Reading: 6.2—Personal Outreach and Evangelism

6.2 Personal Outreach & Evangelism: The effective Great Commission pastor or leader must practice what is preached, significantly engaging in personal outreach and evangelism through personal involvement in the community. This commitment is a leader’s modeling of what it means, in part, to leave a Gospel footprint. Again, as a leader, you cannot send people where you are not willing to go. Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you,” (John 20:21). Jesus modeled being sent before He sent others. As leaders, we are saying to our people, “As the Father, Son, and Spirit have sent me, I am sending you.”

By way of brief definitions, outreach is building sustainable relationships in the harvest, and evangelism is clearly articulating the Gospel in the harvest. So, it’s incumbent upon pastors and leaders to be building sustainable relationships in the harvest and tuning into the leading of the Spirit for the opportunity to evangelize. The simple question, then, is, “Are you doing that, are you building sustainable relationships, and are you always on the lookout within those relationships for opportunities to share the Gospel?” If not, it’s time to begin developing strategies for personal relationship building and personal evangelism.

What are the barriers to personal outreach and evangelism? This list could be very long and I’m not going to attempt to point out every possible barrier. Rather, I’m going to identify five that surface often in my interaction with pastors, and I’m going to speak in their voice:

1. Evangelism is not my spiritual gift. Ephesians 4 identifies five callings: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers. My calling is more a blend of shepherd and teacher so I leave evangelism to the gifted, (Ephesians 4:11). True, we don’t all have the spiritual gift of evangelism, but we all are called to evangelize. Often, Timothy is cited as an example of the pastor/shepherd and is used as a model for pastors that sense that calling in their lives, but remember Paul’s words to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:1-5: "I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry."

So, it seems that, in Paul’s eyes, Timothy would leave his ministry unfulfilled if he failed to do the work of an evangelist. If Timothy is, indeed, the quintessential model of a biblical pastor/shepherd, then evangelism must surely be an element within that model. Perhaps you don’t have the spiritual gift of evangelism, but you do have the responsibility to evangelize. If lack of gifting is a barrier for you, remove it.

2. With all that I have to do, I do not have time to invest in building sustainable relationships, even if that might lead to opportunities to share the Gospel. I get it. Serving as the lead pastor in any size church is extremely demanding on time. I want to suggest to you, however, that the root of this barrier is not really time, it’s priority. You’re not giving personal outreach and evangelism a position of priority in your life and ministry. Once you do establish that as a priority, you will find the time. As long as it remains of secondary importance to you personally, you won’t. With personal outreach and evangelism established as a priority, the barrier shifts to one of time management. We went into significant depth regarding Managing Ministry Time under Skill #4, so I won’t repeat that here. If lack of time is a barrier for you, commit to establishing personal outreach and evangelism as a priority and use Skill #4, or an alternate resource of your choosing, to distribute your time accordingly.

3. My congregation has high expectations regarding my ministry to them, and I don’t think they would be willing or understanding if I compromised on that in favor of ministry to the community. We’re back to priority, again, with a twist, and the twist has to do with congregational buy-in. First, we’re not talking about compromise and we’re not talking about either/or, as in we can either minister to the congregation or we can minister to the community. The objective is to do both but to do them with a biblical basis. A congregation is called to love God and love neighbor and to go and make disciples as Jesus works through them to seek and to save the lost. There is no place for self-indulgence as a believing congregation.

However, self-focus is the posture that many, if not most, congregations have acquired over long stretches of time, and that won’t go away overnight. It’s up to senior leadership to, well, lead; lead the congregation through a transformation from self-focus to kingdom-focus, and the kingdom, surely in part, is focused on multiplication until the full number of saints is gathered, until the multitude that is too numerous to count is brought into the family. If congregational expectations are proving to be a barrier to personal outreach and evangelism, those expectations must be changed through dynamic leadership. Leaders must lead and not simply follow their congregations, taking congregations where they biblically ought to go and not necessarily where they want to go, if their wants are contrary to God’s mandates.

4. Personal outreach and evangelism are not why I signed up for ministry. Rather, I signed up to preach, teach, pastor, and shepherd. I remember the moment I crossed a line in my consciousness and realized I was being called to pastoral ministry. For roughly three years, I had served with a church planter in starting a new church. My role was in music and the arts. This church had a strong launch and grew very quickly with several hundred attending at this three-year mark. I was meeting with this planter one day and he informed me that he was going to have to miss a few consecutive Sundays, something that hadn’t happened before. He was concerned about who would preach in his place, having been very careful with the pulpit since we had a very distinct ministry approach and culture. Suddenly, I heard a strange voice say, “I’d like to preach.” It was my voice and I have no idea where it came from, but it was out there. He looked at me rather oddly and then said something such as, “I could see that working.”

I suppose the rest is history, my history anyway, but that was the beginning. Two years later I would be in seminary, and three years after that I would be the lead pastor in a revitalizing church. All to say that I get it; I think most of us go into local church ministry as pastors because we have a strong calling to preach and teach and take care of a congregation. However, it’s antithetical to Great Commission commitment to pursue that calling to the exclusion of personal outreach and evangelism.

Consider Paul’s instruction is Romans 10:13-15:

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

I’ve heard numerous sermons and teachings based on this passage of Scripture, and many have missed the point entirely. They have presented this word from Paul (from God Almighty through Paul) as if the focus is on the preaching. It is not; the focus is on the sending. Paul builds a chain, here, that starts from the end and works its way back. The objective is belief, and Paul begins there with belief that emerges from hearing that emerges from preaching that emerges from sending. Without the sending, there is no preaching, no hearing, and no believing. He emphasizes this point by quoting from Isaiah 52:7, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.” This is a poetic depiction of messengers who run from the scene of battle to deliver news of victory. This imagery appears again in Nahum 1:15 as a reiteration of Isaiah 52:7 and yet again in Ephesians 6:15 in Paul’s explanation of the Whole Armor of God with, “as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace.”

Concerning Romans 10, Bible commentator Leon Morris writes, “The climax to which Paul builds up is And how can they preach unless they are sent…Paul is saying that the preaching of the Christian message is impossible without the divine commission…It’s interesting to have the feet selected as the beautiful parts of the body. But, of course, the messengers normally traveled on foot and the feet were the significant members. They might be dirty and smelly after a long, hot journey, but to those who eagerly awaited good news they were beautiful. Those who bring good news are always welcome,” (The Epistle to the Romans: Morris, pp. 390-391).

The words of Isaiah 52, quoted in Romans 10, are messianic in nature, delivering a message of salvation from bondage, victory for the captive who is set free. All of the links in the chain are important: the sending, the preaching, the hearing, and the believing, but the starting point is the sending. Again, as Jesus, said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you,” (John 20:21). In a general sense, a call to pastoral ministry is a call to more conventional pulpit preaching, but the more specific sense is the call to labor in the harvest, working to bring those who are estranged from the family of God into the fold. Perhaps your perception of ministry is that you didn’t sign up for personal outreach and evangelism, but, if so, I want to encourage you to reconsider what it means to be among those who lead in the church that Jesus Christ is building.

5. Personal outreach and evangelism are way outside of my comfort zone. I have a friend and ministry colleague who is the most effective evangelist that I know, and I don’t, for a minute, think that all of us can or should function in quite the way he does. However, he makes a very interesting point in regard to evangelism and one’s comfort zone. If personal outreach and evangelism are outside of your comfort zone, he doesn’t suggest that you simply bite the bullet and push through your discomfort. Rather, he says that you need to cultivate a new comfort zone. In other words, according to his perspective, if reaching out to lost people and evangelizing is outside of your comfort zone, you have the wrong comfort zone. Interesting!

Following this logic begs the question, “How do I cultivate a new comfort zone, one that is comfortable with personal outreach and evangelism.” Before I go any further, let me offer a couple of thoughts: Jesus did not say, “Follow me and I will make you comfortable.” He did not say, “Take up your cross and I will provide for your comfort.” All to say that faithfully serving the Lord is sometimes going to lead into awkward and uncomfortable situations. The objective is not comfort. Rather, the objective is to be effective and productive even when we’re stepping into areas of ministry that are not in our wheelhouse, recognizing that through practice, practice, practice we’ll likely become more effective, more productive and, yes, more comfortable.

In short, the road to more comfort or ease at facing the uncomfortable begins with prayer. That, of course, is no surprise. Pray, pray, and pray for God’s strength, insight, peace, opportunity, etc., etc., etc., and see what the Spirit does in and through you. Jesus said, “Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest,” (Matthew 9:38). Indeed, you are one of those laborers the Lord of the harvest will send into the harvest through prayer to gather His family.

To prayer, add practice, practice, practice. Surely, you’ve heard the saying, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Answer: Practice, Practice, Practice. There is no substitute for experience so get out there and get started. It might be difficult at first, but, eventually, this can become your new norm through habitual, prayerful practice. Over time, reaching out and evangelizing will become more “comfortable.” Brian Tracy, motivational speaker and consultant, has a book titled, Eat That Frog, that challenges folks in the workplace to do the hard thing first, get it over with, and move forward. Of course, part of the concept is that eventually the hard thing won’t be the hard thing anymore. The title of the book borrows from a statement attributed to Mark Twain, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Ok, I’m not going to suggest that this be included in the Book of Proverbs, but I think you get the idea. If there is something that is absolutely right that needs to be done, but is challenging, difficult, or uncomfortable, prayerfully go for it, again and again, and it will get easier.

So far, we have prayer and practice; I’m going to add one more “P,” partnership. If, as a pastor, you are struggling with personal outreach and evangelism, note that many pastors are just like you. Find a pastor colleague or two or three and form a partnership in your and their pursuit of personal outreach and evangelism engagement and effectiveness. Pray together, share experiences as you practice, and, perhaps, join together on occasion to minister together. Change your comfort zone and maximize your personal outreach and evangelism effectiveness through prayer, practice and partnership.

Shifting gears away from barriers, what are the opportunities for personal outreach and evangelism? There is no limit to the possibilities so I’m going to narrow the field by approaching this question through two categories: 1. Direct Engagement and 2. Indirect Engagement. Direct engagement is contact that you make personally and indirect engagement is through contact you make from one degree of separation. 

Direct engagement in beginning to establish sustainable relationships, a.k.a. outreach, is to leverage connections that are already accessible. That might include family, friends, and neighbors. Arguably you already have some sustainable relationships from among those groupings, so the question would be whether or not you are strategically utilizing those relationships for Gospel purposes. If not, begin to pray for God’s leading and the Holy Spirit’s sensitivity in moving those relationships in a Gospel direction. 

Another source is the workplace setting of folks in your congregation. Mining that territory has a double application: 1. connecting with congregants at their workplaces is, obviously, connecting with them, which is a good thing, and 2. connecting with congregants at their workplaces might open the door for connecting with some of the folks that are their co-workers. This can be a win-win that begins to groom outreach that might grow into evangelism. Also, there is a plethora of affinity groups within most communities that might provide footholds for engagement. Finding such groups that organize around interests of yours can be fertile ground. Finally, good old-fashioned networking can provide a source of making connections. This is very similar to leveraging affinity groups but might be thought of as groups for networking that don’t necessarily organize around something for which you have an affinity.

Indirect engagement in beginning to establish sustainable relationships occurs when you influence others to embrace direct engagement, so you are separated by one degree. As a pastor, begin with your staff and leaders, first, and then move to your congregation. This can be done through your teaching and preaching ministry, your personal leadership in their lives, and the model of direct engagement to personal outreach and evangelism that you present. Again, practicing what you preach in this regard will greatly enhance the effectiveness of your influence in their lives.

I’ll close this section on personal outreach and evangelism with a highly transferrable concept called Closing the Gap. The concept concerns the gap between where you are in any given endeavor and where you want to be plus the commitment to close that gap through strategic intentionality. For example, let’s say that your assessment regarding your ministry time is that you do not have the time bandwidth to accommodate proactively engaging in outreach, which we have defined as building sustainable relationships. That’s where you are. However, you have become convicted of the importance of making outreach a priority, which is where you want to be. Wishing and hoping will not close that gap, but the gap can be closed through strategic intentionality.

What are some of the elements of closing such a gap? Begin with a heartfelt commitment to do so accompanied by prayer for the power of the Holy Spirit to guide you in establishing this new priority. Quantify the objective by targeting a percentage of your ministry time for this initiative, perhaps 5% or 10%. Analyze how your time is currently being allocated and determine what adjustments will need to be made to open that 5% or 10% for this purpose and begin to take the action steps necessary to make it so. I think you get the idea.

Closing a gap is typically not complicated but it does require discipline. There are two elements that often cause a breakdown: 1. Failure to identify individual action steps that will need to be taken to close the gap, and 2. Failure to take those steps in a timely fashion once they’ve been identified. Again, wishing and hoping will NOT close a gap. Timely action steps must be taken, however incrementally, and when this occurs virtually any gap can be closed.

Leaving a Gospel Footprint requires a strong commitment to personal outreach and evangelism, overcoming barriers, leveraging opportunities, and closing whatever outreach or evangelism gaps that are present.