Evangelism Coach

• Cup of Joe offers up some helpful Evangelism resource recommendations, with a reminder that God is the evangelist.
• Dan Kimball is doing a series on hell, including this one: “If you think I’m going to hell, you should care that I’m going to hell.” (To quote Seinfield’s Elaine).
• Pastor’s Study on Philip And the Eunuch. Here is our stuff on Philip and Eunuch, from the conversion series that we did here some time ago..
• Here is a chapter by chapter review (this link is for Chapter 2) of unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters. See also (see this review, Scot McKnight’s review).
• Trying to Build an Effective Website for your church? Consider these things.

I’ve had many a conversation with

• church planters who want to start a coffee house
• church members who want to start a coffee house ministry
• church members who want to run a coffee shop
• churches who want to deal Fair Trade Coffee (such as Esperanza Coffee Group) for their gatherings.
• building committees that dream a coffee house in their church.

What drives many of these visions is the idea of a social gathering spot for informal evangelism, or a setting for evangelistic bible studies.

It’s considered a vision for evangelism that often sounds like this:

“Let’s build a coffee house and THEN we’ll do evangelism bible studies.”

What about this idea?

Don’t build or design a coffee house.

Use the one in your neighborhood!

Ten Reasons to use a local cafe for your evangelistic bible study:

1. No Capital Outlay — No need to design special space in your building, or purchase/renovate an existing building
2. Supports local economy — Local business owners are supported when you meet in their store.
3. Get out of the church — Cafe’s are a neutral space.
4. No clean up — No coffee pots to clean or grinds to dispose of.
5. Good coffee — I can’t tell you how many cups of burnt coffee or colored water I’ve drunk at church.
6. Public space — Regular meetings may produce curiosity and people self-introducing themselves and connecting.
7. Start tomorrow — no need to design, dream, spend lots of money. You can focus on gathering people and building relationships now instead of when its ready.
8. Low Cost — the infrastructure exists at the coffee shop, freeing you to meet people instead of paying for building plans, inspections, materials, and supplies.
9. No volunteer recruitment — you don’t have to recruit more overworked volunteers from your church to support the work.
10. Put your efforts into building relationships, not business — a coffee house is a business.

Here is another pastor that moved his bible study to Borders: No Borders at Borders.

Other coffee house ideas:

• In They like Jesus, but not the Church, Pastor Dan Kimball wrote about getting himself out of the church office and setting up a secondary office in the Cafe. He speaks of many evangelistic conversations.
• Another church simply opens their doors on Monday morning giving away free coffee.
• I used to go to the same St. Arbucks every Sunday morning prior to church. I got to know every staff person and every regular Sunday morning visitor. I had the opportunity to pray with and for nearly everyone.

Now this doesn’t mean you can’t start your own coffee house, like The Refuge has done, but don’t avoid doing evangelism while waiting for a building to finish. Get out there and build a group in the local cafe while you are waiting.

Let me ask you this?

Where are your evangelism bible studies held?

Homes, Church, neighborhood coffee shops?

Does your church dream about a coffee house ministry?

Do you have the people meeting already, or are you waiting for the space first to build a group?

Current Reading:

I finished reading They like Jesus, but not the Church by Dan Kimball. It has a companion website to explore (www.theylikejesus.com). I enjoyed Dan’s take on culture, and cultural exegises. He does a great job of explaining our current culture and how the church should engage it. Anyone interested in doing evangelism among the unchurched out to read this book. I’ll do a further review of it as promised in another entry.

I’m now reading “Confessions of a Reformissional Rev” by Mark Driscoll. I listen reguarly to sermons from Mars Hill via podcast, and have appreciated his books in the past. It’s lessons learned during the growth years of Mars Hill, and the hard lessons of a church that has grown explosively over the past few years. Some of the sarcasm in the book makes me laugh so hard my neighbors hear me when I’m on the back porch at 6am this time of year.

Some blog entries of note:
The Washington Post writes an article about Golf Ministry (link expired) – intentional outreach to golfers. As a pastor, I could never justify skipping church to play golf. When I did, I always played the best game, but couldn’t tell anybody. . . Actually, a lot of professions use golf to futher relational networking and alot of business progress is made on a golf course. It’s not really outrageous to think that golf can provide a context for conversational evangelism.

The Rambling Prophet points out another poorly worded church sign.

Church Redone posts a list of 10 ways to hinder visitors from finding your church.

In it he writes:

“Evangelism, in its greatest simplicity is God’s powerful, saving activity at
work through us for others as we share the good news of Jesus Christ. . . .
Evangelism is our multifaceted effort as individuals and as Christ’s Church in
cooperation with God’s Holy Spirit to offer what John Wesley called the
medicine of life. The overwhelming motivation for our evangelist ministry
is the divine love that fills our hearts with the joy of heaven to earth
come down.“

He goes on to say that one important question to ask is “Where is the Holy Spirit of God at work in our world today?

Theology of a “decision”
I have no problems giving an invitation at the end of an evangelistic sermon or as part of a presentation. The Internet Monk looks at this method a little theologically. I simply offer it for thought.

Invite a friend
Steve Furtick spends some time writing about inviting a friend to church. Granted its about inviting people to their particular church, but he raises a good thought or two about inviting people to come. Somewhere i have the statistic to support that of first time visitors, over 80% say they came because of the invitation of a friend.

Church attendance staistics
Speaking of attending church, here is an interesting statistical report.

Religious Literacy
Ever wonder how much bible knowledge there is in our culture? Read about it here. There are links there to further articles that the writer is reacting to.

That’s pretty much it for this week. Have a great Easter. By the way, I’ve added some further ways for you to auto subscribe to updates. At the bottom of each post there is a subscribe button that will let you put the Evangelism Coach into your newsreader, or direct to your email box.

Today’s non-Christian 20- and 30-somethings are big fans of Jesus but are less thrilled with His followers and the churches where they worship. Pastor/author Dan Kimball reveals their six most common perceptions of Christians and the Church, what they wish church was like–and why you should be listening to these emerging voices.

From Outreach Magazine.