Soul Winning
“The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.” Proverbs 11:30
We have an electronic library with more than 50 practical Evangelism and Outreach Programs that your church can choose from. Please speak to your DiscipleSoft account manager with information on how to access the library.
We believe that every church should have at its disposal, a variety of evangelism and outreach programs that suit their particular environment. Different strokes for different folks. People we are trying to reach with the word come from a variety of backgrounds. God is not “a cookie-cutter or a one size fits all God” who wants everyone’s spiritual experience to be the same. Rather, God treats each one of us as the unique individuals who we were created to be. Our unique personhood is at the very heart of evangelism. By having a variety of programs your church will expand the ways through which God can transform people’s lives.
This deliberate planning process will help your church to be creative and innovative in spreading God’ word. We have created this Evangelism and Outreach Library to help your church with practical ideas. We have decided to make a broad categorization of the programs into Evangelism Programs versus Outreach Programs. Below we explore the fundamental difference between these two concepts.
EVANGELISM is primarily the sharing verbally, as well as sharing in print, the Word of Life (the Gospel of Christ). Put in other terms, evangelism provides a communicated message—the Gospel of Christ—that includes a warning about sin and the consequences of sin, an explanation of the Gospel of Christ (the ONLY solution God has provided for sin), and a call to true repentance. So all programs whose primary objective is communicating the Gospel will be classified as evangelistic.
On the other hand, Outreach involves the acts of Christian service, charity and social outreach to your community. Sometimes not always, as part of serving the community, the people will be able to talk about their personal relationship with Christ. Outreach implies action more than message. Perhaps it is best defined as a business term as an act of reaching out, bringing an organization’s services or products out into the community.” When a church engages in outreach, it is reaching out to the community in order to meet needs or to let people know of its existence.
Through Outreach, unbelievers are given a glimpse of the love of Christ through believers. Believers take their love for the lost into the community and allow them to see changed hearts in action. There is usually nothing offensive about outreach, and it is often regarded as noble, even by those who are opposed to Christ.
From the account above, there is clearly a significant difference between outreach and evangelism. They are both noble actions and bring honour to God. It is important to realize, and this should be clear through the descriptions, that they are not synonymous. The greatest difference is that evangelism is primarily a message while outreach is primarily an action.
We should note that there may be an important link between outreach and evangelism. Often at times we reach out to people to draw them into a place where we can evangelize to them. We may provide children with an opportunity to have fun so that we can invite their parents to come to our church where we will take the opportunity to share the Good News with them. It is the hope of any believer that his actions will cause others to realize he is somehow different and convict that person so he can ask what makes the believer different.