How I prepared a church for Door to Door witnessing

A church on invited me out last weekend to prepare their team to go door to door.

I thought I was invited to give my workshop on personal evangelism.

Because of some miscommunication, I didn’t realize that this was my expected purpose until it was too late.

The organizer mentioned that 53 people were attending the workshop. Here is what she said after the event.

“We often want evangelism reduced to a formula we can put into a book and follow it like a recipe. But what you’ve helped us to see is that evangelism is a process, and that it’s a process that each one of worked through ourselves in coming to faith.
This helps us to realize that when we go door to door, we need to be patient with people who are not yet ready to receive, and be receptive to noticing those who are.
We need to be listening to the Spiritual Thirst.”

Reflections

I don’t normally teach on door to door style evangelism, and didn’t realize ahead of time that this was my expected purpose.

However, the style of evangelism that I teach can be applied to door to door evangelism, by focusing on listening to the Holy Spirit and find those who are ready to engage in genuine spiritual conversation.

Door to door techniques can be used well to

Invite people to a special church event
Find out the spiritual needs of the community
Offer to pray with people who mention a spiritual need
Engage in evangelistic conversations when people are open to such conversations.

A Sales Call for Jesus

I think many door to door conversations can go wrong when it becomes a “sales call for Jesus.”

In this method, the evangelist has a fixed script to follow, trying to argue an often unwilling person to accept the offer of eternal life.

If a person is spiritually ready like the Ethiopian eunuch was in Acts 8, this can be done well – the person is spiritually thirsty and willing to learn more.

But if a person answering the door has little interest, or wants to argue about theology, then there is no spiritual thirst, and to try and stick to the script causes hostility, anger, and perhaps a deafness. Scripts are helpful when the spiritual thirst is present, and quite often useless when it’s not.

Effective door to door mission

I think the key to door to door approaches is to listen for a person’s level of spiritual thirst.

If it is there, keep going in conversation about the person’s spiritual thirst. You get to help them move closer in their journey to Christ.

If there is none, offer to pray about a need and then move on. Door to door campaigns are not the place to waste time with the unwilling.

Door to Door Training Resource

While there are many gospel presentations (I call them gospel scripts) that one could memorize for door to door evangelism campaigns, I teach an evangelism method can help you at each door you visit during your evangelism campaign.