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.