This post is probably the most straightforward one in this series.
If you are trying to reach people from other religions with the gospel, it’s a good idea to learn from people who already have extensive experience in the field. Why go ahead and make lots of mistakes, when you can learn from the mistakes and experience of others?
A number of mission agencies with extensive experience in work among other faith communities have resources specially designed to help British churches reach out to their neighbours. Here are a few examples:
Grace for Muslims is a website maintained by Steve Bell of Interserve which seeks to educate Christians about Islam and to encourage and equip them to reach out to them with the message of Christ. On the resources page, you will find the excellent Friendship First course, which is a six week course designed to help ordinary Christians to relate to Muslims as people. It is written for Christians who have little or no knowledge of the subject and can be run in church home groups or larger seminar settings.
Neighbours Worldwide is a programme from WEC International which seeks to help churches in the UK reach out to different ethnic groups in their area. Experienced mission partners work alongside existing churches to support them in their evangelism.
South Asia Concern offers a wide range of services to churches that want to reach out to their neighbours from the Indian Sub-Continent. These include audits to see how “Asian friendly” your church is and courses and workshops aimed at equipping Christians to understand and to reach out to their Asian neighbours.
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Posts In This Series
- Introduction: I believe that the skills and experience of cross-cultural missionaries are crucial to the future of the church in the UK: the start of a blog series….
- Go: When push comes to shove, there is one basic difference between long-term, cross-cultural missionaries and the average church member. …
- Study: How well do we understand the culture that surrounds us?…
- Contextualise: When Paul spoke to a Jewish audience, he started off with the story of the Jewish nation, when speaking to Greeks, he worked from inscriptions on statues and Greek poetry. …
- Serve: If you just preach the word but don’t do the deeds then you are not credible, if you just do the deeds without preaching the word then you are not audible….
- Don’t Look Down: Looking down on a class of people, and holding them in contempt for their reading habits, has far more to do with liberal, middle-class prejudice than it has to do with Christianity. …
- Speak: To a newcomer, a phrase such as “we will now enter into a time of worship” conveys far more background information about the person using it than it does about what is going to happen next in the service. …
- Religion: Learn from people who have been there and done that….
- Stories: Taking one of Jesus’ amazingly creative parables and turning it into an alliterated, three-point, logical sermon has to be the ultimate in literate processing. …
- Pray: It would be easy – very easy – for a Western rationalist to dismiss all of this. I’m a biologist, I know what causes diseases! …