Evangelism Coach

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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?

Popularity: 57% [?]

I’m not the first to point this out, but I’ve heard the expression: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Perhaps you’ve heard it too. Perhaps it’s a cliche that is beyond trendy.

But, when one person is excited about evangelism, and doing it, sharing their experiences, and reflections, other people begin to get the idea that perhaps “I can do this too. ”

When you are causing the evangelistic tide to rise, others will rise up and do evangelism.

You keep your evangelistic passion high, other’s will increase as well.

It just pours out.

When I preached every Sunday, I always had a new evangelism story — a book I was reading, a conversation I had, a prayer that I had with somebody. People around me began to feel more comfortable doing evangelism, and within a few months, people were telling me their own stories of conversations.

That’s where I learned to love evangelism coaching. Asking folks to recall the conversation, explore it a little more, think about how to do the conversation differently the next time a similar topic came about — just like a debriefing. Asking questions to help sharpen the skills.

As long as my evangelistic temperature was hot, the people around me warmed up to evangelism.

Stoking the Fires

How does one keep the fires hot? Let me give you 15 right off the bat. It’s not a linear list and not exhaustive, but here goes:

1. Keep your relationship with God strong.
2. Read the Scriptures, meditate on them as your day goes on.
3. Enjoy noticing God’s activity around you.
4. Regularly tell others about God’s work in your life.
5. Regularly engage in evangelistic conversations
6. Review them as part of your devotional life.
7. Read evangelism books.
8. Read and comment on evangelism blogs.
9. Participate in the evangelism activity of your local church
10. Share your evangelism stories with others.
11. Join an evangelism coaching group that meets regularly to review conversations.
12. Worship deeply.
13. Pray regularly.
14. Notice the people around you and pray for them.
15. Practice explaining the gospel clearly and simply.

Let me ask you this

What would you add to this list?

Popularity: 49% [?]

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.

 

 

Popularity: 93% [?]

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?

Popularity: 31% [?]