Equipped for Witness: Spirituality and Evangelism in the Eastern Church

Catalog description

Equipped for Witness will introduce the student to the need for re-defining the content of, the preparation for, and the practice of contemporary evangelism. To do this, the course will: a) examine the challenges to evangelism posed by the contemporary post-truth social context in which the idea of absolute truth is widely rejected and in which there is little or no correspondence between empirical facts and the so-called personal truths expressed by individuals; b) Establish a Gospel-as-Person framework, based on the personal nature of God and a truth-based understanding of human being, identity, and the self, centered on the person of Christ; c) Shift the focus of evangelism away from the mere communication of information to the introduction of the person of Christ; d) Demonstrate that the most effective witnesses are the spiritually mature believers who, enlivened by the Holy Spirit, make the presence of Christ perceptively known to those around them; e) Build on the unique characteristics of Orthodox spirituality to show how spiritual maturity can empower our witness.