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Media Ministry and Evangelism

Media, missional lifestyle - by - March 31, 2008 - 19:37 Etc/GMT+5 - 2 Comments

Effectively sharing the Gospel

I was listening to some teachings recently about being effective in evangelism and the need for todays church to renew their vision for evangelism when I started to think about the connection between evangelism and the media ministry.

One of the primary reasons we have a ministry based on using media is simple to be more effective in how we share the gospel. That can be as simple as sound reinforcement so that the masses can hear the word of God preached on Sunday morning, projecting sermon notes on the screen so that those who are more visual learners register the main points of the sermon clearer or even as simplistic as with out light it is extremely hard to read the scriptures. On the other hand, the desire to share the Gospel and spread the word of God runs hand in hand with our push for new technology implementation, more types of media, in the reach of more people. This includes webcasting in multiple formats, both on demand and live streams, print media, CDs, DVDs, radio broadcast and any other media we can find a way to use to spread the Word. This reaching out to people using their preferred form of media is one type of contextualizing the gospel (a physical contextualization) – that is putting the gospel message into a physical format (context) that works better for today’s culture.

Contextualization is often seen as a bad thing, especially as some people feel it waters down the gospel (more speaking of cultural context of scripture than the physical medium). I heard Mark Dever (Capital Hill Baptist Church) make a statement recently on contextualization of scripture that should apply to our media ministry as to any other ministry. Paraphrased here, he states any contextualization of the gospel must make the offense of the gospel clearer, not obscure the offensiveness of the gospel. The gospel needs to be provocative.

I am still chewing on this and what it all means to our ministry, so expect more thoughts on this in upcoming weeks.

» 2 Comments

  1. Brandon says:

    Jeff,

    I just stumbled upon your blog. Looks great! On the subject of contextualization, I would recommend a series of blog posts on Acts 17 and contextualization by Phil Johnson. It’s a good example of how Paul used ‘contextualization’ to sharpen the gospel message. His website is teampyro.blogspot.com. Phil is the executive editor for John MacArthur’s book ministry, as well as the executive director of Grace to You, the radio and television ministry of MacArthur.

  2. Brandon says:

    Jeff,

    I just stumbled upon your blog. It looks great. I just wanted to recommend a blog post series on Acts 17 and contextualization by Phil Johnson, who is John MacArthur’s editor and an executive producer of Grace to You, MacArthur’s radio and television ministry. His blog is at teampyro.blogspot.com. Phil also maintains the Spurgeon Archive on the internet and is a pastor on staff at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA.

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