Develop Your Church’s Evangelism Strategy

Healthy churches grow. 

They grow in worship, fellowship, discipleship, and mission engagement in the community.

They also grow through evangelism.

What is your church’s evangelism strategy?

A vibrant culture of personal evangelism would mean your church members are actively sharing their faith in Christ with people in their circles of influence.

A vibrant culture of welcome and hospitality can help people who are not yet Christian experience your church and find a place to get questions answered in their journey to following Christ.

Lead your church forward with an evangelism strategy

Strategies convert intention of your mission into action.

Strategies are shaped by the goals you set.

Perhaps your evangelism goal this year is equipping your church members to engage more faith-sharing conversations.  Your strategy for evangelism would include training on evangelistic conversational skills or apologetics.

Perhaps your goal for evangelistic church growth might be to retain more families who visit your church.  Your strategies could include launching a church welcome ministry or planning your visitor connection process.

Most of us know this true. 

If we don’t plan ahead, we will miss the opportunities that present themselves.

Three Areas for Your Church’s Evangelism Strategy

As you prayerfully shape your vision to grow your church’s evangelism practices, start one of these areas.

Looking into these areas doesn’t mean the rest of your church’s mission is overlooked or ignored.

It goes without question that your church’s mission has many parts that are all running at the same time.

But when you begin to focus on one of these areas to improve your church’s evangelism strategy, you’ll likely find a weak link to shore up to support that area. 

Perhaps your goal is to increase the number of invitations to church. 

As you brainstorm, you realize that you need to improve your first impressions ministry to help your church members feel confident their guests will be welcomed well.

Consider these three areas to brainstorm shaping the evangelism strategy for your church.

1.  Equip people to share their faith in their daily life.

• Intentional training
• Provide opportunities for practical experience.
• Model your growth in personal evangelism skills
• Lead staff and other leaders in their growth in personal evangelism.
• Do a live virtual evangelism training
• Prayer for the community and the lost.
• Building authentic relationships with non-Christians.
• Send your church leaders to an evangelism training seminar.
• Host an Evangelism Training Seminar.
• Find an evangelism program like the Alpha course and implement it.
• Choose your church’s default gospel presentation — a basic evangelism gospel script.
• Develop an evangelism accountability small group.

2. Improve the weekend experience to support the work of evangelism

• Conduct a church hospitality assessment and seek ways to improve the welcoming of visitors.
• Hospitality ministry to all who enter.
• Connect people to faith and friends.
• Do a live (virtual) Hospitality Training for your team.
• Preach themes connected to life and community needs
• Regular sharing of the gospel during sermons.
• Comeback events (a new sermon series or launch a group, for example).
• Church website and social media to support personal invitations
• Special events that mobilizing members to invite friends.
• Set your outreach events that are intentionally geared towards your target audience.
• Host “Invite a friend” Sundays.

3. Mobilize people to engage/serve the community

• Plan and deploy people in community service
• Find and develop the church’s heart for the community
• Launch ministries to engage the community.
• Help people see the faith-sharing opportunities during their service.

This list is not exhaustive, but a way to categorize some initial ways to develop your evangelism strategy for your church.

Define your outcome: What Does Done Look Like?

Now that you have identified a particular area for your evangelism strategy, determine the goal you want to accomplish.

As you brainstorm your evangelism plan for this year, begin to ask yourself the question:

“What does done look like?”

Many churches want to have a focus on evangelism, but do not define the specific goal that measures “we did it.” 

• Do you want 10 adult conversions?
• Do you want to read 10 evangelism books for your growth?
• Do you want to launch a food pantry and teach your volunteers how to share the gospel while sharing resources?
• Do you want to have 10 people trained in personal evangelism skills?
• Do you want to . . . . . ?

In other words, what does done look like?

Once you have identified your outcome, what will you choose to measure your progress?

Pick One and Deep Dive

I recently coached a small church pastor through a similar brainstorming process for their church’s “Year for Evangelism” campaign.

Pastor asked my help to shape the evangelism strategy for their 19-member country church.

I kept asking him, what does successful evangelism look like for your church at the end of year?

The ideas started spilling out like a waterfall:

• 10 baptisms upon profession of faith
• Launch a church greeter ministry
• Run a personal evangelism training course.
• Preach an evangelism sermon Series.
• Run 3 evangelistic small groups.
• Do 4 community-centered servant evangelism projects.

The evangelistic strategy ideas started flowing once the pastor landed on the goal of 10 new members through profession of faith.  This might be 3-5 new families, a reasonable stretch for this small church.

The projects are all interconnected, but flow from the pastor’s starting idea of reaching 10 new believers.

You’ll likely develop an impossible list to accomplish all at once.   Instead of feeling overwhelmed by everything, begin to evaluate what you and your church can reasonably accomplish.

After you pick from one of your many ideas, develop your action plans, measurements, and your process for evaluating and tweaking your objectives.

Take Action on Your Evangelism Strategy

If you haven’t already done so, carve out some time where your leadership will pray about your evangelism strategy.

Listen for God’s guidance as you spend time in prayer.

Ask God:

• What does the year of evangelism look like for our church?
• What are you calling our church to do to expand kingdom of God right here?
• What programs are you calling our church to do?