By:
Patricia Thangaraj
True ministry work is not just ministering to those persons who enter your church doors, but actually going out into the world and trying to reach the lost souls for Christ.
This is the advice that Featured Speaker, General Bishop of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the West Indies (PAWI) International, Bishop Dr. Pat Glasgow, gave to members of various Pentecostal churches that were in attendance at the PAWI Barbados 2016 Centenary Convocation on Saturday night at the Hilton Hotel Barbados.
This includes going to those places where no other person would dare to venture, he stated.
“I said many years ago at WIST, the action in the end times would not be behind the pulpit, but it would be among those people that go to places where there are churches that have no walls, no stained glass windows, to minister to people who would never come to a church, but need to be ministered to. To find themselves in quarters and in corners of our society that some of us would not want to or would be afraid to go.”
The General Bishop said that this is imperative since there are many bad things that are occurring in the world today and these persons – the ones who are not being reached because they do not venture into a church building – are the ones that also need to hear the message of the Gospel.
“And we have some bad things happening in our society. The Church cannot close its ears and say, ‘That doesn’t affect us.’ It does. Jesus said, ‘Go make disciples of all nations.’ All nations include the drug dens, all nations include the prostitute places, all nations include the intellectually disowned people (and) all nations include everyone. That is our responsibility. So what do you do after a hundred years? Fan the flames, preserve the flames, but empower yourself for change.”
He added that the inability of the Church to meet the needs of these persons is synonymous to riding a donkey cart on the ABC highway while everyone else is in their brand name vehicles.
“And then there is change in our organisation and structuring. Maybe the watchword of the culture that we are living in is change. But the question is: Are we prepared for it? Some time ago I thought of organisations that are not prepared for change… Think of a man or the Church being a donkey cart riding on the ABC highway, when everybody else is going in their Rolls Royce and their Audi… but that is how the Church would look if the Church is not prepared to adjust to change.”
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