Does your church love Jesus? If they do, does anybody else know? Seventh-day Adventist women are becoming more purposeful about answering that question. While the church has long relied on public evangelism campaigns to get their messages across, they are now encouraging all areas of the church to find new and innovative ways to reach outside sanctuary walls and into their communities.

In an interview with Adventist News Network, Heather-Dawn Small, Women’s Ministries director for the Seventh-day Adventist world church, discussed plans that the department had to combine both ministry and evangelism. Small says people need to see Jesus at work in their communities before churches even start preaching.

“The church has functioned as a gated community for too long,” Small says. “We bring people into the church to evangelize them when we need to go out into the community and touch lives.”

She explains that Women’s Ministries is encouraging Adventist women all over the world to implement its new theme for the next five years, “Touch a Heart, Tell The World.”

“Where would the church be if we didn’t have the touch of women supporting all the church’s ministries?” Small asks. “They bring the touch of love to all. Our statistics show about 500,000 people have been baptized through Women’s Ministries in the past five years, so it is clear that women can do evangelism, but the missing element is touch.”

The theme emphasizes a more personal way of looking at evangelism. Small wants women in the Adventist Church to do more ministering or personal outreach that involves meeting the needs of those in the community. This form of outreach, or touching lives, is instinctive to women, she says.

“Women are natural caregivers not just of their own families—but of the world,” she explains. She points to the Church’s Women’s Ministries department in South America that is responsible for membership conservation.

Women’s Ministries has brought attention to women all around the world who are sick, overworked, poor, lacking training/mentoring opportunities, abused and illiterate. They have sent out brochures informing churches of the needs that exist around the world. The brochures provide suggestions and choices on how women can help in their own way.

Some of those choices include starting grief, loss or divorce support groups, nutrition classes, self-esteem classes, professional mentoring, budgeting classes, leadership training, communication classes, women’s shelters, healing seminars, literacy classes and others. Adventist women in the Middle East have been leading some of these seminars for the past 10 years.

Small says she became more and more concerned about meeting the needs of women after her two trips to the United Nations last year. “I saw the vast needs that exist. I was overwhelmed,” she recalls.

With a renewed emphasis on outreach ministry combined with evangelism, more people will come to know Jesus, Small says.

Women’s Ministries will release a series of six brochures that deal with difficult issues facing women globally.

“They will include ministry ideas from women around the world, who have been using these ideas,” says Small.