An Asian Christian seeking a wholistic 3-dimensional Christian spirituality
This is my second teaching video. In this video, I reflect on four major themes drawn from the apostle Paul’s practice in Athens.
Hope you will be blessed. PDF download link is below the video.
Sharing Your Faith by Shiao Chong
To download an accompanying pdf discussion handouts suitable for a short workshop or a small group, click here: Sharing Your Faith.
Recently, I led a workshop at an evangelism conference. And in the workshop, I shared my list of fundamentals of personal evangelism. This is a list of principles that I practice in my conversations and engagements with non-Christians who are exploring the Christian faith. Hopefully, this list might be helpful to you too.
But, first of all, a few preliminary remarks before I jump to the list. Evangelism can be misconstrued and also poorly executed. It is often misunderstood as marketing, “selling the gospel” or recruiting new converts. For me, it is simply sharing one’s faith or beliefs, bearing witness to what you believe and/or to what God has done in your life. It also involves, if you have the privilege, to walk with someone in their spiritual journeys. In an older post, Bad Evangelism, I have talked about bad evangelism, and poor executions or reductionist methods of evangelism.
Secondly, although this list is about personal evangelism, I want to emphasize that evangelism is not simply an individualistic effort. I believe you ultimately need a community to witness and disciple people. Evangelism is, therefore, a communal effort. But this often gets lost in all the literature and talk about evangelism. It obviously involves a personal one on one relationship or engagement, but it is more than that. I try to hint at it with my second to last principle listed below. Continue reading “Fundamentals of Personal Evangelism”
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that the most segregated hour in America was Sunday morning worship. I am reminded again of that reality thanks to Martin Luther King Day in the USA this past Monday. Sadly, King’s observation is still probably true today. Churches in North America are still highly segregated according to ethnicity – not just black and white but also, Chinese, Koreans, Philipinos, Latinos, Caribbean, etc. Unlike in the past, however, churches today self-segregate along these ethnic lines. Why? There are a variety of reasons (racism probably being one) but one popular justification is the Homogenous Unit Principle or the HUP. Recently, I wrote a guest editorial denouncing the HUP. This was published in Christian Courier, Dec. 27, 2010 issue. Below is what I wrote:
In the news recently, neighbors of a Toronto street came out to drive away a group of Christians who were doing public evangelism on the street. Here’s the youtube video of what occurred:
Apparently, the church group had been regularly grouping in front of a particular house and reading their bible loudly for the past seven years. There’s the possibility that homophobia might be involved as it was a homosexual couple living in that house. But it is not clear if the church group is aware of that, as it seems to be their regular evangelism spot on that street even before the homosexual couple moved into the neighborhood. Regardless if it was homophobic motivated or not (it’s worse if it was), I think most of us will agree that this is an example of bad evangelism. Continue reading “Bad Evangelism”
3-D Christianity 