Bridging the December to January Gospel Gap

The next month is the biggest evangelistic opportunity of the year.

Between now and Christmas Day, hundreds of thousands will hear the gospel. Tens of thousands will resolve to take Jesus seriously, to look into Christianity, to sort out what they believe.

And by January, tens of thousands will probably have forgotten that resolution.

It’s one of the perennial problems at Christmas. Amidst the wrapping paper, the party hats and the leftovers strewn over a million houses will also lie the people’s good intentions to go to church, or join a course, or read a book about Jesus, in the New Year.

Of course, it needs God to re-awaken the desire to get life and eternity sorted. But humanly speaking, this is one of the ways the evangelistic Christianity Explored website comes into its own.

It’s a great bridge between December’s carol service, nativity play, chats over mince pies with neighbours, and so on, and the New Year. It allows people to keep thinking about Jesus Christ in their own time, in their own way. It helps to keep the Lord on the agenda until January.

Three ways you can get people using the website this Christmas:

• Tell people about it at your evangelistic events—put the web address on your powerpoint at the end of the service, or on the back of service sheets/info to take home
• Give everyone who comes to your church a website card—a card with the strapline and the web address on (buy them in packs of 25)
• Encourage Christians (including you!) to go to the site. The more we think about how to answer people’s questions and explain the gospel message, the better we’ll be able to communicate what Christmas is really all about.

If you can’t make these decisions for your church, why not forward this post on to your pastor?

Let’s pray that the Lord would use your outreach events before Christmas, and use the website over Christmas, to bring many people to look at His Son and come to see who He is in 2012!