Urban Evangelism In India: An Evangelistic Project Conducted In The City Of Poona

After two thousand years in its advent to India, Christianity still remains an unknown entity to the main core of the population. There are more than 3,000 cities and 550,000 villages in India with a population of 683,810,051 people. The urban development in India presents the greatest challenge to the church. It must discover ways of employing effective methods of evangelism to reach the massive population. Guidelines for evangelistic outreach in the cities of India were drawn from certain theological implications for evangelism under the headings: evangelistic priority, participation, incarnation, and proclamation. An actual evangelistic project was carried out in the city of Poona in which these guidelines were applied. A study of the Scriptures reveals that God has employed a variety of methods in seeking to communicate with men. Both the Old and New Testament strongly support the idea of the whole church proclaiming the whole message for the whole world. Both leadership and laity participation in evangelism can better reach the community with diversified ministries to lead the people to the hearing, understanding, and obeying of God\u27s spoken word through proclamation. The unusual participation of young people and other lay members of the church and participation in personal ministries seemed to be a particular benefit. Although this approach was effective in reaching certain groups in the community, it is suggested that these methods should also be tested in several more such outreach attempts before final determination is made regarding their usefulness. This project report, while emphasizing the need for biblical proclamation for outreach success, indicates an awareness of the practical difficulty of not being able to reach the Hindus, who make up the majority of the population. Thus, the report contains certain possible suggestions and recommendations for improvement in future evangelistic methods in urban India including the other areas of the country. The impact of evangelism in India makes it necessary to continue to implement methods to meet the contemporary situation. Emphasis in improving methods of communication such as the formation of an action research committee to ascertain receptive groups, homogeneous units, and language groups; development of evangelistic centers with a view to coming in contact with the community; promotion and preservation of records and reports from the theoretical and practical action research ventures; and organization and implementation of frequent training programs for both leadership and laity involvement are a few ways of achieving efficiency and effectiveness in evangelism