My recent flurry of posts about conversational evangelism got me thinking. I tag them as evangelism and outreach, and a thought crossed my mind as to whether using two tags was a redundant exercise. Why not just choose one and stick with it?
And then I thought: Is evangelism the only way we understand outreach? Perhaps that's the problem. If they are synonyms then they are the same thing. But if they are not, then evangelism in one aspect of outreach and that means there is more to outreach that we may imagine.
Perhaps we have defined evangelism too narrowly, reduced it only to "sharing the gospel". Outreach might help us broaden our concept once more. It allows us to integrate sharing our faith with serving our community and building relationships. The importance of sharing truth is not lost, it just becomes a significant part of something much bigger and, dare I say, something in which we can be involved more fully and more widely involved across our community of faith of diverse gifts and personalities.
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