If I Ever Wanted to Get Better At Evangelism…
If I ever wanted to get better at evangelism I would embrace six important values into my life. As one entrusted with helping LFM in the area of Missional Leadership, my goal is to help congregations and individuals become more free to do evangelism. The enduring quality of a missional congregation and a missional Christian is that we grow in dexterity and comfort with the practice of evangelism away from the gathering of God’s people at a church. For the previous two paradigms of church we have basically herded people to a church (or to a revival) to be evangelized. A specialist like Billy Graham or Leighton Ford did the evangelistic job, and the rest of us were simply the herders to get unbelieving friends to a place where such an event unfolded. But in this new era of the church – the missional era – we are finding that unbelieving people are not showing up at a church or a revival. Thus, the story of Jesus must be told in neighborhoods, workplaces, and other gathering places (i.e. coffee shops, gyms, yoga classes). This sharing in the common places of life is not a new practice in church history, but it will be new for many of us. Many of us have fears about such conversations because they used to create awkward situations. My hope is to invite you to grow in comfort by focusing on 6 different values that can open up something much more organic and authentic than learning a sales pitch about heaven. I’ll give you the list now – and over the next weeks I will describe each of these words/phrases one at a time in 6 separate conversations.
Six Words – Six Values
- Compassion – for people
- Interest – in people
- Proximity – with people
- Intriguing – around people
- Provocative – for people
- Questions – for people
