Have you ever noticed that sometimes it can be easier to share the gospel with a stranger than to share it with a member of your family who knows you well?
Sharing Jesus with your family members is one of the most important things you can do yet it often comes with more fear and greater worries.
- What if they reject the message?
- How can you respectfully tell your parents or grandparents that their long-held beliefs and traditions are false?
- What will you do if they bring up the sins of your past?
- How will you handle it if they distance themselves from you as a result?
When sharing the gospel with a stranger these questions don’t pose a potential problem. You may never know exactly how they respond to the gospel in the long run because you don’t have a close relationship with them. However, these are questions that have greater significance when it comes to a close family member. Their response or rejection of the gospel can have direct and lasting positive or negative effects on your life.
I find sharing the gospel with family can be very stressful and difficult. On the other hand as a pastor I often see that family members play a huge role in bringing someone to Christ. Many new people who come to church, come because of family! In our context many if not most people hear the gospel for the first time through family members.
This led me to the conclusion that if the members of our churches can learn to successfully share the gospel in with family, it is much more likely that they will be able to successfully share the gospel outside of the family. This is exactly why we recently decided to hold a special evangelism conference called “Mission in the Family.”
Watch the video above to hear a little more about the “Mission in the Family” conference and about our recent women’s conference.
Watch the video below to hear from Oles, one of our conference participants.
6 pastors from 4 different churches help make this conference possible.
Pastor Nickolay spoke on the barrier to sharing the gospel with family.
About 120 participates attended from churches all over Ukraine.
We had break-out seminars on sharing the gospel with children and how to work with someone who seems closed to the gospel.
I interviewed each pastor on the topic of sharing the gospel with family. You can watch this interview in Russian here.
Question and answer time is always one of them most interesting parts of the conference.
I spoke on how to share the gospel in the context of marriage.
You can find the live stream of all our sessions here http://blagovestie.today/live_mission
