Tuscaloosa Baptist Association has taken to heart the call to “be witnesses unto me” (Acts 1:8) and is teaching people exactly how to reach their “Jerusalem” for Jesus Christ.
Through its new Neighborhood Missions Ministry, the association is training and encouraging Christians to reach out to the unbelievers living right around them.
“We live behind closed garage doors, fences and gated communities, and we don’t know our neighbors as we should,” said Jerry Wilkins, director of missions for Tuscaloosa Association. “Our prayer was that God would call 100 people who would agree to be missionaries in their own neighborhoods and that we could train them to influence their communities for Christ.”
That prayer was answered abundantly in January, when 169 members of 30 churches (more than a third of the association’s churches) participated in a two-hour training event led by the Neighborhood Missions Ministry committee, which is made up of pastors and laymen. The training focused on five essential elements for effective neighborhood evangelism: get to know your neighbors, love your neighbors, pray for your neighbors, serve your neighbors and witness to your neighbors.
“The ultimate goal is to share Jesus Christ,” said Tim Fields, pastor of Big Sandy Baptist Church, Tuscaloosa, and a member of the committee. “But we’re going to start by knowing our neighbors, loving them, serving them and praying for them.”
One means for developing relationships with neighbors is described in Jeremiah 29:5: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.” During the training session, individuals were encouraged to take the next step in the sequence by helping a neighbor with yard work or household tasks, for example.
Closely intertwined with establishing relationships are two other elements: serving people and praying specifically for their needs.
The reason for actively working on relationships is clear: “Unbelievers in today’s world no longer buy into a gospel they hear; they buy into a gospel they see,” said Scott Reynolds, pastor of North River Church, Tuscaloosa, and a committee member. “They need to see the gospel lived out in front of them.”
That requires perseverance because very few conversions result from only one contact, Reynolds added.
The process of bringing neighbors to Christ may involve numerous occasions of “planting” and “watering,” while waiting for the harvest to which 1 Corinthians 3:6–7 refers, he said.
Reynolds encouraged neighborhood missionaries to persevere and realize that each contact with an unbelieving neighbor may bring that person one step closer to accepting Christ as Savior. “There is only one true soulwinner, and that is the Holy Spirit,” he said. “Our job is to be faithful; His job is to harvest.”
With the original goal of training 100 neighborhood missionaries already surpassed, Wilkins said the committee seeks to train another 331 in the next year, bringing the total to 500. By 2015, it would like to see 1,000 missionaries working in their neighborhoods.
A DVD of the recent training will be available for pastors to use in instructing their church members who feel called to be neighborhood missionaries.
For more information, visit www.neighborhoodmissions.org.
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