How should the Church approach and witness to unbelievers?

Kevin Swanson explains in this video that the Church be balanced in that there must be love shown to both the believers in the Church and unbelievers outside the Church. The Church must reach out to unbelievers but also to the believers. Elders ought exemplify this to the members of the Church. They ought to be opening up their home to strangers and believers alike.

However, it is a delicate balance. A church may lean too far one way where there is no love for believers because it focuses on bringing in unbelievers so much that believers are neglected. The opposite can also occur where there is no love for unbelievers.

John 17:15-18 (NKJV) – “I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth. As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.”

Our Lord's last command is our first priority. In the church, in the family, in the city, to the ends of the earth. Join us in October for White Under Harvest. The church needs to be careful that it doesn't become ingrown. In other words, sometimes we want to build our communities and be a very close-knit community that focuses on the love of the brethren.

And after a while, we've developed our relationships and we feel very comfortable with each other. The Bible requires of us a balance between the phileo-delphia and the phileo-xenia. Hebrews 13 says, love the brothers and love the strangers. And that balance has to be carefully maintained all the time by the elders, the pastor, the leaders of that church. And if you get that out of whack, you're going to develop an ingrown church or you may develop a church that isn't a church at all because the love of the brethren isn't there.

You've got a big mega church where all the strangers are coming in and flowing out, but there really is no church at all. Well, you need a church. You need a church that loves the brothers, and you need a church that reaches out all the time. My recommendation is for the pastors, the elders, the leaders, to exemplify that balance constantly. They ought to be opening up their homes all the time to strangers.

And the pastor should bring strangers into the church constantly. Strangers that stayed the night with him. I did that last Sunday, I brought a whole family that stayed the night with me. These were strangers. Our church had never seen these people before, and we embraced them, we brought them in, we brought them to the church, and the church now understands that it's not just our community that matters, It's also the strangers that matter.

So we want to go out and love the strangers. We want to lead a group of 20-25 people on a Friday night down the 16th Street Mall. The brothers are there. The brothers are loving the brothers, But they're also reaching out to strangers at the same time. The pastors should be there, the elders should be there.

They should exemplify their love for evangelism, reaching out to the lost sheep that need to be brought into the fold. You