Overcoming Fear

Hi everybody, this is Ronã.

I’m very excited to meet all of you next year. Yeah! That’s right, we are going to America in February! That’s awesome!

Until then, I want to talk about one challenge I’m overcoming during this time—The fear of evangelism.

Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that I am ashamed of Christ. It’s not that at all. I love to talk about Jesus with my friends. It’s about the fear of people’s response. I’ve shared the gospel with some people, but they didn’t receive it, or they ignored me, or they denied what I said. It really affected my confidence, and I started thinking that I’m not good at this (evangelism). That’s not my gift.

Although, as you know, evangelism isn’t an option. We all have the call to evangelize. Jesus’ last words on earth were a command to evangelize and make disciples. For Him to spend His last minutes with us telling us to evangelize shows its importance to the church.

So, I had to find a way to overcome this fear. I’ve overcome other fears before. When I was learning English, I was afraid that I would make mistakes when I spoke to someone. However, I knew that if I didn’t try, I would never be able to speak. The same happened when I started to teach. My hands would shake. I was afraid that my students wouldn’t like me or I wouldn’t do a good job. But I knew that if didn’t get into the classroom, I would never be able to improve. The same goes for evangelism. If I don’t practice it, I will never be able to see its fruit.

So I started praying that the Lord would give me opportunities, boldness, and the capacity to evangelize. I started seeing His answer when I took the last quarter of VI. One of the courses available was Evangelism and Discipleship. I knew that’s the one I needed the most, so I chose it and it was a blessing.

If I could summarize what I learned in one sentence, it would be this sentence:

“Do what you love with people who don’t know Christ”.

We all have things we love to do, and our hobbies can be excellent tools for the gospel. In my case, I love to draw and play sports (even though I’m not good at them). So I started to offer some digital drawing lessons to some people at CDR, and also playing Flag Football with others in a field next to our house. The result is that now I’m connected to around 6 new people so far. People that I can offer my friendship, knowledge and help.

Amanda's Drawing Character

 

Flag Football on Saturday.

Every Saturday more people come to the flag football, and they bring their friends. Our plan is to invite them to an Alpha group in December. Pray for us.

A few points I’d like to highlight:

l  Sometimes we spend all our time doing church things (that’s not bad), but we end up just being around Christians all the time. It becomes hard to connect with others. The worship team currently has 4 piano players, so I asked for a break. This has allowed me to have more time to focus on these “outside” projects.

l  Community evangelism. I haven’t been doing these projects by myself. Amazing people have helped me so much, and I’m really glad God sent them. So if you want to evangelize, consider doing it with your friends. That’s encouraging.

l  The VI course really gave me a new excitement for evangelism, and if you feel the same, I would recommend you take it or read the books contained in it. They are: Re-imaging evangelism by Rick Richardson and 3D gospel by Jason Georges.

To finish I want to share an amazing week I had with two missionaries in a close city. Dean and Larry have been doing a teaching training with the 1^st Baptist Church of Anapu for two years. They’re blessing that church very much. I’m glad I was able to be part of that. Guess what was Larry’s lesson in this module—Evangelism!

Interpreting Dean. He taught about Christian Doctrines.     

People say you understand better when the interpreter acts like the foreigner.

Interpreting Larry. He reminded me that God is the one who

draws people. So don’t feel discouraged or that you fail when

sharing the gospel. 

 

 As always, we want to thank you for your constant support of our work here in Brazil!

Love, Ronã and Allison

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