Sammy Gilbreath’s got a challenge for you.
Yes, you — personally.
You’re a believer, right?
Then it’s vital that you’re sharing your faith, you and your friend and your neighbor and your brother.
Why? Because it’s a command from Christ Himself.
And because more than 2 million unchurched people in Alabama need to hear.
It’s an important undertaking, so important that the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM) has adopted the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) evangelistic strategy — God’s Plan for Sharing (GPS) — for Alabama’s statewide focus for the next 10 years, from 2010 to 2020.
Plan now for Easter
“This is the first time we have ever had a 10-year emphasis; usually our emphases have only been one or two years long,” said Gilbreath, director of the SBOM evangelism office. “It really is the most concentrated effort to get the gospel to Alabama that I’ve ever seen. It is a concentrated, very simple strategy of putting the gospel in everyone’s hand.”
The strategy will be emphasized by a different effort every two years, starting with the first effort in 2010 — Across Alabama.
Across Alabama will culminate on April 4, 2010 — Easter Sunday — but the preparation is starting now.
Gilbreath has put 2,500 miles on his car in the last few weeks traveling around the state to train teams for the four-pronged evangelism effort.
“This is just exploding in the state, and it’s so simple every church can do it, from a small bivocational church to a megachurch,” he said.
And it’s relatively inexpensive, he noted. The SBOM provides the books and materials as well as training for any church that requests it from his office.
“We can also customize the material for a particular area,” Gilbreath said. “For example, Birmingham Baptist Association is calling their effort Across Metro Birmingham.”
Across Alabama will consist of:
Prayer walking
March 20, 2010
If every church gets involved, then Alabama Baptists should be able to prayer walk or prayer drive all of the state that day, Gilbreath said. To prepare, churches can:
• Go ahead and begin promoting the GPS strategy and Across Alabama to their congregations, using videos, PowerPoint presentations and other resources provided by the SBOM at alsbom.org/AcrossAlabama.
• Contact their association to see when training will be held in their area, or contact the SBOM to set up training.
• Enlist a church member who already prays consistently to serve as prayer coordinator for this effort.
• Create routes in their area for prayer walking or prayer driving. The mapping center in the SBOM evangelism office is available to churches at no charge, should they be interested in making use of that resource. Call 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 245, for more information.
• Enlist prayer walkers, organize them into teams and prepare them for the event using resources provided at the Web site.
And on March 20, prayer walk.
Gospel distribution
March 27, 2010
A week after your church saturates the area with prayer, it’s time to go back in and make contact with the people in your community.
• Enlist a coordinator for a gospel distribution effort, and follow the same routes you used for the prayer-walking effort.
• Assess whether this date works well for your church. If it falls during spring break, then it may be better for your church to select a different date. The most important consideration is that the gospel distribution come after the prayer walking.
• Develop an attractive-looking invitation to your church’s Easter service to pass out on distribution day.
• Prepare plastic bags to hang on doors. These bags, along with the Find It Here gospel fliers, are available from the SBOM. Call 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 245, for more information. You also will want to include your Easter invitation in these bags.
• Enlist two-person teams and assign them to specific areas. Offer witness training for them beforehand. Training is available from the SBOM.
• On March 27 (or whatever day your church selects), deliver the bags in the areas you previously prayer walked.
Harvest Sunday
April 4, 2010 (Easter)
Easter can be a great time to draw the net in your church, Gilbreath said, provided that the church is prepared to be intentionally evangelistic that day.
To get ready for your guests:
• Prepare your congregation to make guests feel welcome. Make sure there are an adequate number of guest parking spaces, and post greeters at those parking spaces. Post greeters inside, too, and remind your members to be intentional about making sure each person receives friendly treatment inside the church.
Follow-up
April 4, 2010–forward
The six-week window following a nonchurched person’s first visit to a church is a critical time. Churches can prepare to seize that moment of opportunity with these five steps:
• Visit the person.
• While you are there, pray for him or her and answer his or her questions.
• Enroll him or her in a Bible study.
• Minister to him or her according to the needs you can identify.
• Invite him or her to your small group or Sunday School class.
A variety of resources for follow-up are available at the Across Alabama Web site.
“Alabama Baptists have always been effective leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in evangelism and missions,” said Rick Lance, SBOM executive director. “The challenge today is bigger than ever before. Our goal must always be to increase the population of heaven and to decrease the population of hell.”
What’s next?
After Across Alabama, what’s next in the GPS strategy?
An emphasis in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020, with the goal that everyone in Alabama — and everyone in North America, with each state doing its own emphasis — has heard the gospel by 2020.
“It’s a mammoth attempt to really saturate North America with the gospel,” Gilbreath said. “It’s a seeding emphasis — to sow down the gospel in North America.”
Each effort will use a different style of evangelism in order to “reach different cultures and different segments and use different methodologies,” he explained.
For instance, one year may be a service project used for evangelism.
Gilbreath and three other evangelism leaders from across the nation will continue to meet over the next 10 years and write the emphases for GPS.
The four were first enlisted by NAMB to write the GPS material several years ago when then-SBC President Frank Page charged Southern Baptists with adopting a conventionwide strategy to reach the lost.
Each evangelism leader wrote one of GPS’s four thrusts — praying, engaging, sowing and harvesting. Gilbreath’s assignment was the “engaging” portion.
For more information on Across Alabama, visit alsbom.org/AcrossAlabama. To speak with someone in the SBOM evangelism office, call 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 245.
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