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Extravagant Generosity - Sharing your faith
By Bishop John R. Schol

Growing up in a working class family, the most extravagant we ever got was adding an extra pickle to our hamburger. We shied away from extravagance.

We wore clothes from Sears, ate burgers from Gino's and later McDonalds, rode in a ‘56 Ford, then a ‘60 Rambler station wagon and later in a 1970 Volkswagon bus, all used of course, except for the 1970 Volkswagon bus, which was the first new car we owned.

Basic was good, straightforward without sugarcoating was honorable and simple living was a virtue.

However, there were three things my parents were extravagant with. They wouldn't say they were, but if you hung around them for more than 15 minutes you experienced it - love, accepting everybody and sharing their faith in Jesus Christ.

Love - It was pretty much unconditional with them. It didn't matter if you had a quirk or didn't think like them or had a lifestyle different from theirs. They loved everybody. They may not like what you did, but they loved you.

Accepting everybody - This pretty much goes with the loving part, except they really lived it. My parents lived in the same house for 50 years. The neighborhood changed multiple times - Roman Catholics, African Americans, Hispanics and Filipinos. It was a mini-United Nations.

When everyone else had moved, they stayed and everyone was welcome in their home. All the neighbors came to discuss, have a cold drink on the porch, borrow a tool or to break bread.

Sharing faith - My parents prayed their faith, sang their faith, told us about Christ and, most importantly, lived their faith.

I am not sure how many people they touched, but I know my parents had a significant impact on either bringing people to or deepening people's faith in Christ.

They didn't wear their faith on their sleeves, but they lived it in their hearts and when the opportunity presented itself, they welcomed the opportunity to share how God enriched their lives.

What would our churches look like, what would they be like if everyone loved, if everyone accepted everybody and if everybody shared their faith? Maybe the kingdom of God.

Fortunately we do have churches that embody all three attributes in the Baltimore-Washington Conference. They are not perfect churches, they have conflicts and they also have financial problems, as a matter of fact these three go right along with loving, accepting and sharing. But these churches do have a richness that is beyond measure.

Here are a couple of things you can do to help the three to blossom in you and your congregation:

• Change yourself. The greatest influence you can have on others is to change who you are. Loving people more, accepting more and sharing more will have an effect on others.

You might start with the Jesus prayer, "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner." Saying this five, 10 or 15 times, several times a day, opens you up to possibility. You begin to rely on God more, humble yourself more, and start to see others as in need of your forgiveness rather than your judgment.

• Encourage people to share their testimony. I encourage testimonies in worship (two to four minutes in length) a couple of Sundays a month. Invite someone to share how their life has been changed by God.
• Invite people who are different from your congregation to come to church with you. It will give others the opportunity to be more like Christ.
• Pray each morning that God will send somebody to you that needs a word of encouragement or hope. And of course share the encouragement or hope God has placed in you through Christ Jesus.

I want to offer you a guarantee. If you practice these four actions regularly, you will find heaven everyday.

Share the faith extravagantly!

Called to be ‘bearers of the word'
By Scott Kisker

The comments below were shared by Scott Kisker in a video played at January's Discipler Group meetings.

Evangelism simply means that we tell the news; and the news that we're telling is the good news about the Word of God that has come in flesh in Jesus Christ, who has died, has risen again and lives today for each of us.

That Word is the same word, which in the very beginning, God created. We as Christians are bearers of that Word.

If we are to take our evangelistic ministry seriously, we need to know that we are those who have been chosen to bear that Word. We have no other reason to be here.

And as such, our model for what it means to engage in this mission, this evangelistic mission to the entire world, to be bearers of that Good News, which is the Word of God, is to mimic what God has done most profoundly in Jesus Christ.

As we bear that Word, we must be invitational, because God, in Christ, has been invitational to each one of us.

As we bear that Word, we must be relational, because that Word is not simply some abstract word, it is the person of Jesus Christ who is alive today and is someone with whom we and everyone in the entire world can have a relationship. God has not chosen just to give us some abstract law, but a person, which can change our lives.

And if we want to engage in real evangelism, we must also be servants, because that is how God revealed his Word to each one of us and to the world.

Churches often forget that the goal of evangelism is not to draw people to us, to our community. There are actually two aspects of this evangelistic mission that the church always needs to be aware of. The one aspect is this whole "sent-ness," which is what it means to be the church, to be one, holy, apostolic and universal.

That word "apostolic" actually means sent. We can't just wait for people to come to us. We must go out as bearers of that Word in a public way that is also in some sense scandalous in the way that Jesus is a scandal.

But also, there is a drawing-in aspect to evangelism. But it's not drawing people to us. It's not drawing people to our programs, to who we are, to how open we are. Jesus said, "If I am lifted up, I will draw all people to me."

The church's drawing-in evangelistic task is simply to lift up Christ, because it is Christ who has the power to heal people in their lives, Christ who has the power to do what needs to be done, to have that word go forth into the chaos of people's lives and create space for new life.

If we are lifting Christ up, our churches will grow because they will then become places where people get healed, where people find new life. And if that word gets out, we won't be able to stop people from coming.

Now I know there's a lot of pressure out there for us to grow our churches. But as long as we're focused on ourselves, it simply becomes narcissism cloaked in piety, and it is not evangelism.

Until we focus on Christ and we focus on our neighbor, only then are we doing real evangelistic mission.

And it is not an option. There is no excuse, because that's exactly what Jesus has done. If we are to be Christians, we must do what God in Christ has done, which is to humble ourselves and go and reach out invitationally as servants, in relationship, and welcome people to Christ. ...

We need to get out and find out where people are gathering, what are the points of contact that we ourselves can have with the young people in the high school around the corner, with the firemen whose building is across the street? How do we make relationship with people who are outside of our communities so that they know that the Word of God, which we bear, is also interested in them?

And they can find out, not that we are so wonderful that we lock ourselves up in this beautiful building. But that we ourselves are so vulnerable that Christ has come into us and begun his work of healing within us and that can also happen for them.

Scott Kisker is a professor of evangelism at Wesley Theological Seminary.

All are now called to witness

As of Jan. 1, 2009, the vows for all professing members of The United Methodist Church have been changed to include the word "witness."

Baptismal vows also reflect this renewed emphasis on United Methodists bearing witness to Christ.

The changes were made by the 2008 General Conference, which revised Paragraphs 217 and 225 of the 2004 Book of Discipline and altered the Baptismal Covenant.

According to denominational leaders, Baptismal Covenant III is no longer necessary and should no longer be used in The United Methodist Church.

The new vows, in part, call on United Methodists "to faithfully participate in its ministries by their prayers, their presence, their gifts, their service, and their witness."

(More information on these changes is available at www.gbod.org/worship .)

This change, said the Rev. Taylor Burton Edwards of the Board of Discipleship, notes that the traditional vows of "prayers, presence, gifts and service" were primarily inwardly focused and institutional in character.

"They offered little insight or inspiration for disciples of Jesus Christ to engage in God's mission of transforming the world," he said. "Adding ‘and witness' to the list (‘prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness') may help our members, new and old, to recognize their responsibilities not only to "show up," but to "show forth" God's saving love in all that we do.

Jesus modeled wise and fruitful faith-sharing
By Joshua Martin Siegel

For better or for worse, religion is not a "growth industry."

But we live in an increasingly materialistic, self-centered culture, which often seeks to use religion for its own purposes.

How can those who wish to represent a moral, spiritual approach to life influence others in these circumstances?

Jesus provided many examples of how this can be done.

The primary one is teaching wisdom. People in Jesus' time, just as in ours, are looking for guidance on the meaning of the biblical commandments and teachings. They want to understand and learn to apply the teachings that could truly influence the way they feel about themselves and their role in the world.

Jesus gave those who asked wise advice that if they followed it, it "turned their lives around."

Jesus teaches us that in order for wise advice to be accepted it must be accompanied by genuine humility and an understanding of the essence of those you are talking with.

Being effective in your teaching also requires living those teachings in one's own life and having the capacity for other people to see those teachings manifest in you and the ways you treat them.

Jesus also had the gift of speaking simple and directly to people in terms they could identify with and the capacity to say what was needed regardless of the prevailing norms of the time.

His ways provide a pattern for contemporary Christianity to influence culture. They are effective guidelines for evangelism and the sharing of faith.

• Talk wisdom, not theology.
• Live what you teach.
• Understand who you are talking to.
• Remember what you are teaching is not about you and your needs for accomplishment or power.
• Speak authentically regardless of the norms of the surrounding culture.

In other words, to expand Christianity, emulate Jesus, the wise and humble rabbi, and you will help to make disciples, just as he did.