
How can we encourage a culture of evangelism in our church? We launched a very simple idea recently that I’m excited about!
A couple of years ago I heard a speaker at the Amplify evangelism conference. He told us about something they did at their young church and I thought it was a brilliant idea.
A brilliant idea
The pastors wanted to encourage the church to share their faith. So they started tracking how many gospel conversations they were having.
The idea was very simple. They made a chart. Anytime they had a conversation with someone during the week about the gospel, or church, or God, they would mark it down on the chart. They set a goal of having a certain number of these conversations in one month (I think the goal was 100, if memory serves.)
I’ve been waiting for the right time to try this, and I just launched it at our church two weeks ago. I preached about the Parable of the Sower, and we set up the chart. We didn’t set a goal, but will simply mark down the conversations that we have. I shared three short stories of recent “God conversations” that I have had and wrote three stars on the board. And, we’re off!
Track the thing that you can actually control
The thing I like about this idea is that it tracks the one thing that we can actually choose to do when it comes to evangelism: sowing seeds.
Our first inclination is to count the number of people who become disciples. Or count those who simply pray a prayer to commit their lives to Christ. Those are things to celebrate, but they are not the first step to becoming a disciple. The first step is to plant seeds. And that’s the one that we can choose to do regularly. We can choose to develop a habit of sowing seeds wherever and whenever we can.
We learn from the Parable of the Sower that a large percentage of these seeds will not result in true discipleship. So that’s not the point. The point is to build in ourselves a habit of sowing seeds readily and widely, and letting God produce the growth.
Our church already has a fantastic emphasis on personal evangelism, and I’m looking forward to seeing if this chart will help encourage it even more.
Let’s get to it!
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