Evangelism and Church Planting
The September 2007 edition of Christianity Today has a great article by Tim Stafford on the relationship between church planting and evangelism. He postulates that the primary methodology of corporate evangelism strategies has moved from "crusades" in the 50's and 60's, to "personal evangelism" in the 70's and 80's to planting new churches in the 90's to the present. I think he's right and I think the emergence of church planting as the most used methodology of evangelism is a very good development.
Crusades have a notoriously low success rate in connecting people to the local church once they walk away from the crusade counselor who prayed with them at the altar. Approaches like Evangelism Explosion and the 4 Spiritual Laws did indeed help people learn to share their faith but the percentage of participants was typically low. The missional strategy of planting new churches is proving to be a solid biblically based form of evangelism that produces lasting results in terms of changed lives and transformed communities. It's good that we're returning to a biblically based holistic evangelism strategy. But where do we go from here? What's the next frontier of evangelism? How do we "catch up" with the exploding population of the United States and the world?
I believe the next "best practice" of evangelism will be the reproducing church. Whether it's multi-site, satellite or parent church planting, the future of the church will be more missional, fluid, flexible and not building based. The healthy faith community of the future will be constantly shifting and spinning off new networks of disciples who continually build new bridges to the lost people who are sociologically isolated from natural relationships with followers of Christ. Evangelism will come to be viewed as a process that happens inside of a discipleship relationship. These rapidly multiplying communities of faith that are built around the mission of Jesus (to seek and save the lost) are the only hope we have of effectively obeying Christ's call to make disciples of all nations.
Crusades have a notoriously low success rate in connecting people to the local church once they walk away from the crusade counselor who prayed with them at the altar. Approaches like Evangelism Explosion and the 4 Spiritual Laws did indeed help people learn to share their faith but the percentage of participants was typically low. The missional strategy of planting new churches is proving to be a solid biblically based form of evangelism that produces lasting results in terms of changed lives and transformed communities. It's good that we're returning to a biblically based holistic evangelism strategy. But where do we go from here? What's the next frontier of evangelism? How do we "catch up" with the exploding population of the United States and the world?
I believe the next "best practice" of evangelism will be the reproducing church. Whether it's multi-site, satellite or parent church planting, the future of the church will be more missional, fluid, flexible and not building based. The healthy faith community of the future will be constantly shifting and spinning off new networks of disciples who continually build new bridges to the lost people who are sociologically isolated from natural relationships with followers of Christ. Evangelism will come to be viewed as a process that happens inside of a discipleship relationship. These rapidly multiplying communities of faith that are built around the mission of Jesus (to seek and save the lost) are the only hope we have of effectively obeying Christ's call to make disciples of all nations.
posted by Steve Pike @ 2:40 PM
1 Comments:
At October 1, 2007 6:21 AM ,
Jimmy Kinnaird said...
I think your assessment of the CT article is right on. As a former church planter, I planted churches, but also used events and personal training within the church plant to give it some traction in evangelism. One observation on this is that we will be making a mistate to think that church planting is evangelism. It can, as you said, be the best methodology, if handled rightly, but unless there is intentional and strategic evangelism imbedded into the church, it will not be any more effective than any other thing in evangelism.
Keep up the good work!
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home