Evangelism Coach

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Mark Driscoll on video explaining the various themes on the Emerging Church. I find this a helpful summary of the ongoing conversation and a fair critique of it.

The Jolly blogger asks: “Why are church plants the most successful at reaching people and does my established church stand any chance of being renewed?”

Five ways to sharpen you evangelistic skills.

A pastor’s conversational encounter in a cafe. Get out of the office my friend and see who you run into.

Take a risk and pray. From a slide show on evangelism full of quotes from books.

Check out this quote on authentic Evangelism at Pentecostal Post-it Notes:

Quote on Conversational Evangelism:

“Actual conversations with other human beings rarely follow a script. So resolve now to be OK with interruptions, awkward pauses, rabbit trails, and even bursts of anger. Keep your agenda to love, but drop your agenda for how the conversation has to play out.” – Walter Henegar Evangelism for Dummies: The surprising gift of stating the obvious.

 

 

Next week, I’ll be teaching on Evangelism in Panama at the Youth with a Mission Base.  Pray for the work there.

This weekend, I’ll be preaching 3 services at Centro Cristiano Betania in Panama City.  If you are not in church on Sunday, you can listen to the live stream at http://www.stereoferadio.com/ at 8.30CT or 11:00CT.

Have a great weekend.

 

 

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This week, I read Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens by Niel Cole. He writes about spontaneous church planting and leans towards a viral house church model. The church should be spreading the DNA of the kingdom spontaneously, thru planting new and smaller churches.



It was quite a contrast after reading Confessions of a Reformissional Rev by Mark Driscoll, who is pastor of Mars Hill, a mega church in Seattle and their dreams to keep growing by adding new people into the Kingdom.


Both have a passion for seeing people come to faith in Christ, though both go about it in different ways.

I enjoyed Cole’s thinking outside the pizza box, his passion for evangelism, and his rather sound explanations of new testament era churches. He does a good job in explaining the biblical idea about the priesthood of believers. I liked the critical thinking about engaging the culture.

I found two challenges with Cole’s book.

1. What makes a church?
It didn’t go into much detail about the individual churches themselves, how they are structured, or what makes them definably different than a traditional small group. It read as if any small group of people that organized themselves would have been called a church. Perhaps he lays out further development somewhere and I’ve not yet come across it.

But I’m not sure what separates these little churches from small groups disconnected from a church. He doesn’t interact with the rich theological history of the marks of a church, which in my confessional tradition (Presbyterian) are

1. The pure preaching of the Word of God as sound doctrine,
2. Administration of the sacraments,
3. The exercise of discipline

The point here is not to debate tradition, the validity of how many marks define the church visible or invisible, but rather how to blend the material in the book into the richness of good sound theological tradition.

If’ you are more familiar with his writings elsewhere, I invite you to chime in with comments.

2. Church Leadership
There are variety of historical understandings on church leadership and plenty of good books. Driscoll’s book devotes a chapter to exploring church leadership given that Mars Hill is hosting over 10,000 people a weekend.

From reading this book, there is no clear discussion of leadership other then a good discussion on the priesthood of believers. But New Testament ideas of “appointing elders” or “pastors and overseers” is not developed in this book. Some of the illustrations indicate perhaps the premature elevation of inmature leaders, or the lack of protecting churches from wrong doctrine.

Implications
For our family, we will setting up shop in a new town (and a new country) in the not too distant future.

Our current ministry plan is to link up with a local church, but start new small groups in our section of town.

We will live in a 14 story apartment building, in a neighborhood with more condos in nearby towers.

Our group will be made up of mostly non-Christians who are seeking a relationship with God and want to discover their faith. I hope they as they find faith, they would get involved with the local church, instead of seeing themselves as a local church as Cole seems to indicate.

Once such folks are established and connected to the local church, we’d start another small group.

Let me ask you this?
Would you pray about starting a small group with your neighbors?

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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.

 

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