Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Evangelistic Preaching - again

Here's another quote from Roger Carswell

"Thirty years or so ago churches did away with the Sunday evening gospel service.  In the last five to ten years, we have been doing away with the evening service.  I fear we are losing gospel preaching altogether.  A fine personal worker said to me recently that if he wanted to take people to hear the gospel in a church, though there is fine Bible teaching all over town, he would have to take them to a Brethren Gospel Hall, as it is the only place where the gospel is preached.  I would love to see a return to gospel preaching*, gospel services - whether on Sunday evening, morning, afternoon or during the week!  Then we may again discover evangelists in our churches."

* Me too, Roger.  Me too.


3 comments:

-miriam said...

hi! :) thanks for your blog, I like it a lot! Just thought I'd share that my Dad is the pastor of a small baptist church on the south coast of Devon where he has been regularly having a Sunday evening "Gospel service" for several years now.

I think it's hard sometimes when you don't see anyone coming to the Lord through it and he's been there for nearly 9 years, but slowly the church is growing, and there are some encouragements and unbelievers coming in. And I guess we can't underestimate the importance of Gospel services for those of us who are already Christians too!

Thanks again :)

Gary Benfold said...

Thanks for the comment, Miriam. Power to his elbow - and his vocal chords.

Pete said...

I have my doubts about this. I grew up in a church where there was a "gospel service" every Sunday evening. It was part of their culture and no doubt they were proud of it. But it was just preaching to the converted. Surely the main function of our services is to offer worship to God and for the church to be taught the faith? Rather than expecting unbelievers to come into church, we should be taking the gospel out into the world - that seems to be the Biblical model.