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Evangelism that Flows
Natural forces drain evangelistic energy, but your church can keep its outreach strong.
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You can then gather a team that agrees this is what their lives and ministry will be about. You instill evangelistic values into more and more people around you. What happens then is you will attract other like-minded leaders into your church and repel those who are not. Many people are looking for a church that's alive evangelistically. Contagious churches put the work of evangelism into the hands of all their people. But pollster George Barna has shown that only one in three churches intentionally train their people in evangelism. We not only have to raise the value, model it, and teach on it, we have to get all our people through a training course where they don't just hear about evangelism but they practice it. Friends listen to friends. If we train individuals to naturally communicate their faith, we will see people come to Christ. Jerry Cline: If I as pastor don't say to others in the church, "Hey, there's something missing here," evangelism is probably not going to happen. I may need to say to the elder board, "I'm not seeing many conversions of late. Let's list the names of people we're rubbing shoulders with, and each time we meet, we'll pray for them." When the church is preparing the budget, I have had to say on occasion, "There's not much money in this budget for evangelism." My leaders have always responded to that. People are looking for us to take the lead. Last year, for example, we allocated several thousand dollars to bus unchurched kids to Chicago for ballgames as a way to build relationships with them. We're trying to break out of our standard approaches. How does today's seeker differ from the seeker of 1975? Mittelberg: Seekers are more skeptical now. They have less knowledge of the Bible and of what it means to be a Christian. So you have to do more ground work, showing them this is not a blind leap of faith, that the Bible is a book with credentials and that it works in our lives. When it comes to God, people don't know who he is. If they were to believe in the possibility of a revelation from God, they wouldn't know whether it's the book of Mormon, the Koran, some New Age writing, or the Bible. There's a lot more confusion, a lot less urgency about needing to know, yet a great emptiness. A generation ago, seekers knew what they could cling to if they were willing; now even if they're willing, they don't know which way to turn. Yet the spiritual interest is sky high. |             |
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