Missionary Identity

As Christians, I believe we should always be more driven by our missionary identity than we are by our national identity, our political identity, our environmental identity, our social identity, or even our church identity.

Loving Your Community

Several years ago, I talked with a local sheriff about the pressing needs he saw in our community. While he was grateful for the church groups who came through the jail to offer Bible studies and prayer meetings with his prisoners, he said it would make an even greater impact to “stand at the back door and meet the inmates when they are released.”

More Church Planting Is Needed

Among the best ways for us to reach people with the gospel is personal evangelism and church planting. Even with all the changes in culture this remains our best option for reaching unbelievers.

Church planting efforts need focus. A scattershot approach will not be the most effective.

Here are five things we are going to need to increase church planting capacity.

Should the church be more inclusive or exclusive?

One of the biggest challenges that Christians face today is reconciling the seemingly exclusive claims of Jesus with the postmodern cultural value of inclusivity.

Whether you are at a Starbucks or a law firm, a university campus or a preschool, inclusivity is what everyone seems to be striving for. It’s written in value statements. It’s expressed in public memos (sometimes after an employee Twitter gaff). And perhaps most importantly, it’s simply assumed to be an inherent good by most people in society.

Loving the Lost

It’s fascinating that a lot of Christians don’t seem to like non-Christians, often referred to as the lost or the unchurched. Often we want to keep away from messy people - perhaps missing the obvious that we are messy as well.

7 Ways to Create an Evangelistic Culture in Your Church

So your church is “evangelical.” But is it evangelistic? Here are seven ways you as a pastor can build an evangelistic culture that’s about more than baptism numbers.

While many churches would consider themselves to be evangelical, I have personally found very few of these same churches to have a strong evangelistic culture.

I wouldn’t evaluate this through the number of conversions reported by churches. That is solely the work of the Holy Spirit. Instead, I suggest we look at some key indicators of an evangelistic culture from Scripture.

5 Ways to Elevate Evangelism

Evangelists are hard to come by these days. Although the gift of evangelism is listed with several others in Ephesians 4, it seems like evangelists are few and far between. Peter Wagner, a longtime professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, first estimated that 10 percent of Christians are evangelists. However, more recent studies have suggested the percentage of a congregation who are gifted as evangelists to be closer to 1 to 4.

Interestingly, the word evangelist only appears three times in Scripture, which supports the idea that it may be somewhat rare (Acts 21:9; 2 Tim. 4:5; Eph. 4:11). What are the marks of an evangelist? How do you know if you are gifted? Here are several indicators:

8 convictions concerning evangelism

For most of my time in ministry, I’ve focused on helping pastors, from seminarians to veteran pastors, lead their churches in evangelism. Here are the key convictions as to why I think evangelism is as vital today as it ever has been and why I am devoted to it.

Preaching the Cross

When I was growing up, my family did not go to church every Sunday, but we never missed Christmas Eve or Easter.

This image of the “Christmas-and Easter-only” churchgoer is always in the back of my mind when I prepare to preach in the weeks leading up to Easter Sunday. If someone only went to church twice a year, what sermon would I want them to hear? How could I sum up the essence of the gospel in thirty minutes? What message would make the biggest impact? What words might make all the difference?

If you don’t care for the poor, you don’t understand the gospel

Karl Marx famously called Christianity the opiate of the people, but I think it’s actually the smelling salts. Because when you really understand God’s grace, you wake up to injustice, and you are moved by compassion.

The reverse is true as well: When you are blind to the needs of the poor, it raises the question of whether or not you’ve actually ever believed the gospel, because you are unaware of your own pressing need for God’s merciful attention to you in your sin.

Three Things Churches Love that KILL Outreach

All churches love certain things. Some love fellowship, some worship, some prayer. Those are good loves. Some are neutral loves. Some are not. Other churches love their building, their history or their strategy.

Those can be good or bad, depending on what we mean by love and how we value those things. But, some things that churches love hurt their mission and hinder their call. Here are three I've observed from my work with thousands of churches.

How to Pray Evangelistically

Three years before my father passed away, he turned to Christ for salvation. It was amazing, actually. My dad had quite a temper prior to his conversion. My childhood memories of his displays of anger still echo in my mind. Though my grandmother was a strong believer, Dad never showed interest in Christianity. In fact, he first believed that many routes lead to God; “we’re just following different paths,” he told me.

How to be on Mission in the City

What does the future hold for cities? Stephen Um shares five tips for a faithful gospel mission. Let’s consider just a sampling of the facts:

• 5.5 million people move into cities every month—that’s the equivalent of a new San Francisco Bay Area being created every 30 days. (UN-HABITAT)
• Right now, there are 23 megacities, with over 10 million citizens. By 2025, there will be 36 such cities. (UN)
• In 1900, only 14% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. The number was 30% in 1950. In 2011 the world became 51% urban. By 2050, the world will be nearly 70% urban. (PRB)

Study your city

If you intimately know whom you want to reach, then you will be better set up to engage people effectively with the gospel of Jesus.

An inability to interpret the signs of the times is to be guilty of what we might call . . .

. . . the “Great Omission.”

10 Questions to Diagnose the Evangelistic Health of Your Church

Any good physician will make certain your physical exam includes at least three components. First, the doctor will want you to have thorough lab work. Second, all exams include a comprehensive look at your physical body. Third, the physician will ask you a series of questions that would lead him or her to know more about your overall physical and emotional health.

In my work with churches across America, I often ask a series of questions that help me assist the church to become more evangelistically focused. Recently, I took time to write down the questions I ask most often. Look at these ten questions to get at least some hints of the evangelistic health of your own church.

Four ways to create an evangelistic culture in your church

I recently wrote an article that offered ten questions to help you diagnose the evangelistic health of your church. A couple of the readers asked insightful questions related to the culture of a church. Specifically, they wanted to know how a church could create a culture to become more evangelistic.

While the creation of an evangelistic culture cannot be reduced to a simple formulaic approach, I can offer four suggestions of a more practical nature.

10 Reasons we have not reached the Unchurched (2)

Part 2 (Reasons 6 - 10)

In last week's post, I covered the first five reasons we, as Christians fail to reach others for Christ. Today I conclude with the final five reasons.

10 Reasons we have not reached the Unchurched (1)

Part 1 (Reasons 1 - 5)

Though much of this information could be regarded as dismal, my ultimate assessment is not that pessimistic. I believe in the God of miracles. If my conclusions focused on human ability and goodness, I would have little hope. But my conclusions presume the God of creation is on His throne.

When Faced with Gospel Opposition

Recently I wrote an article here about tips on how to talk with your neighbors about Jesus, where I shared a story of someone I encountered becoming a Christian through those tips. Right after I wrote the article, I was in a situation where I was verbally opposed for my sharing my faith.

Inevitably, we will face opposition in talking to neighbors about Jesus, and in fact, if we’re consistent in doing it, we will face consistent opposition.

7 tips for talking with your neighbors about Jesus

We met in the elevator of our condo building.

Instead of the classic stare down at the ground and avoid eye contact bit, I said hello and introduced myself. I asked him a few non-awkward, basic questions. How long have you lived here? Do you like it? Have you met any cool people?