Podcast Episode #216
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We lament the decline of evangelism in many local churches and discuss ways to assess whether or not your church is effective when it comes to evangelism. Also, I highlight a humiliating defeat in sports to my grandson.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
- I would rather a church have a programmatic evangelism emphasis than none at all.
- Pastors, keep track of the annual number of faith conversions in your church.
- One of the great travesties in many churches today is a dichotomy between evangelism and discipleship.
- The number one correlation of evangelistic churches is evangelistic pastors.
- A church that has an evangelistic reputation is one that has a good reputation.
- Healthy, evangelistic churches are typically known in the community for caring for the community.
- 95% of the non-Christian, unchurched community are receptive to faith conversations.
- If your church is not seeing a lot of conversions from adults, it’s likely because your adults aren’t sharing their faith.
The six points we discuss about evangelistic effectiveness of churches are:
- Keep track of total annual conversions.
- Look at trends of those annual conversions.
- Calculate the church’s conversion ratio: Average attendance / total annual conversions (under 20:1 is good).
- Is the pastor personally evangelistic?
- Does the church have an evangelistic reputation in the community?
- Does incarnational ministry become transformational ministry?
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Feedback
If you have a question you would like answered on the show, fill out the form on the podcast page here at ThomRainer.com. If we use your question, you’ll receive a free copy of I Will.
There’s no doubt that an evangelistic pastor will have a church of people who are evangelistically inclined and are also out there ‘doing it’. He is, afterall, an evangelist! However, many of our churches have pastors who are Teachers first, rather than Evangelists. Still others have very caring Pastoral type pasters who aren’t perhaps the greatest teachers or preachers.
You see where I’m going with this. When our churches are typically defined by the leadership of one man ‘up front’ week after week, there is a high likelihood that the church will take on that ‘value’ and likely also attract those with that gifting. Afterall, he’s modeling something, it’s easy to see and like minded folks will be drawn to that.
We must either accept this reality and not lament it OR we can work to change it and work away from the one man, one leader, one guy who does it all and equally value the other gifts. I say equally value, give equal Sunday morning sermon/stage time to men and women with all the variety of gifts who can model all aspects of our faith and ‘job’ of equipping the saints.
Of course, evangelism should be on all our minds and we have responsibility to share what we’ve seen and heard and experienced with non-believers. But when we try to have a one size fits all solution, we should not be surprised when some ‘sizes’ don’t have as much effect–whether in the pulpit or in the pew.
Moderation
with Mediocrity..
not the Christ in me
Dr. Rainer,
What about evangelistic methods such as door to door calling? May you do a podcast on different methods and the positives and negatives of each.
That would be extremely beneficial.
Thank you,
I visited a church down the street. We liked the church. Next evening 3 of the members were at our front door., with a goodie bag ( Chocolate chip cookies). Next day a written card from pastor, next day a phone call from someone in our age group inviting us to join them to a community group. That’s how you reach out to people!