Jewish Evangelical Ministry Takes Gospel to Streets of NYC
by Chad Groening
July 20, 2004
(AgapePress) - The global evangelism ministry Jews for Jesus has dedicated the month of July to an extensive evangelistic outreach effort in New York City.The group that began in the early 1970s with a handful of Jewish believers sharing their faith in Jesus on the campuses and streets of California' s San Francisco Bay area has grown into an international ministry at work in more than 20 cities and eleven countries worldwide. In this new outreach effort, Jews for Jesus is targeting the Big Apple and hoping to hand out one-million tracts and engage thousands of people in brief conversations about why Jesus -- Messiah Y'shua -- is the promised Savior and Redeemer.
Susan Perlman, the first assistant to the executive director of Jews for Jesus, says the object of the outreach is "to make the Messiah-ship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to New Yorkers." She says those metropolitan citizens are bombarded with such a constant stream of media and information that "you have to be able to engage them in a way that is fresh and new -- and the message of Jesus is always new."
Jews for Jesus staff and volunteers begin by simply asking New Yorkers who they think Jesus is, Perlman explains. "We actually just try and gauge where a person is at," she says, "and then we take the conversation from there. If they do believe that Jesus exists and that He was a historical figure, we try and share some of what the Bible has to say about who Jesus was."
And Perlman notes that, although the ministry workers sometimes encounter a certain amount of hostility to their campaign, they also find that many people express keen interest in their message. She says, "There are some people who will say to you, 'Why don't you get a life?' or 'Why don't you get a real job?' or 'How can you believe in Jesus -- intelligent people don't do that.' We just pray for those people and trust that the Lord is going to speak to them at some other point if they're not ready to hear what we have to say right then."
Perlman says like Jesus Himself, Jews for Jesus workers are "out there" witnessing in hopes of reaching even one lost sheep -- one person who will hear the gospel message and respond in faith, taking the first steps toward a saving knowledge of Christ.
Jews for Jesus describes its commitment to direct evangelism in the ministry's core values statement, which emphasizes "a clear presentation of the facts of the gospel to the unsaved and an urgent appeal to receive salvation through faith in Christ" as "the best and only hope for a lost and dying world."
