Evangelism Substitutes: Which one does your church commit?

Since many people are afraid of personal evangelism, many church leaders have allowed other programming to replace the work of personal evangelism and called it evangelism.

As I do seminars across the country, heads nod in agreement as I lay this out.  You might see your own church in here.

Today’s substitute:

1.  Study Committee on Evangelism

In my training and coaching, the biggest evangelism substitute that I see is “Make a study group or Evangelism Committee“

With great enthusiasm, a group decides:

“Let’s form a committee, or let’s form a small group and let’s study a book together.  Since we don’t know how to share our faith, let’s study it for 10 weeks, 12 weeks, or even a year.

Let’s spend 5 weeks choosing a book, and then talk for 7 weeks about what we are not doing, and then spend a couple of months figuring out what we want to avoid doing.” {slight sarcasm here}

You may have been part of such a group.  I know that I’ve been part of a few.

But how many of you have participated in many book studies never really turn into practical action?

Conversations in these group meetings get into

• what does evangelism mean,
• why we can’t do it “that way,”
• how we are not ready to do evangelism,
• and a variety of other topics.

I once chaired an evangelism committee that spent several meetings trying to agree on a definition of evangelism.  Since we only met monthly, it took us several months just to get that far.

Many times, such conversations are useful to help groups clarify their perspectives on evangelism.

But the key element to successful evangelism training is real life experience of having one on one spiritual conversation about Jesus.

Many group studies on evangelism do not effectively give people actual experience through sharing their faith.

They don’t have spiritual conversations with strangers, nor do they even have spiritual conversations with friends and acquaintances.

In my experience, even if the group study has homework assignments, people are hesitant to initiate spiritual conversation and reflect on it.

So we spin our wheels.

Let me ask you this?

If you are a group leader, what steps can you make to encourage personal experience in evangelism in a group like this?  Let’s have a conversation.

(Image Credit: Nutmeg)