Video Transcript: Corporate Outreach and Evangelism

Welcome back. We continue with our course developing great commission  skills. We're working our way through our final skill, leaving a gospel footprint.  And with our session today, we're going to be taking a look at corporate  outreach and evangelism. You know, last time we looked at personal outreach  and evangelism and in getting started into our discussion with this video, I just  want to say that personal outreach and evangelism works best when the entire  congregation is corporately engaged in that activity. What happens is we create  a bit of an upward spiral. It goes like this. The ministry of the church supports the outreach and evangelism efforts of the individual, and the individual supports the outreach and evangelism efforts of the church as a corporate body. Now this can create a bit of an upward spiral where the church is supporting the individual,  the individual is supporting the church. One feeds the other. Okay, now the  problem comes when these two are not in alignment with personal outreach and evangelism, and corporate outreach and evangelism are not working together.  Now that can, that can work or not work in two different ways. One would be  this, let's say there's a strong commitment on the part of a pastor, a few leaders, some folks in the church, and they are actively engaging in personal outreach  and evangelism. They're connecting with people to build relationships. As those  relationships begin to develop an opportunity to to share faith, to invite folks to  come to some event at the church, whether it's a worship service on Sunday or  perhaps some other gathering of some sort. And so they prove to be effective in  this personally, individually, and so one of their guests comes to the church, but  the church corporately, is not dialed in. The church is inwardly focused, more  concerned about itself, not really thinking too much about newcomers and what  that newcomer might need in order to feel welcome and at home. And so the  work of the personal outreacher evangelist dies, because when their guest  arrives at the church, there's no corporate match. There's no corporate  alignment to what this person has done personally. And so this guest decides,  well, I don't really want to be part of this. I don't feel welcome. I don't feel like I  belong. You know, the other the other side of it works the same way. You can  have a church that is ramped up to receive newcomers well, to process  corporate outreach and evangelism, but then the individuals of the church don't  engage as new folks are coming in, and the same thing happens, they don't  come back. So what we need to what we need to see happen is we need to see  both of these working at the same time. On one hand, they can be an upward  spiral. The personal efforts and outreach evangelism can feed the corporate  efforts in outreach and evangelism, the corporate efforts can feed the personal,  individual efforts, and one builds the other in an upward spiral. But if any one of  those on either side is missing, there's no upward spiral. It just dies. Individuals  who are working to bring people to the church then find that those people are  not welcomed very well when they come. Now, here's a distinction I'd like to  make. Just about every church I've ever worked with perceives itself to be very 

friendly. Okay, I understand that. I get that. The problem, though, is that it's not  really about friendliness per se, when people are talking about their church  being. Friendly. Often, what they're talking about is that I go to church with my  friends, and it's very friendly for me. When I'm at church with my friends, we  catch up. I get to see them. I see what's going on in their families. We sit  together. We might go to lunch after. We have a social time as well as a worship  time. Wow. What a friendly church. But when the newcomer comes in, you see  the new comer is not in that group. It's not in that circle of friends, and the  newcomer is feeling like an outsider. The newcomer is feeling like I've just  stepped into a family reunion, and it's not my family. So I want you to make a  distinction between friendliness and hospitality. Friendliness is something that is  earned over time, and for the first time visitor, obviously, that first time visitor  can't really just jump in and be instant friends with everyone, but hospitality is  something that we can practice regardless of how long we've been engaged  with someone. So the goal that I'd like to challenge you with is not to be a quote  friendly church, but to be a church that does a great job with hospitality, with  welcoming, that first timer, that newcomer who steps in and has that feeling of,  wow, these folks really want me here. They've really gone all out to make me  feel welcome. So push for hospitality, not for friendliness. Okay, so it's very  important, it's very important that there be this one two punch, effective outreach and evangelism. It has to work with the individual and with the Ministry at large,  welcoming each other. Now let me give you a kind of a horror story to drive this  point home. I've actually mentioned this scenario in an earlier session. I don't  recall which one, but the church that I pastored in Phoenix, Arizona, we had one  particular woman in the church who was just phenomenally gifted at getting into  folks' lives and inviting them to our church. And at one time, we recognized that  there were 22 families in our church that she had personally invited and brought  to our church. Well after I left that church, a new pastor came in with a very, very different approach, a very different point of view as to what church should be,  how it should function, and it proved to be quite disruptive for that congregation.  Many people left the church and lots of folks were disturbed that the the church  that we had created by the grace of God, with our particular culture, was sort of  being broken down, and it was becoming something else. And so I received a  communication from this woman Some months later, and she said to me this  she said, I no longer feel that I can invite people to this church because she  lacked trust, in confidence, in what they would experience. Wow, that's the  antithesis of what we want to see in the personal outreach and evangelism  working in tandem with the corporate outreach and evangelism. So let me  introduce you to a concept, a tool that you might find helpful. I call this DNA the  dynamic newcomer accelerator. As the name implies, what we're looking for is,  you know, how do we accelerate the experience of the newcomer and move the  newcomer into really being into the heart of our church quickly. So think about 

two things. One is newcomer passion. You know, develop a culture of  passionate concern in your church for those who are lost in the harvest. Care  about them. You know, in Matthew 9, that. Passage that's so famous, when  Jesus says the harvest is plentiful, the workers are few. Well, if you back up a  few more verses, it says that when Jesus entered the city, he had compassion  because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Well, that's where we have to be. We've got to have compassion, because people are out there as sheep  without shepherds. Now Jesus, of course, is the Good Shepherd, the Great  Shepherd, but those of us who serve under Jesus are referred to as under  shepherds. We've got to have that same heart. We've got to have that same  care for people that Jesus had newcomer identification, we need to determine  our church's geographic and demographic targets so that great commission  ministry can be better defined and directed and focused. So I want to introduce  you to the innovation triangle. The innovation triangle. This is just a way of  organizing thought in regard to reaching people with the Great Commission  through the Great Commission. Here's how the innovation triangle works.  Obviously we have three corners at the top, you see the word contents. This  refers to the contents of ministry. Now the contents of ministry are the non  negotiables, our doctrine, our theology, you know, the authority of Scripture, non  negotiable. Divinity of Christ, non negotiable. The cross, sin, resurrection. You  know, these are the things that are absolutely non negotiable. We will not give  those up, no matter what. Now, one of the non negotiables is the cross. Jesus  went to the cross and died a painful death to pay the penalty for our sins. So the cross is not just the death of Jesus. It's the reason for the death of Jesus, which  is our sin. So for us to appreciate the cross fully, we have to recognize our own  sin. Now, Scripture tells us that the cross is offensive. The cross can be an  offense. The cross can be a barrier. You know, there are some folks that just  can't get past the cross. They don't buy their own sin. They don't buy that  someone had to die and shed blood for them. They just don't see it. So the  cross is an offense. Well, what we want to do, we're not going to compromise on the cross. And if the cross is offensive to someone to the point that they simply  cannot accept that, well, it is what it is. So be it. We can't change that. It's sad,  it's unfortunate, but there's nothing we can do about it. The cross is non  negotiable. However, a lot of times in the church, we create barriers that prevent people from even dealing with the cross. Something else that doesn't even really matter becomes a matter of offense, a blockage, a barrier, an obstacle that  people can't get past, something like not being received well, feeling like an  outsider. And I've had that experience. You know, in my ministry, I travel a great  deal, and very often I'm a first time visitor at a church. Now, certainly there are  some in the church leadership, in particular, that know who I am and why I'm  there to work with that church, but the average folk out in the seats don't know  who I am. They just probably see me as a visitor, and I've been through some 

tremendously difficult experiences as a first time visitor because of how poorly I  was received by a given church. All right, so let's not offend people with things  that don't matter. The contents of ministry are the absolute, sure, true, tried,  proven, non negotiable elements of ministry. Now the context refers to the  people that we are trying to reach, the people that live out in the community  around our church. That is our ministry. Context, that is our ministry. Mission  field, our domestic mission field, who lives out there. Now we break the context  down into two segments. First, there is the geographic target. As you look at  where your church is located, and you look at the community that surrounds  your church, it's helpful to define that footprint as best you can using street  names or other dividing mechanisms, like maybe there's a river or maybe you  cross a line and you're into another county or another school district, there are  all kinds of boundaries around our churches. So what I want to caution against  is using something very simplistic, like, like a radius. You know, everyone who  lives within three miles, everyone who lives within five miles. Well, churches are  not in communities that are built in circles. The footprint of a given church's  mission field is not going to probably be a very neat geometric design, but think  it through and identify what is our geographic footprint, what is our geographic  target? What is the territory that we are going to consider our primary focus for  outreach and evangelism? And then secondly, there's the geographic the  demographic target who lives inside that geography? You know, within any  community, there are going to be multiple slices of demographics. Now, we're  not really called to be all things to all people. We're called to be something to  somebody. Well, who are those somebodies? Who are those particular people,  those particular slices of demography that our church is particularly called,  particularly positioned to reach effectively. So let's identify who those folks are.  So now we have in our ministry context, we have a sense of the geographic  area that we're going to try to cover, and inside of that geographic area, we have a sense of the demographic focus that we're going to place on this community  now, just so you'll know if someone happens to come that's outside of our  geographic identification. Fine, great, they're welcome, but we're not going to  strategically work at reaching beyond our footprint, and if someone comes into  our church that doesn't really fit the demographic profile that we have discerned  for our primary focus, fine, all are welcome. The point here is that we're not  we're not trying to be exclusive. We're trying to be focused. We're trying to focus our resources on a certain geography and a certain demography. And our intent  is to deliver the content, the truth, the good news to our identified context, our  geographic context and our demographic context. Now we move over to  containers. Now containers is the word that I use to represent the approaches to ministry that we use, the styles, the culture that we create, what kind of music  we use? Are we formal? Are we informal? All of the stylistic choices that we  make, the methodologies that we choose to use, the particular programs that we

select. You know is that a worship service going to be 60 minutes long or 90  minutes long. You know, all of these things are just choices that we're making.  There's no right or wrong to this. They're just choices. Now, while the contents  are non negotiable and the context you might think of as semi negotiable,  because we're going to confine this to a certain geography and a certain  population within that geography, when it comes to containers, completely  negotiable, there's no theological import to our containers. These are just  choices that we make for how we're going to deliver the contents to the context.  Now where churches get into trouble sometimes is that church folks have a  tendency to take their favorite containers and grant them the status of contents,  making them non negotiable. So we're going to do it this way, because that's the way I like to do it. That's the right way to do it, and I can't do it any other way. So there's a resistance to change. There's a resistance to adapting to new  conditions. But this is how the innovation triangle works, and it's in the  containers that we have the opportunity to be innovative. You know, we're not  going to innovate the content God has given us, the contents in His Word, you  know we're not going to innovate with the context. You know that that the  location of our church is where it is the people who live there are who they are,  but we're wide open with possibilities in terms of containers, and that's where  the innovation can really thrive. So with that in mind, let's move on to some  components within this idea of a dynamic newcomer accelerator. First of all,  there's newcomer connection. This has to do again, with building sustainable  relationships in the harvest, the harvest that is within our geographic and  demographic targets. Then there is newcomer acquisition. Now I know that  might be a little bit of a cold sounding marketplace term, but the idea is we are  trying to help people make the journey from the harvest field into the barn, if you will, into the church, into the kingdom, into a relationship with Jesus Christ. So  newcomer acquisition is about moving them into the orbit of our church's  ministry. Newcomer satisfaction. This is where we absolutely guarantee that  newcomers are very, very well received, that they experience a wonderful first  time visit, where we are very high on the hospitality quotient. And then there's  newcomer retention. I've said this before, but you know, it's one thing to get  someone to come the first time. That's difficult, but it's even more difficult to get  someone to come back, so helping people move through those levels of  commitment as quickly as possible, to retain the newcomers that come in. You  know, I frequently work with with church leaders, with pastors who will say, you  know, we're doing fine in terms of our visitor count. Lots of people are visiting,  but they don't seem to stay well. We've got to figure that out. We've got to ramp  up our newcomer retention process. Okay, so here we go, leaving a gospel  footprint corporately, is greatly enhanced by a commitment to the dynamic  newcomer accelerator, and by a strong commitment to corporate outreach and  evangelism among pastors and staff and leaders. Okay, really, there's no 

mystery to this. This is not some mysterious, strange, vague thing. This is, this is just strategically thinking through, how do we get into people's lives? How do we get them into the orbit of the kingdom represented by our church? How do we  help them move to deeper and deeper levels of commitment? The most  important commitment, of course, being to Jesus Christ. Our biggest concern is  that they become part of the kingdom, not that they become part of our church,  but when they do become part of our church, it's very likely that that's that's  going to be their particular piece of the kingdom that they're living in. You know,  we're all called to be together in some way, and the local church provides that  gathering place where the visible church is supporting the invisible church that is the eternal kingdom of God. Now that concludes this video on what is the title.  Title, corporate outreach and evangelism. So we've got that combo personal  outreach and evangelism, corporate outreach and evangelism, they work hand  in glove to move us forward. Now next time we're going to be talking about a  new skill topic that I have labeled the gospel, ask, how do we offer the  opportunity for someone to step into the kingdom of God? So until we meet  again, I pray that you will have God's blessing on your studies, God's blessing  on your life, God's blessing on your ministry, and we'll see you next time. Thank  you.