Sunday, September 17, 2006

Open Door's Harvest Conference

Yesterday I taught my first formal workshop at Open Door Ministries' Harvest Conference. It was a single day long conference hosted by the local church that I am a part of here in Long Beach. It was a privilege to have been asked and I'm thankful to Pastor Dan for allowing me to share with others about my approach to the Great Commission and my paradigm of the Church.

The workshop was called "Relational Evangelism: Living Out The Great Commission As A Lifestyle". In a nutshell, I talked about how Jesus called us to a new WAY – to live a lifestyle of faith that expresses love for God, love for others, and to inspire others to do the same while living in community. As a Church, we have got to stop focussing on conversions as if that's our objective, and instead we need to begin a genuine and sincere process of relationship with people that leads to discipleship.

What does that look like?

I'm going to be starting what I call a "Lifestyle Group" (as opposed to a home group or a Bible study) where we will explore this. In the workshop, I introduced "5 Organic Principles to Expanding Your 'Oikos' " which I extracted from my experience knowing Neil Cole (and others) over the past four years. Neil is the Executive Director of Church Multiplication Associates, Founder of Awakening Chapels, and author of "Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens".

I thought i'd share with you the notes I handed out for my workshop. Of course, you miss out on the conversation and discussion that we had during the actual workshop, but maybe you'll find the outline helpful. If you like, have your own conversation and discussion about some of these things! Or you can email me if you'd like to know more about any of it. Anyway, here's a link where you can download it (it's a PDF file):

http://www.catalystlb.org/workshop_notes_relational_evangelism.pdf

3 comments:

Peterson Toscano said...

wow, sounds like a super workshop, and knowing your enthusiastic style, I bet it was well received.

A new WAY, a lifestyle of healthy relating with each other. Yeah, that sounds like the Jesus I know.

Aaron said...

Looks like an inspiring workshop -- thanks for sharing your notes, Eric. I'm hoping they'll be a starting point for some great discussions here.

Anonymous said...

hi eric,
i have been reading ur blog the past week and am so amazed as to how our experiences are very similar. i am also filipino, 33 years old, moved to the U.S. in 1995 and lived in south carolina since, born and raised catholic, and have been struggling to be gay and christian at the same time, both of which are very significant of who i am. i am inspired by ur writings and efforts to reach out to people like me who are searching for a deeper and more fulfilling life.