Issue 23 – Has the Church lost its evangelistic edge?
Dear Len
You’ve led a large church for many years and 18 months ago your denomination made you the regional leader for your family of churches, as well as still leading your own growing church!
It’s a big responsibility, but your new executive pastor will free you up to lead these churches with distinction. I’m not surprised you’ve had mixed feelings about what you’ve seen on your first round of visiting. As you say, many churches are doing wonderful community ministry, and you’re rightly thrilled with this. But you’re troubled that, with all this good work, few churches are making any evangelistic impact on their communities.
In a word, you’re concerned that somehow, somewhere along the way, many churches have stopped challenging people to follow Jesus. And you wonder how to revitalise them.
Getting Your Situation in Perspective
For more than a decade, other senior denominational leaders have been saying the same thing. In fact, you’re the second in a fortnight to share this concern with me. And if they’ve been in ministry a long time, they all say that the Church today bears little resemblance to the Church they started out with. Put simply, they believe the Church has lost its evangelistic edge.
So I wasn’t surprised to read your comment that evangelism ‘does not seem to be happening’ in many of your churches.
You also feel many pastors aren’t preaching the Gospel with urgency and their people aren’t sharing their faith at a personal level. So you think we’ve lost our confidence in the power of the Gospel to transform lives, preferring to offer the Gospel as one of many possible solutions for the human condition, rather than the ultimate cure.
But you go further in your recent email, which is very strong.
You feel that some of your more committed people are uncertain about what the message of the Gospel really is, are ill equipped and untrained, even ‘apathetic about the need’ to reach others. In short, you feel we’ve lost our sense of urgency, our confidence in the Gospel and our ability to reach the masses with the good news that Jesus saves. And you feel that to ‘share in [Christ’s] ministry of reconciliation’ (2 Cor 5.18) we must first know him ourselves.
If that’s the picture, what can you and your churches do about it?
Here are a few suggestions to get you started. They are built, as you’ll see, around the ‘Law of the Ripples in the Pond’.
The Law of the Ripples in the Pond
I got my first lessons in leadership when I was growing up on my father’s farm.
My dad had a dam, or pond, on his farm. On a calm day, we could throw stones into the middle of the dam and watch the ripples fan out till they reached the edge of the dam. But to affect all the water in the dam, we had to land our stones in the middle of the dam.
It’s like that with changing the DNA of churches. We’ve got to start in the middle with you and your leaders because you’re the ones that make things happen. To change your churches, we start with you and your leaders.
It’s the law of the ripples in the pond—and it leads to the following steps you can take to revitalise your churches.
Step 1—Model the Gospel’s Call Yourself
Leaders of organisations have an incredible influence on the organisations they lead, so get as close to God as you can and let him fill you daily with his Spirit.
As you read the Bible, think long and hard about the broad sweep of redemptive history.
Think often of the tragedy of the fall in the Garden of Eden and the devastating consequences for us all. Remind yourself constantly of how frequently Jesus spoke about hell and endless punishment. Sit at the foot of the cross and marvel at the grace that saves us all. Be encouraged every day by Acts 1.8’s promise of power for service and be challenged by 2 Timothy 4.2’s call to be urgent. Let the great heroes of the past, like the Wesleys and the Booths, fire your spirit. Give yourself to your ministry with the last great day of history always in view.
In your leadership position, you set the tone for your leaders and churches because renewal is caught as much as taught. As John Maxwell and Kevin Turner put it, ‘We can’t fix our team until we fix ourselves.’
If you model the Gospel’s compelling call yourself, your leaders and people will catch it off of you.
Step 2—Pour Yourself into Your Regional Staff
Regional offices are run in different ways across the denominations and staff are employed on different bases.
For example, the regional youth leader may continue pastoring a smaller church while leading the region’s youth. Some denominations have regional offices with full- and part-time staff. However regional staffing is worked out, the principle is the same—your staff, who have so much to do with the pastors and people of your region, get their ministry cues from you, their leader.
If you model the Gospel’s compelling call in your dealings with them, they’ll come to love the truths that you preach, stress what you stress and model the Gospel’s compelling call themselves in their work in your region.
Through your regional staff, you start a people movement that further down the track will change the way your churches work.
To get effective evangelism back into your churches, you must start with your regional staff.
Step 3 – Pour Yourself into Your Pastors
Over time, pastors have a profound influence in shaping their churches, so if you look at longer ministries you’ll find that the churches the pastors lead become expressions of what the pastors themselves believe and model.
This means that your relationship with your pastors is a critical component in reviving evangelism in your churches.
Here are two general principles to get you started, with the details in the larger church discussion that follows:
1. Pour yourself and your dream into your pastors when you’re visiting them, for whatever reason.
Build such a strong relationship that you can talk freely with them about their walk with God, their beliefs and preaching, the ebb and flow of evangelism in their church and your evangelism expectations of their church.
2. Pour yourself and your dream into your pastors when you get them together in regional gatherings.
Encourage them to follow your example (Phil 4.9) and keep the broad sweep of redemptive history in view—with its highs and lows, its compelling Gospel call and its warnings about going to an eternity without Christ.
When you get your staff and pastors flowing with you, you’re half way to reviving your churches’ evangelism fortunes. This leads us to the other half of the evangelism equation in the sections that follow.
Step 4—Help Churches Change their Sunday Services
Our Sunday services (meetings) are in many ways the most awesome experiences we can have on earth.
God is there, we’re there and people who haven’t yet started following Jesus are often there, so it’s in this amazing situation that we experience what Rick Warren calls ‘the evangelistic power of worship’, when God works in astonishing ways—provided we cooperate with him and don’t get in the way, that is!
To put evangelism back into Sundays, we need to do the following things.
1. We need to sing songs that everyone can sing easily!
Today, we often sing performance songs, which are led by experts. They’re difficult to sing, frustrate our worshippers, alienate our seekers and thwart the Holy Spirit’s ministry. Indeed, when I look back on the 2000 services I’ve attended in the last generation, I believe it’s our singing that’s let us down more than anything else. Generally speaking, it’s not blessing us as it should and it’s a major stumbling block to reaching seekers.
So encourage your leaders to choose songs that people can sing and the Spirit can apply. The age of the song isn’t the real issue, it’s whether the people can actually sing it and love singing it!
2. We need to preach messages that explain the Gospel clearly, apply it helpfully and challenge people against the backdrop of eternity to take the next step on their spiritual journey. We need to ‘be urgent’ in doing so (2 Tim 4.2 RSV). No message, not even a teaching message, should end without a clear invitation to follow Jesus and an equally clear comment on what people need to do to start their journey with him that day.
Of course, we should always be sensitive to where people are at on their journey, knowing some will need time to think the issues through so they can make a decision later. But we should always be clear and urgent.
Generally speaking, as you and other senior denominational leaders tell me, this Gospel dynamic is not happening today—and it must happen if we’re to get evangelistic traction in our churches again.
Our preaching is the second thing that’s letting us down on Sundays and we must change that. Urgently!
3. We need to get rid of cringe factors in our services like religious mumbo jumbo that newer people can’t follow and develop an inviting culture that encourages our committed people to bring their pre-Christian friends to our services.
Most churches are too small to run a service for Christians and another service for seekers, and Sunday morning is still the best time to reach Kiwi families. So most churches are locked into one Sunday morning service which, done well, can be the linchpin of reaching people for Jesus.
In 1 Cor 14.23-24, Paul laid down once and for all the guiding principle of how church should be done. As the NIV text note reminds us, Paul expected to see three groups of people at church on Sunday in Corinth—Christians, unbelievers and seekers—and he advised the leaders to do church in a way that included them all.
The way we’ve done Sunday church in the past few years is the third thing that’s let us down. This too has to change if we’re to experience again the conversion flow that comes from the evangelistic power of worship.
A cringe-free service is an absolute requirement for doing church effectively on Sundays.
Step 5—Help Churches Change their Other Ministries
But if Sunday morning is important, what we do in our ministries outside of Sunday is just as important—especially in the ministries that focus on building relationships with those who don’t yet know Jesus.
To put evangelism back into our weekday ministries:
1. We need to get all our weekday ministry leaders up to speed with ‘the next step’ principle, that is, helping people who don’t yet know Jesus take the next step on their journey towards him.
For example, if they and their children attend Mainly Music and its related social events, we may invite them to attend a special Mother’s Day or Father’s Day service that features their children, followed by a morning tea where we can mix with them. For more on this basic ministry principle, see pp 87-97 in The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner and Lane Jones (a great book to take your leaders through!).
When we practice the ‘the next step’ principle in our weekday ministries, we lift our evangelistic tempo hugely.
And when we take our leaders through the 7 Practices book, we grow faster still because our leaders put all their time and energy into reaching people for Jesus and growing them in his likeness.
2. We need to include a small but important evangelism component in our small groups.
This is what a friend’s church does with their hundred small groups, which are built around ‘the 4 Ws’ of Welcome, Worship (which may or may not include singing), Word and Witness (the evangelism bit where they focus briefly on the one or two pre-Christian friends they’re each trying to lead to Jesus). At their meetings, they encourage each other in their outreach, pray for the pre-Christian friends they’re reaching and plan occasional social events that they can share with these friends.
We lift the evangelistic tempo of our church several more notches when we involve all our ‘small groupers’ in reaching their friends for Jesus because we’re now growing disciple-making disciples.
We also keep our small groups from becoming self-centred—as many did in our first experiment with small groups in the 70s and 80s, leading many of them to finally close.
3. We need to apply the 7 Practices principle of ‘narrowing our church’s focus’ so we excel at reaching people for Jesus and growing them in his likeness.
As the book reminds us, good churches have a tendency to do too many things because they do them well, when we should eliminate some things we do well so we can do the few things with greatest potential.
So, at the writers’ church of many thousands, there are many ‘accepted’ church things they do not do because their focus is on keeping the evangelism and discipling task simple so the church bears the greatest fruit. They’re also not afraid to ‘kill what’s working’ (Jn 15.2b) so something with greater potential can take its place.
They stress creating ‘brands’ to nail what it is they’re trying to do with each ministry. So their InsideOut ministry is small groups for students, UpStreet is small groups for children, and so on. Each ministry is designed to do one main thing well.
To learn more about the ‘Narrowing the Focus’ principle, read pp 99-117 of the 7 Practices book.
Step 6—Help Churches Resource and Empower Their People
When we consider the stories of the Wesleys and Booths, we see that they stood out because they started ‘people movements’. They created an army of people who were committed to their evangelism and social reform dream.
To win at evangelism in our churches, we need to do the same. We need to start a people movement by doing the following.
1. We need to inspire our people with the same broad sweep of redemptive history that fires us—teaching them about the Fall, the teaching of Jesus, the Great Commission and the Cross, the outpouring of the Spirit and the Last Things.
In many cases, people care not because they know not—and they know not because none taught them. And they’ll stay that way till their preachers, like Paul, spell out ‘the whole counsel of God’ (Ac 20.27 RSV).
To get your people fired up with the evangelistic challenge, your preachers must teach them this counsel—and ‘be urgent’ in doing so. As the saying goes, ‘like priest, like people.’ Over time, people mirror their preachers.
To put it another way, strategic topical preaching that focuses on the juicier high interest topics that pull the numbers in, is an important assault weapon in the preacher’s arsenal. But to change our people’s DNA, we need to balance that with contemporary biblical preaching that picks up on the great evangelism and discipling principles that flow from the text of Scripture.
Short series on Gospel incidents like Jn 4, the teaching of Jesus and parts of Acts can be a great way to get our people up to speed with the big picture of what life is about, where sharing our faith comes in and how we all fit together into God’s great plan for things.
2. We need to train and resource our people so they learn to share their faith warmly and easily.
There was a time when training resources were limited, but that’s all changed now.
Organisations like Willow Creek (and a host of websites) feature some of the many training resources available today – and some leaders even develop their own resources to fit their mix of people.
But whatever resources we use, we should focus strongly on equipping our people to share their faith easily.
3. We need to help our people see that seekers come to Jesus in many different ways, so we need to be sensitive to their needs at the time.
Some of our people will be excited to learn that there are many different pictures of the cross that we can use when sharing our faith. Each picture is like a gate to Jesus and corresponds to a major human need.
Many years ago, when Joni Eareckson was struggling with the effects of a dreadful accident that left her paralysed from the neck down, her friend Cindy pointed her to Jesus’ suffering on the Cross and how he was paralysed too. This was a great help to Joni even though she wasn’t healed because Cindy pointed her to the picture of the Cross that most applied to her.
All the pictures and gates work like this, so there’s one for everyone—which makes sharing our faith exciting.
To find out more about the 10 NT Gates, go to the bottom of the listed Leadership Letters on this website and click on the World Vision ones listed below. Scroll down to Letters 168-70, noting 169 especially—and the crisp little Reflections handout with 170 (Mar/Apr 2002).
However you do it, get your people up to speed with the many different ways there are of introducing seekers to Jesus—as Jesus himself illustrated in his own dealings with interested people.
Rediscovering the Gospel’s Compelling Call
Years ago, I knew a regional leader who revived the sagging evangelism and discipleship fortunes of his churches. He had about the same number of churches as you, and I watched him move in, handpick his regional leaders from around the country and pour himself into his pastors and churches.
Passionately committed to his evangelical heritage and packaging his strategy in his denomination’s wrapping, he systematically worked out the broad principles of this regional evangelism manifesto. His churches grew. To ensure they kept growing, he did many 1-2 night teaching stands in his churches to get them all on the same mission page.
Len, you’ve made a great start, and you’ll win too because you’re a gifted and passionate leader. And like the man in Psalm 20.4-5, we’re praying for you from the sideline and we’ll celebrate every victory with you.
May all your evangelism dreams for your churches come true!
I’ll write again.
Gordon Miller
Church Growth & Development Consultant
To Discuss at Local Church Leaders Meetings
- Roughly how many people in your church started following Jesus last year? If the number was low, why was it so low and what steps will you now take to change that for the future (write the number and steps down)?
- Do your preachers regularly give clear and urgent invitations to follow Jesus at the end of their messages? How effective have those invitations been and how could they become more effective (write your answer down)?
- How effective are your weekday ministries at building evangelism bridges to pre-Christians? How will you build in ‘the next step’ principle into those ministries (write your assessment and the steps down)?
- Roughly what percentage of your committed people are confident at sharing their faith? How many have brought people to Jesus in the past year or been key links in bringing them to him (write the numbers down)?
- What progress have you made at harnessing the 10 percent in your church who are likely to have the gift of evangelism in a developed or undeveloped form (write your summary down)?
- Given your response to the above questions, what church evangelism strategy will you now develop to bring all these facets together into a razor sharp focus on helping people find and follow Jesus (write the essential features down and add the names of the people responsible for each feature and the desired outcomes)?
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