By Ladi Ayodeji
In the business of the kingdom,we can’t get tired of talking about soul winning because, it’s central to the divine plan of God for the redemption of mankind.
In Jn 21:3-13,we read the story of some of the disciples who went fishing, but didn’t catch any fishes, despite trying all night, until Jesus intervened and, obviously because of his discernment , said:’Cast Your net to the right side…’and when they did, they made a huge catch.
The wisdom of God is manifold, according to the Bible. God could say one thing,and it could mean other things as well .Remember, when Jesus first began to recruit his disciples,he sighted two brethren, Peter and Andrew,by the sea of Galilee, fishing,Matt 4:18-25
Jesus called them to follow him; saying,’I will make you fishers of me.Immediately, they followed him. If you read the entire scripture quoted above, you would see how from the fishing for the men, Jesus was able to appoint his 12 disciples, and launch his evangelical ministry.
From this ministry,we got the ministries of Peter, James,John, and the other disciples whose writings, constitute a substantial part of the gospel.
That said,I was inspired to write this article,by the instruction Jesus gave the disciples,in Jn 21:6, when they couldn’t make a catch:’Cast your net to the right side of the ship’.
Our strategies for evangelism like the sharing of tracks,door to door preaching, giving prospects welfare packages,free transportation to church,are no longer as effective as they used to be. People would come to church for a while and stop coming after some time.
I have reflected on this issue deeply and I thought,we should cast our net to the right side of the ship,in other words; we need to change strategies.We need the right soul winning strategies that could sway the present generation of unbelievers.We definitely need to change the position of our net to be able to catch new fishes(souls), for the kingdom of God.
Ministers need to devise new ways of promoting the gospel in the wake of the powerful influence of the social media on youth focus and attention. Young people today,if not everyone, continue to engage the social media platforms on all fronts. It’s the biggest influence on our consciousness in this century.We need to explore how to use it to propagate the gospel aggressively.l believe there are creative ways to sell the message of Christ on the world wide web.
Few years ago,a friend told me how he two Chinese guys.He preached the gospel to them but they said they didn’t know Jesus. They probably had heard that name but they didn’t think much of him. It then means that there are millions, perhaps, billions of people around the world today who haven’t heard about Jesus but not the way they ought to.
The focus of the church should be on soul winning, not just on growing the numbers, but getting people committed to Christ teaching them doctrine and his message of salvation. This business should not just be about church growth;we need first to get people to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and teach them how to grow in the faith before bringing them to church.Once we do that, church growth would happen naturally when they finally start coming to the services.
However,if we keep bringing unbelievers to church by giving them material incentives to attend church services or special programmes, they will continue to show up and disappear as they do now.
Real work of preaching and conversion of the sinner must be done outside the church through door to door evangelism.That way, intimacy would grow between the evangelist and the convert, and the purpose of salvation would be better understood and taken more seriously.
Of course, some will give their lives to Jesus Christ during altar call in church, but most of these folks often do not attend the next service. They merely respond emotionally to the Pastor’s powerful and exciting preaching on the spur of the moment. Such feelings are usually ephemeral. They don’t last. Even the Bible we give the newly converted, they never read unless someone visits them regularly to study the word and get them to form the habit of reading and studying the scriptures.
Real work of conversion must, therefore,be done outside the church, right there on the mission field,before people are brought to church.
Also, conversion is always the work of the Holy Spirit. So,we ought to step up our prayers for new converts so that, when we go out on the mission field, people would accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.
