Thursday 20 October 2016

Reclaiming Evangelism: Why Christians Need to Recover Their Passion for Christ

U.K. ministry leader explores evangelism's embarrassment, exclusivity, and entrepreneurial nature

It didn't take him long to get round to trying to convert me. We had agreed to meet for lunch to talk about social media strategy. After the briefest of conversations about our families and what our working day had involved so far, it began. He pulled out the leather bound bundle from his bag and placed it on the table. He started talking about a turning point, a life-changing experience, a new direction.

He opened up the leather case to reveal a gigantic iPad Pro. There was no stopping him after that. He demonstrated how much screen real estate he had so he could look at two documents side by side. He showed me the Apple pencil and how it integrated seamlessly with Evernote, and how the pro subscription was worth every penny. He demonstrated the detachable keyboard, and the battery. His enthusiasm was so infectious I began to regret my previous life decisions. Nothing I had ever owned compared to this amazing ubertablet. Had there been an Alpha course on how to get the thing for free I would have signed up there and then.

What I was witnessing was evangelism. It was Apple that first applied the term evangelist to the selling of technology, first in software and then tech in general. Technology marketing expert Guy Kawasaki writes of how he searched for job openings containing the keyword 'evangelist'. "Amazingly, there were 611 matches – and none were for churches," he says. "It seems that ‘evangelist’ is now a secular, mainstream job title. Indeed, the first eight matches were for evangelist jobs at Microsoft – go figure."

The term 'evangelism' pre-dates the Church. 'Evangel' means good news and someone that brought a message of good news was called an ...

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