December 20, 2019 | Miami, Florida, United States | Libna Stevens/IAD
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Inter-American Division (IAD) plans to start the new year empowering its pastors to join forces in executing evangelistic programs aligned with the church’s Year of Discipleship and Mega Soul-Winning across the territory. Top church leaders will provide useful models of soul-winning for pastors during a special online program coined as the first Pastoral Evangelism Summit of the year on Jan. 14, 2020.
“Pastors always need new perspectives and motivation to use best practices to deepen success,” said Pastor Balvin Braham, assistant to the IAD president for evangelism. Braham explained that recent IAD studies showed that 85 percent of respondents believe that pastoral evangelistic campaigns in the territory lack proper pre-campaign preparations. “We want to affirm that which is working [in evangelism] so they can move confidently with those methods and amplify or present new perspectives that will be energizing and helpful.”
The online event promises to be educational, inspirational and motivational for all pastors who with the help of lay pre preachers, bible workers and active church members, have been working together growing the membership to more than 23,000 churches and congregations in the territory.
The program will feature presentations on effectiveness in evangelism campaigns, pastoral and laity campaigns, the role of prayer in the campaign, reclaiming former members, discipleship methods, as well as evangelistic budgeting and reporting, among others.
The event will highlight the role church ministries like children’s ministries, women’s ministries, youth ministries, education department, personal ministries and Sabbath school will play in propelling 2020 into a fruitful soul-winning and discipleship year, said Braham.
“We are interested in a strong collaboration in evangelism among the ministries of the church for each have two principal roles: consolidation of those who are within the ambits of those ministries and mobilizing, training, equipping and deploying them for soul-winning,” said Braham.
IAD leaders want all the local fields to organize their pastors to congregate in clusters at conference office or by districts to access the program and be on board with small group leaders and all church members to continue strong in the mission of sharing the gospel in 2020, explained Braham.
Pastors will be motivated to continue evangelistic drives of reaching new believers for Inter-America’s territory-wide baptismal ceremonies that will take place on Sabbath, Apr. 4, 2020.
“The year 2020 will be a very great and rewarding year,” said Braham. “It is like the year of jubilee and we desire to have all pastors on board as together we ‘Reap God’s Harvest,” Braham said.
Inter-America’s evangelism year has been divided into the following seasons:
To view Inter-America’s online pastoral evangelism summit on Jan. 14, 2020, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Miami Time, visit us at webcast.interamerica.org