You can make beautiful cards at VistaPrint.com for next to nothing. Make sure the front is something that stands out, or maybe a picture of the Church Building with all the members smiling outside. The back should be self addressed and stamped with full postage.

2) Grab your ministry teams together a few weeks before you canvas the neighborhood. Pray corporately or actual just schedule a prayer walk through the neighborhood. Once this is done, visit each house in your area. Make it an event, bring puppets, clowns, band. What ever it takes to make an impact and get noticed. Knock on every door, let the people who answer know that your church is planning a special prayer service for New Years. That you are going out into the neighborhood to see if any one has needs they would like to have prayers for. If they say they do, write down on the card their actual prayer need, verbatim, without judgment. There may be some requests that normally you would not want to pray over. The request may illuminate their more pressing need. During the service, you will just pray that God's Will is manifested in their life. If no one is home, leave the card with a note tealling the resident about the prayer request cards. Do not invite people to the service. In their hearts and mind, their assumption is that you are there to get new members. In YOUR heart, you should be there to PRAY and meet NEEDS. Not inviting them to visit your church will be a more powerful witness. Just make sure your heart is clean. Over time you will notice many may just show up over the next year.

 3) When the ministry teams get back, pray that the Lord of the Harvest plans the seed deep, sends someone to water the seeds, and prepares the harvest.

4) Our service would start at 8:00 PM and go until a few minutes after midnight. To get the most out of the service have light snacks, coffee, tea in the fellowship hall or church basement. Maybe have a family friendly movie going. A few weeks before New Years, prepare a sign up sheet. Make sure a leader or mature Christian is scheduled a s a leader. They will guide the prayer for their hour. Hopefully most people in your church will sign up. Let everyone know before or after their time that there will be fellowship before and after.

Some of you may be wondering why the First Cyberchurch changed the name of its blog. Well your humble cyber pope found out that there was another established blog with the name "Daily Office". So with much thought and prayer, this blog was renamed "One Church, One Gospel". I pray that name supports our mission of promoting a united church in deed. That deed to be reaching the lost for Christ.

If you have name ideas, let me know. Have a great day everyone and may God Bless you and keep you this fine winters day.

This is our first image for our first ChristChievement. It is our Praise Him, Praise Him Christchievement. It is copyrighted until we can post the CopyChrist License. So that means you can only use it or post it to your own website, once you tell 100 people to Praise God. So over the next week during normal conversation with strangers, you must say Praise God. This is just a stepping stone to boldness. I will put this image up on CafePress if you want to get a button or a sticker. Feel free to use this to create your own ChristChievements. The only limitation is it must be art of a Christian organization that affirms our statement of faith. Once you earn it post a comment letting the rest of us know. I will try to post two a month. If you have ideas let me know.

While you are trying to unlock this ChristChievement, keep a prayerful heart. Ask God to bless this silly step in faith and allwo fruit to grow. Be prepared to share what Christ has done in your life. Once you get through this simple first step, starting a conversation with strangers should become eaiser. If this is scaring the you know what out of you, then this Christchievement was designed with you in mind. Have fun and God Bless.

I found this blog today on Technorati. I have read 2 articles already and I am impressed by what I found. I plan to add this blog to my RSS reader. This article is about coaching a passion for evangelizing in your church. If you choose to exit my Blog, exit here to read this article.

One of the goals on preaching a sermon series on evangelism is to raise the temperature or passion for evangelism in the local church.

In preaching your series on evangelism, or studying evangelism, the goal should’t be just increasing a skill set, but also increasing passion within a congregation.

How do you coach passion?

About 2 years ago, a church planting coach asked me this question.Click here to finish article.

We have started a new tradition in my family. I do not know how long you have to do something for it to become a tradition. So far we have been doing it for 2 weeks. LOL. I believe it will continue for some while, and we have been having a good time with it. We call it missionary Monday. I went out and bought a world map. We placed that into the small office shared with my wife, 11 year old daughter and 4 year old Beagle. Then I set my DVR to tape Saturday night “Travel the Road” on TBN. We then watch the show Monday evening. While we watch it one of us writes every city and country the missionaries visist. After we watch the show each one of us says a prayer for the people we saw in that episode.

When my daughter gets home from school on Tuesday, she has to find the city/country on the map and place a little map pin there. Try it with your kids or even by yourself or some friends. We eat pop corn and other snacks while watching it. It is becoming a nice devotional/study during the week. It is a good family builder, and it teaches our kids significant lessons. One is that we need to reach out to the lost. They learn that our world and the challenges we face are different than a Christian in the Sudan.

Here is a link to Amazon, if you want to check out Season one.  Travel The Road, Season One

I just got from American Tract Society a bunch of the 10 commandment coin below. They are great for many purposes. One is to give them to children when they are out with their parents. You normally say something about how cute their outfit is. How cute they are, you can then ask the parent if you can give them a small coin that you have. Normally the parent will say yes. I would never offer a child a gift though, without the parent being there. One it is creepy, LOL. Two even if you do not get in trouble, if the child accepts the gift, it is conditioning them that it is OK to take things from strangers. If the parent lets you give them the coin you normally can then share your testimony with the adult while the child is enjoying the coin.

It is a good ice breaker to use with someone, if you plan to use the 10 commandments with your street evangelism. It is good to just have as a reminder of the life we should be aspiring to live as Christians. It is a good little gift to give someone struggling with sin, or with life in general.

So now that we know the whats, lets get to the whys. I just thought it would be fun to see how quickly I can give 25 of them away. So all you have to do to win one is be the first 25 people to send me an email at cyberpope@firstcyberchurch.org. The subject should be, "I want my coin", with your full address. I will then ship out a little card, with the coin in it. I do promise to pray for whomever receives the coin to be blessed that week. The cost is cheap, you must then tell one person that you got this 10 commandment coin by going to a website that teaches people to share God's love. The person you tell this to must not be a Christian. You do not need to say anything else. Once you do that, please share what happens. I would be holding the coin while I tell them. It should be done in a casual manner. So it does not seem planned. You will be surprised how many people may ask to see it. They may ask other questions that will give you an opportunity to share what God has done for you.

That is a simple way to witness. It is easy with practice and you will be surprised the power in that simple witness. It is not hitting them with the Bible, which may seem scary to them. It doesn't normally open you up for scrutiny as a legalistic fanatic, out to put a notch on your belt. It is not effective for all people (another post), but it is effective for many. Read acts, so how many time, the apostles, just shared what Jesus Christ did for them. You can them let them know, the He is faithful and to try letting Jesus do it for them. So send the email, get the coin, lets have fun.

I will put you on a list. It is not a list I will ever share. I will not send you letters asking for money. You will get a card from me next Christmas, because the list is my Christmas card list LOL.

Well, Well, Well the CyberPope is going to hook up his homeboys once again. We are going to pick one evangelism product each month. We will buy it, use it and then turn around and review it. We want to make sure if you are going to spend some mad, mad cheeange for products to help you step up your game we want to have your back. So we just ordered the "School of Biblical Evangelism" from Living Waters. Once we get the access to the course, the products in the mail we will take some time to go through the class and will give you detailed information on the course. So keep checking back. We have many more, big THANGS planned. Tell your friends, wake the kids, alert the Church.