On May 4, 2026, our associate minister, Kim Koonts, and I attended
an informal gathering of leaders and pastors from the Cooperative Baptist
Fellowship of North Carolina. Our sole purpose was to discuss how Cooperative
Baptists practice evangelism. We want to make the practice of sharing our faith
a bigger emphasis in the CBF. At Hillside church, we want evangelistic efforts
to define us as a people.
After the resurrection,
Jesus met with his disciples. He told them, “You will receive power when the Holy
Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all
Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). What did they
witness? They stood with Jesus after that had seen him die with their own eyes.
They were witnesses of the resurrection.
What have we witnessed? Having received forgiveness and
having been filled with the Holy Spirit, we have seen that the testimony handed
down to us by those original disciples is true. Jesus is the Savior. He indeed
did die for our sins. He was raised from the dead. All who turn to him in
faith, confess their sins, receive forgiveness, and entrust their lives to him
will be saved. That’s our testimony. Like the original followers of Jesus, we
are disciples and we are witnesses God has sent to testify.
What’s the point of bearing witness? After being raised from
the dead, the resurrected Jesus met with his disciples and told them, “Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). We tell our faith
stories as a step in our work of sharing Christ with the world. We want to help
go from being lost, cut off from God in sin, to being saved. We want to help
our neighbors the people we meet become disciples of Jesus.
How do you and I, the people of the Hillside Church
congregation, answer this call from our Lord? How do we practice evangelism and
disciple-making in a way that’s faithful to the words of Jesus and true to our church’s
culture and personality? We’re going to spend much of the rest of 2026,
attending to these questions.
We’ve already become members of the National Association
of Evangelicals. I encourage you to read up on their organization (https://www.nae.org/). This has nothing to do with
politics and everything to do with sharing Jesus with the world. I also ask
that you pray. Ask God to help the Hillside elders lead our church to be more
energetic in our efforts to share Jesus with lost, unchurched people. Ask God
to show how to best take up this work. Ask God to help you personally grow in
your own walk with Christ.
Ultimately, I believe that the closer we get to God in our
relationship with God in Christ, the more natural it will be to tell others about
him. I have no trouble talking to people about my wife or my kids. They’re
always on my mind. It can be this way with Jesus. We grow closer and closer to
him, and he becomes the center of our thought. Our identity in him is such that
our lives wouldn’t make sense apart from who we are in Christ.
How do we impart this understanding to the people of
Hillside? How do we guide the people of Hillside to live lives centered on
Jesus? Working to know Christ and share Christ is what Hillside will strive to
do as a church. I encourage you to seek to understand your role in this.
