The Bible, Evangelism & CHE
Evangelism is sharing the good news of The Gospel. There are many Bible verses that give believers insight into this privilege and responsibility.
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Evangelism is telling what God has done.
Bible Verse: “Give praise to the Lord, proclaim His name; make known among the nations what He has done, and proclaim that His name is exalted.”
– Isaiah 12:4, NIV
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Evangelism points to the source of salvation.
Bible Verse: “Turn to Me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.”
– Isaiah 45:22, NIV
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Evangelism is our responsibility.
Bible Verse: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
– Matthew 28:18-20, NIV
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Evangelism is sharing God’s greatness with all nations.
Bible Verse: “My name will be great among the nations, from where the sun rises to where it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to me, because my name will be great among the nations,” says the Lord Almighty.
– Malachi 1:11, NIV
Community Health Evangelism is a grassroots movement that has revolutionized the way evangelism is carried out around the world.
For 40 years, Medical Ambassadors International (MAI) has been working to heal communities and transform lives. Jesus’ ministry on earth revealed that he cares for the WHOLE person. He was moved by people’s spiritual AND physical pain. At MAI, we strive to follow the example Jesus set for holistic healing. To do this, we use a development process called Community Health Evangelism (pronounced “chay”).
CHE promotes Christ-centered holistic development through empowerment strategies that avoid unhealthy dependencies. CHE concentrates efforts on long-term solutions that break the cycle of poverty and disease.
By using CHE, MAI is equipping individuals to be independent workers and evangelists in their own communities.
Doing CHE successfully requires that facilitators know how to cast vision, champion alliances, identify needs and resources, facilitate learning, and empower people and communities through training and capacity building. CHE training materials enable CHE workers to equip and mobilize communities to solve their own problems using local resources.
The CHE curriculum is a collection of best practices from around the world condensed into simple participatory lesson plans that can be taught in the community. The latest lesson plan DVD contains more than 10,000 documents including lesson plans, Bible teachings, stories, picture books, teaching aids, surveys, and tools for monitoring and evaluation.
We have found that it is one thing to see the importance of a program that integrates both physical and spiritual truths, but it is another matter to implement such a combination. The integration of spiritual truth into a physical outreach is a way of thinking, which must be constantly reinforced.
Bible study materials have been developed to be used by the CHEs as they lead their own Bible study groups. The materials address ministry successes and failures, praying for one another, and studying various books of the Bible.
Bible stories with appropriate interpretation and application questions are a powerful way to present God’s truth to both children and adults in all cultures. This is especially true in oral culture. Thus, there are CHE lessons with sample questions for over 500 Bible stories, helpfully indexed and organized in many folders.
The CHE Multiplication Process:
- A CHE Facilitator arrives at the focus village or slum and seeks to identify a “person of peace.” Once identified, this person provides a segue into the community by organizing a meeting with the community leaders to discern the possibilities of the community becoming a CHE community.
- A CHE committee of eight to ten members is formed, and the external CHE Facilitator who made the initial contact with the village invites the leaders to have a “visioning workshop.” Initial conversations start with understanding the community and moving it towards becoming a transformed community, one family, and one household at a time and finally affecting the whole community.
- The community CHE committee then identifies another ten CHE volunteers who will be trained by the external CHE Facilitator on a regular basis along with the community CHE committee. The CHE volunteers then go out and interact initially with their “Oikos” (pronounced “Oy’kos”)—immediate family and relatives—and then start with their other neighbors.
- The circle of influence of each CHE volunteer continues to grow throughout the year until each one is influencing 15-20 other families. Subsequently, each new household that has been reached also reaches out to others.
- By the second year there are nearly 150 volunteers reaching out to their neighbors.
- Ultimately, in three to five years the whole village or slum has heard about CHE.
- As the village becomes healthier, neighboring villages notice the results and want to know how they can have that same kind of results. Then, a CHE program can get started in those villages, too.
So, it spreads organically…just like evangelism spreads from one person telling another!
