The Marriage of Evangelism and Discipleship
Discipleship Is Training of Workers for the Harvest
Jesus
said in Luke 10:2 that the "harvest is plentiful, but the workers are
few ..." This being the case, the church must have a workable way of
training individuals to grow as a disciple of Christ and also a way to
train them how to become disciple-makers. We are committed to seeing
God make disciples, not simply see people make 'decisions' for Christ.
Pastor Ken Adams of Crossroads Church in Newnan, GA, has developed a
ministry training approach called IMPACT Discipleship, and the church
has just such a workable process in place. Currently our church has
between 150 and 200 people in IMPACT small groups training for
ministry. We are just beginning to see the results of this training,
and it is tremendous!
Evangelism Is Sending These Workers into the Harvest
We
believe that the gospel is most readily accepted in our society when it
is presented in the context of a relationship. That means we are not
program-driven in our witnessing, but people-driven. We have 4
different avenues that encourage our people to share their faith ...1. Servant Evangelism. This is a great way to mobilize a lot of people to serve lost people. Many people who would never go "knock on doors" find themselves giving away soft drinks, washing cars, cleaning windshields, or otherwise serving the lost and unchurched in our community. We give out a connection card at each event and tell anyone who will listen that "God's love is free and so is this gift from us to you" or "we just wanted to show God's love in a practical way." This ministry will not directly lead masses to Christ, but it will plant a lot of seeds in the community. It also gets a lot of people to take their first steps of faith of being involved in ministry. You can find most everything you need to know at www.servantevangelism.com
2. Events. We are encouraging our people to invite the lost and unchurched around them to "seeker-sensitive" events that would appeal to the population at large and that also share the message of Christ. Marriage seminars, etc. are good for this. We have not attempted a marriage seminar but use our Fall Festival and Christmas Musical as semi-seeker events. We still have a way to go in this one.
3. Small Groups. Our church did the "40 Days of Purpose" last spring, and we saw so many of our members start home Bible study groups at the church or in their neighborhoods with friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers. The impact was amazing. People got saved, baptized, and plugged into church, Sunday school, and small groups. Some of the groups are still going. What we are focused on doing now is encouraging our members to start groups like this in their own neighborhoods. To promote a group that started recently, the leader invited 6 co-workers and several neighbors, and we did a coffee give-away at the entrance of his subdivision to promote the group. There are a handful of other groups that have started with the same intention.
4. Personal witnessing. This is where we are just beginning to pull it all together. Next month we'll be doing some training with our congregation called the "Apple Seed Seminar," in which I will be challenging and training people how to reach out to the people all around them. The bottom line of this is that people will develop an IMPACT prayer list where they pray for lost people on a daily basis. They will also intentionally begin to build these relationships. They will learn how to share their testimony. After the seminar, if they sign up to be a "seed sower," they will have a mentor who calls or emails them weekly to remind them of this priority, who will pray with them, who will ask them to share any "God stories" of what is happening in these relationships. My leadership team has been focused on this approach personally for about a month, and we are all amazed at how God moves in these people's lives if we will simply pray and be available to share the message.
Disciple-making Is the Marriage of Evangelism and Discipleship
I
recently had a chance to hear Randy Pope speak at The Navigators'
Church Discipleship Ministry annual conference. Randy pastors Perimeter
Church in Atlanta, a megachurch that has planted around 27 other
churches in the metro-Atlanta area, seeking to fulfill the vision of
saturating Atlanta with the influence of Christ. Randy has a lot of
great things to say in his book The Prevailing Church about the
necessity of fusing evangelism and discipleship together. The marriage
of evangelism and discipleship is encompassed in one term used by
Jesus: disciple-making. Jesus never separated the two, and neither
should we. A disciple is not truly a disciple unless he is engaged in
reaching lost people and consequently, someone is not truly evangelized
until they have begun the growth process called discipleship. In God's
eyes, evangelism and discipleship are married together. So, in
ministry, we must be careful to work with people to not only grow
deeper in Christ but wider in their usefulness to him. - Rod Zwemke
