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Coaching Congregational Evangelism

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How Pastors Lead Congregational Evangelism #1

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Coaching Congregational Evangelism

Pastor, you have a remarkable privilege to address a group of people each and every week and influence their life for growth in Jesus.

Every time I step into a pulpit, I recognize that responsibility and realize that my words will be empowered by the Spirit of God to change people.

From the front platform, pulpit, or stage, you can coach a passion for evangelism in the congregation, or even call people to respond to what God is doing in their life.

Over the next few days, I want to share with you a new series:

5 Ways a Pastor can raise the Evangelistic Temperature of the Congregation.

Key #1 Share Personal Evangelism Experience

In 3 Keys to Ignite the Evangelism Passion of a Congregation, I encourage pastors to tell their own stories of personal evangelism.

Raw stories about conversations, successes, failure.

Tell them regularly.

Hmmm, I don’t have any stories.

If you are like many pastors, you may have very few stories to tell.

Reese’s research in Unbinding the Gospel found that many pastors have no personal experience with evangelism (Reese, 9).

The footnote explains that 10 out of 60 denominational seminaries in mainline denominations require even half a course in evangelism for graduation.  The other half of the course is often paired with stewardship (p. 22).

Hmmm, I don’t have time. . . .

I know it’s not easy.

In this video (Can Pastors find time for Evangelism?) Pastor Richard White talks about his own struggles to find time as an evangelist.

Pastors have so many responsibilities that evangelism often gets overlooked for easier responsibilities.  Particularly solo pastors that are doing everything from the weekly bulletin, visitation, weddings, funerals, and fixing the leaking toilets.

How do I grow in this area?

Let me suggest some action steps for you:

If you would like a 30 day personal coaching plan in personal evangelism during the next month, contact me via email our contact page.   Consider using some of your study leave money for this.

Stay tuned for the next part in our series, 5 Ways a Pastor can raise the Evangelistic Temperature of the Congregation.

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How Pastors Lead Congregational Evangelism #3

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Coaching Congregational Evangelism

Passion for Evangelism Flame FirePastors carry the torch of vision, and are usually the key public person of influence in a congregation.

It’s been observed that pastors are asked to cast vision for everything from

  • Finding volunteers for work parties or service projects,
  • Recruiting volunteers for Children’s Church,
  • Encouraging small group participation
  • Community initiatives or outreaches,
  • Stewardship and fundraising,
  • Building programs,
  • And so on.

Pastors cast vision about the mission and vision of the church.

You have the sacred privilege to speak regularly in front of your church and the responsibility to define the congregation’s core values and restate the goals.

Pastors are also developer of leaders.

In part 3 of our series, 5 Ways a Pastor can raise the Evangelistic Temperature of the Congregation we’ll look at how pastors can cultivate an evangelism passion within the leadership of their church.

Develop your leaders through shaping their vision.

Key #3.  Challenge your staff and/or leaders for their own personal evangelism.

Pastor, many of you have a church leadership board of some kind, and many of you may be in multiple staff situations.

Spread the evangelistic fire in your own heart by nurturing it in those who work most closely with you in the life of the church.

If you are the lead pastor, one way to increase a congregation’s passion for evangelism is to regularly challenge your staff and/or board in their own personal evangelism.

If you are not the lead pastor, but lead teams, committees, or small groups, challenge the leaders you lead for their own personal evangelism.

1. Cultivate Personal Evangelism

For example, lead them in thinking through

  • What can they do to grow their own evangelism skills?
  • Can they make a list of 5 people that they are actively seeking to influence for Christ?
  • Are they praying regularly for those 5 people?
  • What are they doing to invest in those relationships?
  • Are they regularly inviting and bringing people to church?

Hold them accountable through such means as your regular performance reviews or leadership development meetings.

Of course, lead by example.

2. Personal Development

If you encourage personal reading as part of a leader’s growth, suggest a few books on the theme of evangelism.  (See my Recommended Books on Personal Evangelism, or Church Hospitality Books).

Discuss what is being read and what difference that will make in their ministry.

I make a habit of trying to read at least 2 books a month to grow myself.  One is usually on leadership and life skills, the other is on something about evangelism, church growth, church planting, or theology.

Since this is my area of specialty, I read a lot of evangelism books.

You may want to have your staff read only one or two on evangelism.

Use study leave money or conference money to send your staff to an evangelism conference or organize one for your local area.  Since you are likely trying to develop your staff in many different areas, you may only be able to do an evangelism conference every second or third year.

The idea is to be intentional in your choices of the multitude of conferences out there.

3. Cast vision in their areas of responsibility

Coach the evangelistic passion in their areas of ministry and leadership, like small groups, worship teams, Christian Education.

Lead them in thinking through:

  • How their ministry activity be more welcoming to visitors.
  • How their leadership spreads the evangelistic vision into their area of responsibility.
  • Cultivating the evangelistic leadership development of the leaders they lead.
  • How their small groups can be more invitational and welcoming.

Cultivate prayer

Effective church leadership teams pray together.  I’ve grown convinced that more is accomplished in prayer rather than incessant conversations that never end.

Prayer is

  • where passion for the lost can be expressed,
  • longings for more salvations can be stated, and
  • agreeing in prayer has a side benefit of mutually encouraging one another.

Take some of your prayer time in your staff meetings to have each one pray for those who don’t know Christ.

Spend prayer time as a team praying for your church’s evangelistic outreaches.

Spend prayer time as a team praying for the church’s new preaching series and the effectiveness of invitational-type activities.

Organize prayer walks in your community.

Action:

Stay tuned for the next part in our series that will come out next week.

5 Ways a Pastor can raise the Evangelistic Temperature of the Congregation.

 

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How Pastors Lead Congregational Evangelism #2

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Coaching Congregational Evangelism

I’ve been listening to some podcasts from various different churches in the United States as I exercise. (Read: 6 Steps to Get your sermons recorded again to see a cheap and easy way to make them available on line.)

One key feature that I’ve observed in the podcast of these growing churches is the regular appearance of some kind of life-changing testimony.

  • Why someone started to follow Christ.
  • Journey to baptism
  • Celebration of baptism.
  • Celebration of new members.
  • Stories of how program / preaching series made a difference.

With each one of these testimonies, the pastor affirmed the congregation and reinforced the values of personal and corporate evangelism.

This brings me to Key #2 in our series: 5 Ways a Pastor can raise the Evangelistic Temperature of the Congregation.

Key #2: Testimonies of Life Change

In these podcasts, the pastor gave some of sermon time to let people tell their own story.

I listened to them and made the following observations.

1.  Testimonies were brief.

Some were given by video, some were given live.

It is clear that the videos were edited to tell the story in a compact form, and likely the individuals were coached in how to tell their story in a few minutes.  Many people are nervous giving any kind of talk, so some intentional preparation of live speakers likely was made.

2.  Testimonies were on topic.

If the sermon series was on acts of grace, the story was about an act of grace that transformed a life.

If the sermon was on prayer, the story was how someone experienced an answer to prayer, often through the anonymous involvement of a church member.

3.  The pastor congratulated the congregation.

For our purposes, this is the most crucial point.

These stories are the fruit of the congregations evangelism efforts.

When the testimony was over, the pastor would say something like: “Isn’t that awesome to see how God . . . . ”  Often there was some spontaneous applause of thanksgiving.

Then the pastor helped the congregation see it’s role in that person’s story and then praised them for cooperating with God, praised them for their invitations, praised them for serving and answering prayer.

Those words of affirmation continue to reinforce the role of all aspects of evangelism – the fruit of the labor.

Key times:

Two particular celebration events come to mind.

1.  Baptism.

As individuals come to faith in your church, let them tell their stories.

Baptisms are a memorable time to tell stories.

People can see and celebrate life change.  People can partly identify with stories of others walking through the same circumstance.

Celebrating Baptisms can be a great time to remind your church of the role they played in God’s work.

2.  New Member ceremonies.

If your church does those publicly, these can be another time of highlighting the transforming grace of Jesus Christ.

Since I do a lot of thinking about hospitality and welcome issues, I often learned before hand why did these new members choose to stay.  Invariably, one key factor was how they were welcomed as a church visitor.

This would be a time to congratulate the congregation on doing a good job on welcoming the visitor.

Action:

  • Look out over the next 6-10 weeks of your preaching schedule.
    • Are there baptisms / new member events scheduled?
    • Do you need to organize such a celebration?
  • Look out over your next preaching series or two.
    • Are there people in your congregation that are growing in an area of your preaching topic whose story would make for a good testimony?
    • Schedule a testimony that is related to your topic.
    • Work with your video team to get a story, or work with the person to tell their story.

Personal note:

March 6, 2010 we’ll be celebrating 4 adult baptisms!

We’re turning it into a big celebration of God’s work of redemption.

Stay tuned for the next part in our series,

5 Ways a Pastor can raise the Evangelistic Temperature of the Congregation.

Can’t remember to come back each day?  Get the article automatically by choosing one of the subscription options to in the right side bar of the main blog site.

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How Pastors Lead Congregational Evangelism #4

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Coaching Congregational Evangelism

Sometimes I wonder if in the big rush to be “missional” that some churches forget the attractional side of their main event – the worship service on Sunday.

But, for many churches, that Sunday event is not something that will be going away or be done away with.  It’s not an either or proposition.

Rather, the question for this series is how to utilize the Sunday morning worship service to lead congregational evangelism? [Read more…] about How Pastors Lead Congregational Evangelism #4

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How Pastors Can Lead Congregational Evangelism #5

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Coaching Congregational Evangelism

For the last part of our series Coaching Congregational Evangelism, I want to share some very practical advice a church planter gave me.

“Evangelism doesn’t just happen.  You’ve got to do it.”

I was asking him how he grew his church from scratch in a few months (I no longer remember the exact numbers).

His answer was:

“We do intentional outreaches every week.  Evangelism doesn’t just happen.  You’ve got to do it.”

So this brings us to the last part of this series on Coaching Congregational Evangelism,:

Key # 5.  Schedule Evangelistic Outreaches

Number 4 on the list focuses on the “Come and See” of attracting people to church.  That still play an important role in congregational evangelism.

Here, the focus in on engaging the community outside the church.

I see two different approaches to this.

1.  Acts of Community Service

Churches will do social projects that serve the community.

For example:

  • Health screening
  • Community clean up day
  • Free dental clinic for a day.
  • Job fair for the community
  • Tutoring or after school programs
  • Transportation for senior citizens
  • Fundraising walk/run for disease research
  • Clean up the overgrown yard of an elderly shut-in

You might already think you have evangelistic outreaches, but ask yourself:

  • Are our outreaches simply community service no different other community service groups?
  • Do the leave the recipients of our community service to guess what we are wordlessly saying?

Many foundations and charities do good social work.  How do the recipients of our community service know that we Christians are any different?

I ask the same question Is Community Service Evangelism?

There, read of the story of Olympic Gold Medalist and his shoes.

See how a nation misinterpreted the color of shoes.

See what insight that gives about your community service.

Possible Areas of Growth:

Don’t just do good deeds.  Look for those kairos moments prepared by the Holy Spirit to influence a person’s journey towards Christ.

2.  Servant Evangelism approaches

I’ve written elsewhere about servant evangelism.

The basic idea is an act of generosity to your community, along with a marketing card that advertises the church.

For example,

  • Give away free water bottles at a marathon,
  • Gas buy-downs,
  • Pass out batteries for smoke detectors,
  • Food giveaways to your neighbors.

This was the approach of the church planter said me.

“Evangelism doesn’t just happen.  You’ve got to do it.”

An improvement, I think, is what Pate and Wilkes write about in their book Evangelism Where You Live: Engaging Your Community which gets beyond the event and into a lifestyle, where

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.  . . . . (73)

Johnson, in Got Style? Personality Based Evangelism, devotes a whole chapter to servant evangelism and connects it to a church’s personality.

Possible Areas of Growth

Read

Action:

  • Look over your church calendar for the next few months.
    • What community service projects are happening?
    • How can you encourage your volunteers to look for faith sharing moments?
    • How can you prepare them to share?
    • Do you need to schedule some?
  • What servant evangelism projects are happening?
    • Do you need to schedule some?
    • What are some community needs you can meet?

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How Pastors Lead Congregational Evangelism Series

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Coaching Congregational Evangelism

Here is the whole series in a nutshell. . ..

Of course, there is much more to develop under each part, but at least it’s a start.

Enjoy.

Feel free to post this to your social networking sites since it summarizes the entire series.

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