“Do we have the same urgency for follow-up and preservation?”

The Easter period was a busy time for AE Malawi as they ran the Jesus. All About Life campaign. The ‘Jesus All About Life’ campaign, which aims to provide practical Bible resources to equip and empower churches to bring Easter’s life-giving message to their local community, is usually ran every Easter season in partnership with the Bible Society. As part of the mission steps of African Enterprise’s stratified evangelism approach, AE Malawi trained on the preservation (follow-up) of those who gave their lives during the campaign.

Elder Seleman, the clerk of board/ secretary at the Presbyterian Church of Malawi, and the entire congregation underwent the preservation training on the 16th of June, 2023. The training was a warmly welcomed development by the entire leadership of the church.

The church made efforts to evangelize different areas through Gospel crusades in the city and beyond. They spent most of their investment in preparing and proclaiming the gospel while putting less effort into the preservation stage. This made the impact of the Gospel crusades give out little results than expected. Now, after going through the training, the church has been reminded about one of the most important parts of evangelism. Preserving these new converts will help them grow in faith and mature in spirit.

The Presbyterian Church of Malawi is excited because they will also benefit in a way that the church will grow in number. Now, after the training every member was given a task to assess themselves and see how they are planning to advance their approach to evangelizing their communities.

Elder Seleman later appealed to all Christians to remember our duty as Christians. “Reach out to people of different strata and share the love that we have experienced in Christ”, he said.

“Do we have the same urgency for follow-up and preservation?’’, asked Pastor Constantine Kanise. Pastor Constantine Kanise is the leader of Grace for all ministries, a fellowship that is always running up and down through the city of Lilongwe with the Gospel.

Pastor Constantine assessed the evangelistic efforts of her fellowship as great considering how much work they do every week. As a ministry they make sure that they reach out to communities with the gospel regularly. This exercise has been met with challenges, of course, with planning being one of the key difficulties. Grace for all ministries has most of the time struggled with implementing the preservation phase during their outreaches. This made the ministry to be unsure about how much impact they brought to the communities after their outreaches.

The ministry knew about the importance of preserving new converts, but they found it difficult to do so. After the post-proclamation preservation training, the leadership of the ministry said that they would have the same urgency to preserve the new converts as they had during the proclamation phase. They will make sure that new disciples grow in faith under their watch so that they do not go back to their sinful ways.

From now on, “We will plan better than before”, said Pastor Constantine.