Tuesday morning evangelistic smack-down, #16

We won! Or did we? But is hearing "Merry Christmas" from sales clerks really what we wanted for Christmas? And did anyone check out the price tag?

Here's more from that Christian Muslim Forum statement: "Those who use the fact of religious pluralism as an excuse to de-Christianize British society unthinkingly become recruiting agents for the extreme Right. They provoke antagonism towards Muslims and others by foisting on them an anti-Christian agenda they do not hold."

In other words, Christian conservatives, not the multiculturalists, are becoming the Scrooges in the story. Or maybe we're the old, grumpier Santa, but instead of bringing coal, we bring subpoenas. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) announced that it has 950 lawyers (a 19 percent increase from last year) standing by "to combat any improper attempts to censor the celebration of Christmas in schools and on public property." It's hard to feel jolly when the person saying "Merry Christmas" adds, "Want to make something of it, punk?" http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/january/5.24.html

Shocking “Having procured an apparatus on purpose, I ordered several persons to be electrified, who were ill of various disorders; some of whom found an immediate, some a gradual, cure. From this time I appoionted, first some hours in every week, and afterward an hour in every day, wherein any that desired to it might try the virtue of this surprising medicine. Two or three years after, our patients were so numerous that we were obliged to divide them. So part were electrified in Southwark, part at the Foundery, others near St. Paul’s, and the rest near the Seven-Dials. The same method we have taken ever since; and to this day, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, have received unspeakable good. (Journal of John Wesley, November 9, 1756)

Fire up the prayer meeting “Prayer was mentioned as the second most important methodology for reaching people for Christ in these evangelistic churches. But even that statistic may be understated. In every methodology – preaching, Sunday School, ministries, etc. – prayer was the underlying strength to the methodology. (Thom Rainer, Effective Evangelistic Churches, 79.)

The meaning of conversion “‘Conversion,’ from the Latin convertere, ‘to rotate,’ is not a leap, it is a turning. It leaves a person about where he was before, but now aimed in a different direction. Change depends on what happens next…the question still remains, ‘Is that person who has faced toward Jesus Christ now going to walk toward Him?” (George Sweazey, Effective Evangelism, 17.)