General Goals
The general goal of each English conversation is to build faith in Jesus as God's Son. Some Readers admit that they believe in neither God nor Jesus, others claim some kind of faith in a Supreme Being but do not accept Jesus as his Son, and some will already believe in God and Jesus, but will need to be shown a better way of faith. Each session is focused on taking the Reader a bit closer to God, allowing them to discover from the gospel itself their own needs, and providing a Christian friend to help illustrate and clarify the Good News.
Biblical Basis for the Method
In order to build faith in Jesus as God's Son, we try to let the Word of God speak for itself. Our biblical basis for this approach is taken from John 20:31: "But these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." We base our conversations in English on portions of the Gospel in the belief that it was written to produce faith. We illustrate it as much as possible with our own experiences with God, but we do not try to build a doctrinal scheme and present it systematically, choosing rather to expose people to Jesus as presented in Scripture with the help of the Holy Spirit.
General Strategy
Everything we do can be described as sharing the story of Jesus and sharing ourselves.
Emphasis on Agreement
We want to help people get to know Jesus, not to use him as a debate topic. We try not to confront the readers with differences in our faith and theirs in such a way that Readers are forced to make decisions that they are not ready to make.
Retention
We do everything we can to ensure that the reader comes back again. A person can no longer be exposed to the Word who no longer comes.
Focus
We avoid peripheral areas until there is a core faith in Jesus. It is our experience that many fringe questions will take care of themselves when a genuine faith in Jesus is established. Large abstract questions as well as fringe ones are often cover-up questions anyway, masking other fears of the reader regarding faith.
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