Events Evangelism
Another model for evangelism I came across the other day was called “Events Evangelism”. This approach seeks to engage those outside the church through the organising of events to which they are invited.
I’ve seen a lot of this approach (I’ve even done it myself) and it can work but it suffers from a lot of problems.
It’s a good idea because:
- People will feel more comfortable coming to something that is not going to be churchy.
- Church folk don’t feel embarrassed inviting people to things that are not churchy (I always find this a little sad really but I often feel the same myself).
- It enables people who don’t come to church to see church people doing normal and fun things and so removes barriers.
- If it is a big event then it can really make an impact on people.
It’s a bad idea because:
- Often it is only the church people who turn up anyway
- It can be very embarrassing when hardly anyone comes (once had this with a church BBQ we tried on a bit of waste ground near a new housing estate – even the church people stayed away (it still makes me shudder even now). Needless to say 10 years later the church is still struggling.
- There are some who will only come for the event and don’t want to know about the Christian side of things.
- It’s hard to know how to get the Christian message into the event – music is a great way of doing this though.
Will it work on the Internet?
Not really – at least not yet. It’s really hard to plan an ‘event’ on the Internet because people use the Internet at times that suit them. Sometimes its possible but it doesn’t fit too well with the general nature of the Internet.
It’s also hard because one of the things that makes an event go well is the food. This is pretty impossible to arrange on the Internet.
Despite the best/worst efforts of some it isn’t really possible to get people doing things at the same time on the Internet e.g. group singing, etc. I’ve seen some creative attempts but in my experience it doesn’t work so well.
I think perhaps there may be ways of getting this to work on the Internet but only in association with a ‘real’ event. I’ve seen some good blogs produced for events and perhaps live streaming some things is possible but ultimately there will always be the problem that people connect to the Internet alone (or at least generally they do).
