OUTREACH INTO THE COMMUNITY


The Goldsmith Family - Calgary Stampede Week
Church hosted a free pancake breakfast for our neighbors

Prior to our moving into our church facilities, we hosted a pancake breakfast on the church property to get to know our church neighbors.  We had the first church building in the The Properties, which consisted of an area of four square miles.  Once we were in our church building we began holding a summer Vacation Bible School.  The ladies in the church started a Ladies Time Out, the first of its kind in that area.   Ladies Time Out offered a variety of crafts and classes of interest for all ladies in the area. Another ministry which was deeply appreciated was that of  kindergarten. Then a couple of years after occupying our new building, we began a training program, teaching folks how to share their faith with their neighbors.

I mentioned in a previous post about attending  the Evangelism Explosion training session at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1974. Leaving Lethbridge in 1975 and going to Community Baptist Bible Church, I never implemented the EE ministry.  Soon after Allen Powles came on staff at Rockyview, Allen, Suzanne. Leona and I went to Toronto for the EE training, led by Berkley Reynolds, the Canadian director for EE.  That was a refresher for me and the first time for the others.

We launched the EE ministry at Rockyview in 1981 with a Thursday morning and Thursday evening training session for a period of 15 weeks.  We held two sessions each year, spring and fall.  Our second season we discontinued the morning training session, but were encouraged to have four or five teams of three in the evening. 

Each Thursday we began with a one hour class session.  We would then break up into our teams and go call on assigned homes.  Since we had many newcomers and visitors to our Sunday services, we had no shortage of potential homes for a visit.  Many of my years in ministry, I saw to it that we had visitor cards in the pew racks.  In some of the churches where I served, we also had visitor packets, which included the visitor card, that we handed to newcomers.  Most visitors were good at filling out the cards and this became our source for prospective home visits.  Our teams would go unannounced, no appointments made and call on those who had visited the church.  

Each team of three consisted of a trainer and two trainees, or learners.  It was on-the-job training. Once we were welcomed into a home, our initial conversation focused on learning something about where they had come from, their family and what led them to attend Rockyview Alliance Church.  This was a part of the visit where all three members of the team would be involved in the conversation.  The leader of the team would then seek to direct the conversation to spiritual matters and any previous church connection, etc. If we sensed that they were non-believers, we would tactfully share the gospel with them. The trainer would do all of that in the first two or three visits.  Bit by bit the trainees would participate in the gospel presentation until the last few weeks trainees would do the entire gospel presentation.  It was a joy to see many people pray to receive Christ as a result of these visits made by our EE teams, also very encouraging to see the trainees share the gospel.

In the next two or three posts, I'll endeavor to share some stories about decisions made for Christ.

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