Does your parish have an evangelism committee?

[Herman of Texas]

My church (in Texas) has a Sisterhood, Brotherhood, Building Committee (for maintenance and improvements), we do stuff with the local food bank, we have an icon project committee (since there’s still plenty of space for icons on the walls and ceiling), and of course the Parish Council, but nothing in terms of brainstorming and organizing evangelical efforts. Unfortunately we have largely fallen for the “glory magnet” tactic of having beautiful services and ministering to people once they’ve come in (I call it the Jesus Flytrap tactic). We do have some individuals that are great at sharing their faith with people that they know, but my thought is that since we do pretty much everything else as a Church community, we should also share the Gospel as a community.

What do y’all think? Does your parish have something like this? How has it worked out?

 

[GoingByzantine]

I come from a very small church, so we don't have any committees at all. All the parish members are the committee more or less.

When it comes to evangelization I really think you hit the best method square in the cheek, and that's the "glory magnet" strategy that you describe. The aesthetics of Orthodoxy are powerful, and they help to attract protestants who are turned off by their iconoclastic new-age churches, and high liturgical non-Orthodox Christians who have seen their own liturgies get simplified and secularized over the years.

The bigger means of evangelizing in the public is through witnessing our faith in our daily life. Message boards, blogs and youtube videos are filled with stories of people who stumbled into Orthodoxy after seeing the ways that Orthodox people live. A reverent Orthodox person has a certain air about them that is very foreign, yet very attracting to other Christians.

Events like community garage sales, barbeques and ethnic festivals are also a good way of attracting people into the church, a good example can be seen in this clip (skip to 1:50 minutes on the clip) -

What I'm not a big fan of are the gimmicky ways that Evangelicals evangelize though, and I would not be a fan of using those methods in Orthodoxy.

 

[~Anastasia~]

We have a relatively recently formed committee but ...

Committees are not always the best way to get things done

Our committee is an "outreach" committee (not evangelization specifically) and there is debate over whether the outreach is to non-Christians or non-Orthodox or people generally in need or lapsed Orthodox or ethnic Orthodox not locally represented.

What we DO do is help people who come to us for help, extend the love of Christ as much as we can. And people wander in to such events as the garage sale, Greek Festival (wander might not be the word there - we get about 30-40k visitors), and times we sell dinner to business folks in the nearby downtown or packaged goodies near Christmas.

It's very much on my mind, but most people come to us having heard of Orthodoxy elsewhere, like I did. I'm very interested in how we can improve. But I'm also not interested in "gimmicky".

 

[ArmyMatt]

something like this would best be organized by the gifts of the parishioners. the best parishes I have seen use their people's gifts in unique ways.

 

[truefiction1]

We started such a committee last year, but have only had like one meeting and then nothing for many months. This is because there is always so much other necessary work to be done and limited, skilled and talented labor to do it. But we continue to work hard and long and hope to improve our local missionary work.

I'll share something that's come up between a couple of us (me and Gregory, another brother from my parish), and that is that we're tinkering with the idea (it was Greg's idea and he shared it with me while we were working together to paint the interior of our Church) of going to visit St. John the Compassionate's mission in Toronto, Canada for a couple of days to develop a more comprehensive and hopefully useful view of what it is that they are doing there, and how they are doing it. I have books about the mission that Greg gave me, which I'm reading to learn more, and I've been listening to their series of podcasts on Ancient Faith Radio, called "The Second Liturgy". Honestly, even though I'm personally involved in evangelizing, as administrator of our parish charitable outreach work (St. Nicholas' Benevolence Fund), I'm beginning to believe that unless parishes like ours find a way to become planted in our cities in ways that enable us to become an integral part of our cities in which we are trying to serve God, and especially serving the poor, homeless, sick, and needy in other ways, then we are missing the mark with regards to what it really means to serve Christ in the active (public/parish as opposed to monastic) life.

Maybe, God willing, we'll eventually succeed in improving our Christian ministry to include those beyond the walls of our parish and parish hall. It might be that we'll need to remember what Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon once said: "Being Orthodox, we have the good roots, but where is the fruit? We need to bear the fruit. How will anyone ever believe that we have the right roots if we never bear enough fruit?" (or something along those lines).

I could be mistaken, but I suspect that if we'll come to bear much fruit, it'll be on account of reflecting regularly on our Scriptures, especially Matthew 25:31-45 and James 1:27