A British evangelist is encouraging Christians to take a biblical view of mission work.
Andy Hawthorne is founder of The Message Trust, a Christian charity working to improve the lives of young people in Manchester, England. In his new book, Hope Unleashed: Serving God through Words and Actions, Hawthorne recounts how a business venture in the 1980s led to a need to hire young workers from the area and how most of them had no knowledge of Christ. "So what we're starting to do, reaching out with our business, programs for these young men and women in inner-city Manchester who will have problems with drugs and alcohol and violence and all sorts criminal activity. We decided to reach out because...in inner-city Manchester there weren't many churches doing that kind of stuff. We naively wrote to every church in Manchester and said, 'What are we going to do?' and started to gather people together," he explains. "Two or three years later, I pulled out of that business [and] set up The Message Charity with one employee." Now they have around 80 full-time staff and more than 300 volunteers. Hawthorne says he wants to share the lessons he has learned and encourage Christians to catch the message of the early New Testament church. "Jesus didn't just teach stuff, didn't stand in a pulpit and preach at people. He did stuff -- he cared for the poor, he healed the sick. He was a man of action. But he did boldly proclaim the good news as well, and I really believe finding that sweet spot in words and actions is a way to cut through to the toughest areas," Hawthorne contends. "The gospel works. The problem is I don't think we've quite presented it right on a lot of occasions. We've been all words, we've been all preaching, and people haven't seen our good deeds." Hawthorne also says Christians must be united in order to be effective for Christ.
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