Contagious Christian Campaign
One of the missing pieces to effective evangelism among most of our ELCA Lutheran congregations is the anxiety that the word "evangelism" evokes among our people. They immediately think of caricatures like cold calling, scaring people or passing out tracts at a crowded mall. Such caricatures are neither effective nor evangelistic in the true sense of the word.
What IS effective is one person of faith, listening well to the life realities of another person, and then in a kind, gentle and honest way, sharing the good news of God's presence, love and power. It is about making connections, offering an invitation, and being real.
The Contagious Christian program is a 6-8 week spiritual growth campaign designed to guide a whole congregation in owning and developing their capacity for faith sharing conversations with others.
While we encourage such a campaign in our congregations, theology matters and we DO NOT endorse using the program "as is" or "out of the box." Instead, we encourage you to purchase the materials and then to carefully re-work them to better fit our understanding of the faith. In fact, we STRONGLY DISCOURAGE the use of the Participant booklets in your small groups - you can simply design your own small group discussion materials. We have done some of that revisioning work for you:
Click on each of the following links to download the files from an adapted version of the Contagious Christian seminar.
Mission and Ministry Powerpoint
Personal Evangelism Style PPT Inventory