Evangelism Where You Live

The foundational focus of  Evangelism Where You Live: Engaging Your Community is to present a philosophy of ministry that should work its way into the DNA of a church congregation.

A way of doing ministry in which Christ followers model, encourage, and equip others to be salt and light servants where they live . . . living out the great commandment and the great commission in our network of relationships in the marketplace and neighborhoods.

Chapter 1: Foundations

Pate looks at ineffective methods of church-based evangelism and the relationship between personal evangelism and the local church.  The end results he points out are a lot of effort, but little results.

Programmatic changes have not led to church growth, so perhaps a systemic change needs to be made.

Even after a lot of evangelism training, people can’t give a scripted gospel presentation, but they can answer the question: “What is God up to in your life?”

But all the emphasis on programming in the past few decades has created several barriers to this kind of relational evangelism on a church level.  Friendship evangelism models have been around for some time, but how do you mobilize the church to engage the mission field where it is planted?

Based on his own experience as a consultant and a practitioner, Pate and Wilkes put forth a philosophy of ministry that makes sense and develops this idea throughout the book:

The key argument is:

The premise of this book is simple: the key for a local church is to create natural connection points for Christ-follower to intersect the lives of people far from God through service in the community as salt and light servants. (8)

The church must purposefully deploy people into the community, become friends of sinners, if Christ-followers are to live out the Great Commission.  (15)

Their answer, using the “salt and light” images of the NT:

Churches can deploy their members according to their passions and gifts to be an irresistible influence among the people of their community. (10)

We do not offer a presentation to be memorized but a lifestyle of service that engages tangible needs wherever they occur and seizes every opportunity in that interaction to introduce the person/people served to our Rescuer and Leader, Jesus. (18)

Chapter 2: Barriers that keep us out

Pate and Wilkes give a summary of barriers that keep church individuals from connecting with the neighborhood.

Time (or perceived lack of time), program maintenance, church structures, and unawareness of passion and spiritual gifts among members of your church are primary barriers that keep your people out of the community and within the walls of your church.

The chapter unfolds this list with great detail and I think accurately reflects what I see in churches that I consult with.

Time

Many churches have far too many time consuming programs, events, and meetings each week that do not enable their church to moves even one step forward in accomplishing either the Great Commission or the Great commandment (24)

To the pastor, they provide a simple way to calculate the total number of volunteer hours it takes to sustain the current programming of the church.  The simple question is that with all the man-hours church’s ask their people to give, is there any time left over for building relationships?

Church Programs

Programs are not bad, the authors are clear to say.  But are they the tail that wags the dog?  Do your programs assist the church in fulfilling its mission, or are they stale and lifeless relics of a past era?

People far from God are not looking for more things to do.  Are we a bit off center because of the countless hours we devote to the programs at our church? (27)

The authors encourage pastors to examine their church programming to see what is hindering the mission of intentionally deploying people in the community.

Church structure and control

Essentially, how does leadership respond to new ideas and new directions?  Are policies prohibiting new directions?  Does leadership trust new ways the Holy Spirit is leading?  Are new initiatives squashed or are people given the freedom to pursue them?

Unawareness of Gifts and Passions

Passion determines where a person serves best, and gifts determine how.  Passion is God-given and answers the “where” of ministry.  Gifts are God-given and answer the “how” of ministry.  The authors maintain, rightfully so,

churches cannot reach their potential when those joined to the mission and vision of the church either (1) do not know their God-given passion and spiritual gift(s) or (2) if those aspects of who they are in Christ are underdeveloped.

Their main point in all of this is to explore how can the church get outside its walls?  How can the local church get out of the building and into the neighborhood when these barriers are in the way?

Chapter 3: Place

In my take, Chapter 3 serves as the crux of the entire book, even before the authors get to defining what they mean by community-based servant evangelism.

They do an analysis of the idea of “the third place.” I think Starbucks is famous for that term.

I remember reading Pour Your Heart Into It, about the founding of Starbucks.  Founder Howard Schultz does not conceal his passion for good coffee or for his company. His initial goals were to introduce Americans to really fine coffee, provide people with a “third place” to gather, and treat his employees well.

In an attempt to make Starbucks a “home away from home”, the café section of the store is often outfitted with comfortable chairs, as well as the usual tables and hard-backed chairs found in cafés. Free electricity outlets are provided for patrons, and many branches also have wireless Internet access.  Many larger retail stores also host “mini-concerts” for local musicians (Wikipedia)

Other stores have followed suit, such as bookstores.

Wikipedia describes the third place as “Third places, then, are “anchors” of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction.”

To Wilkes and Pate,

Place is a prioritized period of time which an individual is forced, feels obligated, or chooses to invest who they are. [Emphasis mine] (46).

Best use of Place?

The question they ask, and the brilliant one that struck me:

What place is the local church for most people?

What place should it be?  First, second, third, or farther down the list?  . . As the local church goes after first, second, or third place, with whom will they do battle?  . . .

Why do churches add places instead of leveraging the places that are already central to people’s lives?

As the foundational premise for their community-based servant evangelism, Wilkes and Pate argue that church members should be out in the community as the “third place” serving the community in ways that utilize their passion and gifts.

To those far from God, the church is likely not even in the top 10.  To those who even are close to God, I would argue it’s not even 3rd for many of us.

Family, work, school activities, typically fulfill the first, second, and third spots in a person’s life.  Followed in no particular order with personal or family interests, sports, music lessons, recreational activity, leisure activity, community activities, and religious activities.

Where is the church to fit when it has to compete for all these “spaces” in the lives of those who haven’t made space for it yet?  People will make space for what they deem valuable.  Marketers know that.

If we think of all the person hours it takes to run the church, have we left our parishioners with enough space to build relationships with unchurched people?

Helping our members in the 3rd Place

The key question for Wilkes and Pate is this:

Why can’t the church support its members when they are involved in their third, forth, and fifth place activities?

Why can’t the local church encourage members to serve in secular and civic organizations instead of only serving church programs?

Our churches can re-engage it’s culture by actively serving in schools, community, and civic organizations at a higher place (51).

Serving in the community as the third-place will provide lots of natural opportunities for people to share their faith and meet the needs of the community.

They provide several examples about coaching volleyball, helping neighbors find jobs, counseling for teen pregnancies, homeless shelters.  These community service activities are more than just good works, but provide conversational connection points where church members can share their faith and influence the world.

This can help your church members get beyond the “I don’t know any non-Christians”

(Read More: Do you have any non-Christian Friendships?).

By giving your church members

• permission and encouragement to serve in the community
• training on how to talk about their faith

you can help the people build relationships with those who are outside the church.   This sets up Chapter 4 and the rest of the book.

Chapter 4: Defining Community Based Servant Evangelism

Community-based servant evangelism (which they dub CBSE) is more than doing random acts of kindness in Jesus name.  It’s intentional evangelism.

It’s a philosophy of ministry and strategy of organizing the church that will influence ministry, events, and programs of the local church and specifically, the community (55).

Pate and Wilkes spend the next several pages defining each word and how they are using it.

The end result is a picture of empowering individuals and small groups to find a need in the community that fits their passion and gifts and then creatively find ways to meet that need.

The resultant relational connections built on the foundation of service and meeting mutual needs establish opportunities for spiritual growth and evangelism.  Instead of always recruiting church members for the program needs of the church, this permission-giving approach empowers your members to get out and serve.

As people serve, relationships naturally form.  The evangelism portion of this model is for your members to be intentional in looking for opportunities to talk about their own spiritual walk with Christ.

CBSE involves a Christ follower who serves others out of his or her passion, using one’s spiritual gifts at connection points of need in the community to demonstrate the love of Jesus to others as a salt and light servant.  . . . .

Administratively, CBSE reduces the church’s events and ongoing programs to allow people to be deployed into their daily lives to exercise their passions and gifts. (73)

This really is a philosophy of ministry.  In this chapter, the authors give lots of examples of how this has played out in their experience and what it means for this to become part of the DNA of a congregation.

CBSE involves a Christ follower who serves others out of his or her passion, using one’s spiritual gifts at connection points of need in the community to demonstrate the love of Jesus to others as a salt and light servant.  . . . .

Administratively, CBSE reduces the church’s events and ongoing programs to allow people to be deployed into their daily lives to exercise their passions and gifts. (73)

Chapter 5: Salt and Light Servants

The majority of current discipleship material seems to be focused on information, not so much on experiential transformation.  The idea was that better information and accumulated information would lead to spiritual transformation.

The authors have seen this descend into matters of personal preference, rallies around the latest Christian bestseller, and rabbit trails into the most effectively marketed latest trend.

However, they see a shift from information to experience.

A method that fosters experience to help shape a person’s spiritual formation.

Educational materials are connected with service in the community “as the context to live out the expression of a life in relationship to Christ.”

I have often noted and taught that I learn by doing.

In other businesses, I could study, study, study, but until I was actually doing it, the study didn’t make sense.  Study lead to hypothesizing, thinking about 1000 what-ifs.

But not until I got into people’s lives and talking with them 1-1 about their spiritual journey did any of the studies seem to start finding a purpose.

Perhaps a quote from Randy Pope captures this better in this illustration:

Much in the way that eating creates no appetite for exercise, so too, I have found that Bible study and prayer alone do not create mission oriented Christians.  But, just as exercise creates a desire for food and drink, mission related activities create an insatiable thirst and hunger to feed on God’s word (89).

The idea is to deploy your church members to serve their community and that kind of relational context will spur personal growth.

Eating has never created in us a desire to exercise, but preparing to run 26.2 miles in about 4 hours definitely creates not only a desire, but a need to eat (89).

In the same way, service may very well be the missing factor in developing fully devoted followers of Christ.  Transformation happens in combination with information and experience.

Chapter 6: Connection Points

The subtitle focuses the chapter on Evangelism Training.  The authors have given lots of evangelism training over the years, from memorizing gospel scripts, to relational evangelism seminars, yet not seeing any statistical evidence of new believers.  The rare church had more than 5 new believers in a year after the seminar.

Church’s are beginning to ask “Why is training people on how to share their faith not resulting in new Christ-followers?”

The authors claim that intentional community service is the missing ingredient.  The chief issue is that our church members have lost touch with genuine relationships with people far from God.

To fulfill the front half of the Great Commission the process will always begin with a Christ-follower connecting with someone far from God.  To lead someone into a personal relationship with Christ has little to do with whether someone has attended training and learned a model presentation to the Gospel (95).

Connecting Points

The chapter lays out how to find connection points with the local community, beginning with an inventory from Becoming a Contagious Christian, Hybels and Mittleberg:

• People we know
• People we used to know
• People we would like to know.

I use a similar idea with Spheres of Influence.

The key for churches is to assist members in creating a context for connection, but it remains up to the individual member to connect.

The third group, people we would like to know, is where the role of community service comes into play.  Relationships develop best around a need the mutual relationship can meet.

Where is your church member passionate?  Where is their burden? Examples:

• Single Moms?
• Fatherless kids?
• Teachers?
• Firefighters?
• Undercover FBI agents?
• Little League?

Where are their gifts?  Administratively gifted folks can organize events or run leagues.  Mercy gifted folks can visit people.

We have come to realize that not assisting our church members to develop a connection point into an authentic relationship is simply not providing good leadership.

Chapter 7 and 8: Implementing CBSE

Chapters 7 and 8 map out how to make such philosophical changes in implementing Community Based servant evangelism.  The authors note that there are several books about systemically changing a congregation, and they note that their system works when followed.

The process is organic and leadership-driven.

The first four steps are for the pastor, the next two are for the leadership, and the last 5 are how to make it public.

• Pray and read the Bible
• Church leadership must own the mission of “Love God and Love Others”
• Must be totally supported by the Senior Pastor and or Lead Pastor
• Enlist top / key church influencers
• Enlist a CBSE champion
• Enlist a CBSE leadership team
• Design a plan
• Provide training
• Cast the vision to your church
• Implement the plan
• Evaluate all aspects and correct

This list may seem generic in terms of changing systems, but the chapters tease them out more fully.

A Pastor’s Personal Prayer life

It strikes me how a pastor’s personal relationship with God is the root of this change, not only the pastors but so also the rest of the leadership.

In a 2007 review of surveys of pastors,

two hundred seventy (270 or 26%) of pastors said they regularly had personal devotions and felt they were adequately fed spirituality.

Seven hundred fifty-six (756 or 72%) of the pastors we surveyed stated that they only studied the Bible when they were preparing for sermons or lessons.

If the root of systemic change in a church is found in a pastor’s personal relationship with God, then how can churches give their pastors time to nurture that relationship?    From another study in the same report:

We found that 90% of pastors work more than 50 hours a week. One out of three pastors state that being in the ministry is clearly hazardous for their families. One out of three pastors felt totally burned out within the first five years of ministry.

Research from Crandall (see 5 phases of renewal from Turnaround and Beyond: A Hopeful Future for the Small Membership Church) indicates that personal renewal is the number one factor in successful turnaround in churches.

Research from Martha Gay Reese (Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism (Real Life Evangelism Series) elevates the importance of prayer for a congregation to pick up and maintain an evangelistic passion.

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