The need

1. We wish to serve the local church. We believe that both scripturally and in practice, the church has a central role in both evangelism and community transformation.

2. Church-driven, community-based evangelism models have proven to be veryeffective, and we wish to bring more focus to this paradigm of evangelism. We believe we can learn from our collective experiences in order to determine effective models and best practices.

3. A weakness of many evangelism models (in the NZ context) is that they focus almost  exclusively on the existing friendship networks of those in the church, whereas research indicates that most of the population probably falls outside such networks. A recent Australian survey found that 60% of Australians have no close friends who go to church.

4. We believe the key to the church engaging the ‘other half’ of New Zealanders is two-pronged:
· Rediscovering the significance of a geographic ‘parish’
· Rediscovering the fullness of the Gospel as both ‘good deeds’ and ‘good news’

5. How can a needy church engage a needy community?
· We need a model of evangelism that takes as its starting point our calling
to serve the needs of the wider community
i.e. to demonstrate love to our neighbours

Many scriptures link service with spiritual maturity – we grow spiritually aswe reach out to others

We need to present avenues of service that will ignite the passions and sofree the resources of all our people, not just the few.

6. However, we miss an opportunity if we focus only on needs and not on ageographic ‘parish’ also. Our outreach efforts to the wider community need toalso intersect on a particular street or neighbourhood.
· Only the most needy strata of the community will be reached through‘needs-based’ evangelism, and the results will be dispersed throughout thewider community

· Focused effort in a particular place can lead to deeper relationships,
greater momentum and a platform for community transformation.

· It is also the most effective way of reaching people outside of our existing
friendship networks.

The goals of ‘Love Your Neighbour’

1. To see every community across New Zealand befriended and meaningfully engaged by at least one local church.

2. To cast vision by gathering the stories of successful churches in action and
sharing them widely. No single portal presently exists for accessing stories and best practices from across the church spectrum.

3. To promote the resources, tools and training offered by partnering churches
and organisations that serve church-driven, community-based evangelism.

4. To educate church leaders through conferences and regional consultations led
by successful practitioners.

5. To produce visual presentations and materials that will equip church leaders to
share the vision with their churches.

6. To stage periodic ‘campaigns’ that will help focus churches on their
community.

7. To track progress and provide feedback.

A simple model for easy transference
We believe that the process is simply described and easily transferred by using the model of ‘Prayer Care Share’:

It is simple and describes the actions of an outward-focused church – it begins with what the church is already doing

It emphasises the primacy of prayer and the ultimate goal of evangelism
It identifies clear connection points between church and parachurch, as together we are able contribute ideas, resources and training to these 3 key areas
The ‘Prayer Care Share’ concept has successfully mobilised the church elsewhere

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