Talk:Approaches to evangelism

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Neutrality? This is questionable. Too much Christian-related content, not enough non-Christian/anti-Christian content.

I think one of the problems is this article wasn't created with a very clear focus. (I even think the title isn't spelled correctly) I get the feeling it started as an article to list different notable varieties of Christian evangelism, which I personally think is a good idea, but i'm not even sure if many non-Christian or anti-Christian people even call spreading their beliefs "evangelism". Perhaps the title should be changed to something like "Approaches to Christian Evangelism" or something like that, but I dunno. Homestarmy 14:16, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

"born again Christian"

I have removed the term "born again" for two reasons;

1) "born again Christian" is a tautology. There is no denomination which would disagree that in order to be a Christian one needs to have been born from on high (the original greek, usually translated as born again for logical reasons) although often Christians disagree about the nature of the rebirth (at a point in time, over a long period, as a child, at a baptism etc).

2) Many born again Christians distance themselves from the term "born again" because it is often associated with evangelical or fundamentalist streams of Christianity, both of which are mildly villified by the media and western cultures. Thus those who would not refer to themselves as born again who do evangelism would not be represented fairly.

Tiffer Robinson 15:17, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Recording some things

I'm just going to put my links here so I can look at them later as I expand this article: open air tips. friendship evangelism more friendship evangelism hxxp://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=0764X -- D. James Kennedy's book on friendship evangelism apparently, friendship evangelism in relation to Muslims prophetic evangelism more prophetic evangelism Internet related evangelism Canadian Southern Baptists and Servant EvangelismHomestarmy 00:42, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

And yes, to anyone inquiring, I know the Servant Evangelism section isn't neutral, but a news article on it from ChristianityToday.com ([1]) is making it hard for me to figure out how notable this is, many of the quotes from churches it names give no indication that they are practicing Servant Evangelism at all, and the article gives an extremely broad definition which is sort of hard to pin down. Homestarmy 18:28, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Added treasure hunt

I created a sub paragraph about a type of prophetic evangelism. My question is that bacause this is my first real article contribution I would like feedback. Where I can I would like to expand the subject and add to it where possible. Please leave me a note. Matglas86 (talk) 15:10, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Quite some time ago, I was planning to use the library access I had to greatly expand this article, use the information I learned to touch up all its parent articles, and then maybe get them all to GA status and Featured Topic status. However, after I cleaned it up and added a good bit of info to it, I quickly realized that most of the parent articles to this one are in very bad shape. In several sections, I discovered I would actually be violating summary style to expand them further, because the parents were so lacking in good detail that there was very little information in them. (And, therefore, I wouldn't have been summarizing the parent articles, but instead would have been introducing information that wasn't in the parents) For a very long list of complicated reasons I could no longer give nearly as much time to Wikipedia as I had in the past, and so I simply stopped. My reccomendation is to take a new look at all the parent articles of this topic, (When they exist, for example, I don't think prophetic evangelism has a parent) determine what they are like today, (It's been years since I looked) and as you expand this subject with new information, make sure you put the same information somewhere in the parents. That way, nobody can say summary style has been violated. (They do still have that summary style thing right, it's been awhile since I looked at the latest policy iterations) Also, due to the age of some of the types of evangelism, I found that many public libraries have easily accessable books on the various types of evangelism here. However, simple google searches tended to turn up miles of things I could never sort through when I tried it, so be careful about using only internet sources for some of these sections. Homestarmy (talk) 20:16, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your response Homestarmy. I so if I get it right you would suggest to see if summary style still exists and than see if there is a parent topic on prophetic evangelism that is usable to expand on the topic of treasure hunt. Im still a rookie on WP but try to dig in. Mainly its important to provide good reference material to verify the subject, right? --Matglas86 (talk) 07:21, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Summary style makes a ton of sense from an encyclopedic standpoint so I see no reason why it would ever be radically weakened in Wikipedia, it still seems to have a page anyway, (WP:SUMMARY) might want to give it a read. I checked on the existance of a prophetic evangelism article, and the most I saw was a few mentions of it in a couple non-related articles. This seems to be the article that has always had the main info in it, so there doesn't seem to be a parent. Also, good references are always important in Wikipedia articles, but even moreso in ones that relate to anything even remotely related to controversial topics. If your references aren't very high quality, if anyone has beef with the topic of this article or with something in it, they'll often try to challenge it. Back when I was a frequent editor there was a substantial group of editors who seemed to have a net negative view of anything related to Christianity or organized religion, and their personalities often clashed on the talk pages of popular Christianity related articles, leaving articles in a state of lowered quality when differing opinions collided. In my experience, very strong references (Especially ones created by academics who teach at trusted universities.) generally prevented material from being challenged too strongly. And, of course, whether an article becomes controversial or not, if you try making this a GA or FA and people see weak looking references, they'll call the article out on it. WP:VERIFIABILITY seems to be the main page these days listing the qualities of highly regarded references.

In particular, when I approached this article, there were two kinds of sources I used. The first were some first and second hand accounts of evangelists and evangelism-related organizations, both modern and not so modern, to provide context to the material and some information on the small sections dealing with more modern kinds of evangelism. The second is the bulk of what you see in the References section, namely, the highly reliable Encyclopedia of Protestantism. The authors consist of a large collection of professors and doctorates, often from Ivy League schools, and it has also been through a large number of revisions. That's the kind of reference which, unless you get some truly far-out tenditious editor here, should be absolutly unchallengable in terms of its reliability and trustworthyness. In fact, there might even be a new edition out by now. What's more, I took the effort of inline citing the page numbers of each article I used from that encyclopedia, further backing up every line of text that I derived from that source. There wasn't anything on prophetic evangelism though, so I don't think it would be much help to you if that's the section you're interested in. The point is, that source has the kind of reliability you want to strive towards when citing things, but remember, not all references have to be nearly as good as that one, they just need to pass the policy.

This article has the interesting property of touching on a subject that is of good value to a pretty large amount of people if they knew about it's existance, but is also somewhat out of the way. That means even if you change it a great deal it's very unlikely somebody is going to come and change things in a negative way, which is what you'd get if this was a religion-related article that was much more popular. (And thusly controversial) Right before I had to stop editing much, I had been involved in a huge number of religion articles which had much controversy to them, and for a long list of reasons, it made me feel rather disheartened by the whole process. Not much got done in the end, and looking back on it all, it appears many of the articles I left back then have fallen into a state of disrepair (Especially Jesus, which believe it or not, was actually almost FA material at one point many years ago) When I found this article, it was like finding buried treasure; here I could have edited it as much as I wanted, improved both it and its relatively unpopular parent articles, (Few editors who enjoyed disparaging Christianity related topics actually bother to dive into every theology topic they can find) and gotten them all to GA status at least before anyone even had a chance to stop me with crazy ideas about baseless additions to the articles which served little purpose but to make Christianity or evangelism look bad. Many editors who edit for a long time have some story about some particular article which they personally made great, and for awhile, I thought this would surely be the one for me. That was a long time ago, and I can't possibly do that kind of thing now while getting an Engineering degree at the same time, and several other projects on the side. The point is, if you want to improve this article or any of its parents, you should be in pretty safe territory to improve them as much as you want for quite awhile.

Keep in mind that years have passed since I first scoped out the atmosphere surrounding this article and others, and the community of editors in Wikipedia dealing with these topics appears to have changed signifigantly in the years i've been gone. It looks like one of the editors that I recognize from way back then came here a few months ago, changing a few things in a minor manner, USer:Hrafn. From his edits I guess he was performing cleanup as a result of an article deletion and a minor citation cleanup. If he put this page on his watchlist, he'll probably show up soon if you start changing many things. Probably sooner actually, since this is alot of talk page activity, and whether you're a Wikipedia editor or not, few things are more annoying than people talking about you behind your back.

Oh, and if this looks like an awfully unnecessary amount of text for a talk page response, in actuality its par for the course when it comes to topics which have huge talk pages. That's another reason I liked how this article looked; because it was just me and no talk page activity, I didn't have to deal with reading a billion giant walls of text when I logged in every day, which I often was forced to respond to with another even larger wall of text when they dealt with many parts of article content. I hope that in your editing experience, you won't have to deal with that very much, because it's quite a hassle. The one big overall idea I learned was that the more out of the way you get on a topic, the more you can improve it. If you remain alone on this article, you have a very good shot of improving it or any of its parents up to Good Article status without being bothered, and a fairly decent shot of at least getting any of them nominated for Featured Article status without anything negative happening. After that any number of things could happen, since FA nominations often bring many different kinds of editors to any given nominee article. I'll probably hang around more if you have other questions, i've been getting a bit nostalgic about Wikipedia lately. Homestarmy (talk) 16:04, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Hey Homestarmy I have to say that I really appreciate it that you took the time to respond again. In my 2 days of, for me, intense activity on Wikipedia digging through the first basics of policies, rating and styling I figured it would take some time to create a pretty decent piece. Im now looking into writing a 'parent' page about prophetic evangelism itself. I am pre-writing it on my userspace. I don't now if its possible to show it or that it is hidden but Im just trying to gather some information. Nothing worth posting at the moment. I do have another question on to end with. If I have specific questions is it possible to send you a message anway on Wikipedia besides your talk page? --Matglas86 (talk) 16:23, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I looked through your contributions to get a sense of how much experience you had, (It used to be and probably still is somewhat common practice to take a peek at people's recent contributions when you first meet someone, so that you get an idea of what they do and the kinds of things like they to edit) so I spotted your prophetic evangelism rough draft. My impression of it is that, for the moment, given the content you collected so far it would be more appropriate to leave what you have in just this article. Articles like this are special because rather than being on just one topic, they connect a large number of related topics together, sort of like a topic overview article. What generally happens is that near the top, you have some sections summarizing much larger and important articles, and at the bottom are sections dealing with topics which are too small to have their own articles, but are still relevant to the topic as a whole. As an article like this develops and people find more reaserch on a topic, the sections near the bottom tend to grow in size, until there is so much content that there is enough for an independant article. Then, when the new article is created, the content existing on the topic overview article is cut down so that it summarizes the content in the new article, which becomes the parent article of that section. Homestarmy (talk) 17:15, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

So your suggestion would be to expand the prophetic evangelism part in this article with relevant information. If the article would in a later state grow too big it would be normal practice to separate it a parent article. Thanks that was very helpfull. --Matglas86 (talk) 19:29, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Added section about the EvangeCube

With the growing popularity of EvangeCube I thought it would be useful to add an explanation of the cube and how it came to be created - --AlanP57 (talk) 11:41, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

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