You want to share your faith, but fears stand in the way of your personal evangelism. To truly conquer your fear, you might want to invest in some kind of personal evangelism training.
Personal evangelism involves
- the active sharing of the activity of God in your life,
- listening to the spiritual needs of the friend you are talking with,
- regularly praying for your friends, and
- sharing the gospel content with them, in such a way
- that God brings conviction of sin and a desire to surrender one’s life to Him.
Personal Evangelism is one of the greatest joys of following Christ. It is also is very intimidating for many people, perhaps for you as well.
But the best way to grow in your skills is to learn how to talk about your faith in a conversational way.
As you spend time with Jesus on a regular basis and experience His blessings in your life, you will discover a growing desire to share your faith. Here is what I’ve learned:
In other words, the key to personal evangelism is to do it.
As DL Moody once quipped so about this form of evangelism:
“Then I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.”
10 Steps to Better Personal Evangelism
Before you invest in any course on personal evangelism, you can go the free route for growing in your evangelism skills.
There are other forms of evangelism to consider (like congregational evangelism, evangelistic preaching, etc), but this tutorial is designed to get you up and running with 10 easy lessons that explain the concepts that I teach in my training on personal evangelism.
Here are some practical steps to personal evangelism:
- Make a prayer list of friends.
- Ten Prayer Points For your Friends
- Free tool to uncover the richness of your personal testimony
- How to Find Current Stories of God’s Activity
- The power of Questions in Personal Evangelism (links to over 100 conversation starters)
- Where does a new believer start with personal evangelism
- 7 Tips For More Personal Evangelism Conversations
- How to Practice a Gospel Presentation
- 7 Axioms of Personal Evangelism
- 7 Habits for Highly Effective Personal Evangelism
Know the gospel: The best place to start
The best place to start in personal evangelism is not by asking the question: “What is the best method?”
Rather, the best place to start is by knowing the gospel message.
Master the message first, and then methods will follow.
Do you know the core content of the gospel? Can you share a version of the gospel?
Once you have mastered the gospel content, you can then use any method you want. Memorize a gospel outline.
The key to awesome personal evangelism conversations
The goal is to have conversations with your friends, and even those random strangers. Spiritual thirst is the key point to listen for. Spiritual thirst opens the doors to conversation that are natural and not in any way fearful. Read more about spiritual thirst in this tutorial.
Author: Chris Walker is the founder of EvangelismCoach.org and teaches evangelism and church hospitality throughout the Americas.