"The wonderful people of Soma Communities based in Tacoma, Wash., have adopted this process as a consistent practice.5 Vision Leader Jeff Vanderstelt rightly emphasizes that the integration of the gospel is a lifelong process. For Soma, in the pre-conversion stage of discipleship, emphasis falls on the evangelism dimension, but is still seen as part of discipleship. Once someone gives her life to Christ, the emphasis shifts from evangelism to discipleship, but in a real sense she is always being evangelized.
Actually reframing evangelism within the context of discipleship squares pretty nicely with what missiologists call the Engels Scale. With this Scale, we can observe definite stages that people undergo in coming to faith and growing in discipleship. It will look something like the following continuum, ranging from -6 to +6
Reframing mission and evangelism around discipleship really does make space for long-term, authentic, loving relationships with people in our lives. This in turn gives credibility to our message and cultivates meaningful friendships—virtues we can certainly use in greater quantities at any time. And the really intriguing thing for me as a movement guy is that if every follower of Jesus simply did this with just two or
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