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NOBTS mini-mission trip yields neighborhood harvest


NEW ORLEANS (BP)–What do a man selling shrimp on the roadside, a woman starting her shift at work and a man cleaning out his car have in common?

They were among 106 people who prayed to receive Christ the afternoon of April 17 during a two-hour saturation evangelism project by more than 100 students and professors at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

The mini-mission trip took place in the Gentilly Woods subdivision on the eastern side of the campus and was the culminating event of the seminary’s Tharp lecture series, April 15-17.

Given annually in the spring to present a lay leader’s perspective of ministry, this year’s Tharp lecture series involved training by Bill Darnell and a lay leadership team from People Sharing Jesus Ministries, Germantown, Tenn. — and an immediate opportunity to apply the training in the seminary’s own backyard.

Darnell, as a pastor in Texas and Tennessee, church planter in Tennessee, Massachusetts and Oregon and participant in revival mission trips to South and Central America and Europe, discovered the potential for expanding the evangelistic outreach of the church through training laypeople to share their faith.

People Sharing Jesus Ministries, founded by Darnell 15 years ago, brings in lay teams to train church members to share their faith in Jesus Christ simply as part of their lifestyles, expanding the church’s evangelistic outreach far beyond what a pastor or church staff alone can accomplish.

Darnell began leading his sessions full time last year in order to fill the growing requests for the weekend-oriented training.

Part of the training includes testimonies from lay leaders who assist Darnell.

“I wouldn’t want to live one week or one day without sharing my faith because I’m doing what God told me to do,” attorney Lundy Daniels said in chapel April 15, explaining how a witnessing lifestyle has changed his life. “It’s an opportunity to make an eternal difference in somebody’s life.”

Doug Nash, a jeweler, expressed the desire many laypeople have to be a part of the important work of winning people to Christ as he gave his testimony April 16.

“The pressure is on you,” he said. “Are you going to train your people?

“We let them hand out little bulletins, put them in the nursery or on committees. … No wonder laypeople in the church don’t get excited,” he said.

Nash added he has led more people to Christ in the past two years by using the simple lifestyle method than in 20 years of witnessing using complex methods.

“We have been having some phenomenal results,” Darnell said. During some of the witness weekends so far this year, 147 professions of faith occurred in Hesperia, Calif.; 117 in Tupelo, Miss.; and 150 in Houston. Most recently, on the weekend before coming to the seminary, in Port Arthur, Texas, 35 people led 128 people to Christ in two hours.

“Revival ignited in that church,” Darnell said of the witnessing training weekend at Trinity Baptist in Port Arthur, the church where he grew up in and where his mother still attends.

Along with the outreach campaigns, Darnell, who focused on follow-up evangelism in his doctoral studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, emphasizes discipleship plans for new believers as a critical part of the training events. People Sharing Jesus Ministries also provides materials to help churches develop and implement an ongoing strategy for evangelism beyond the initial training and intensive witnessing weekend.

“We can make evangelism and witnessing sound so complicated,” one NOBTS student said after seeing the results of the two-hour mini-mission trip in the seminary’s neighborhood, “but it’s just as easy to share Jesus as it is to receive him.”
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  • Linda Joyce Zygiel