Sermon Central
Tips on Living an Evangelistic Life as Pastor
Mark Mittelberg
Adapted from the newly updated Becoming a Contagious Church
www.ContagiousChristian.com
www.ChoosingYourFaith.com
The shape of a church will be a magnification of the shape of its pastors and leaders. The values that permeate its culture are the values of the people who run it. So if you want to reshape the priorities of any organization, you’re going to have to first reshape the priorities of the men and women who guide it.
Likewise, truly contagious churches don’t grow out of programs, initiatives, curricula, or trumped-up talk about “taking this town for Christ.” Ultimately, they must grow out of the beliefs and values – the very hearts – of the people who lead them. That is why Stage 1 in the 6-Stage Process says that we must each, you and I, “LIVE an Evangelistic Life.”
Paul says in Ephesians 5:1, “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children.” He goes on to talk about loving people the way Christ did when he gave himself as a sacrifice on our behalf. In effect, Paul is saying, “Lost people matter to God; make certain they matter to you too!” This value must flow from the depths of who we are – and who we are becoming. It really is a heart issue. Jesus said in Matthew 12:34: “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” I’ve discovered this to be true in my own life. The condition of my heart determines the ordering of my priorities, and even the contents of my conversations.
Starting With the Heart
The key for each of us as believers, and especially for pastors, is to do everything we can to keep our hearts warm toward God and toward people, and then to express that warmth in ways that serve those with spiritual needs – and in the process live out this value in front of others in the church. If we want to build contagious churches, we must first become contagious Christians. The old saying really is true; “Speed of the leader, speed of the team.” Jesus said it like this in Luke 6:40: “A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” As pastors and influencers of would-be evangelistic churches, we need to be able to say with Paul, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
How important is our living out these values? It’s everything. Unless you first catch God’s concern for those outside his family, you may as well disregard the wealth of other evangelistic ideas available to you. Why? Because without a heart that beats fast for reaching people, you won’t be building on the foundation needed to sustain more visible outreach programs and ministries.
But if we grow bigger and bigger hearts for those who don’t know Christ, and if we increasingly model his bold example of being a “friend of sinners,” then those around us will be inspired, and they’ll take their cues from us. They too will begin taking relational risks for the sake of the gospel.
Living a Life Worth Imitating
The important question is this: how, on a practical level, can we gain God’s heart toward folks who don’t know him? I’ll share a few of my own ideas, but I also wanted to tap into the wisdom and experience of the wider community of outreach leaders and activists. So I wrote to many of them and asked what they do to keep their own hearts warm toward lost people. Their responses follow, combined with my own thoughts, as I list seven things we can do to raise our evangelism temperatures.
- Admit This Value Has Slipped – and Talk to God about It
This value – evangelism – always seems to be slipping away. About the time you think you have it for good, it starts to dissipate. No one is permanently motivated to reach others for Christ. It’s like water in a leaky bucket that constantly needs filling.
The first step toward making a change is admitting there is a problem. Sure, we can all quote John 3:16 and talk glowingly about stories from the past, but if your passion for reaching people isn’t burning brightly today, the best thing you can do is just admit it.
Many of us feel guilty when it comes to evangelism. When this guilt is from God, who “disciplines those he loves” (Hebrews 12:6), it is a gift from him designed to get us back on track. But we’re not supposed to wallow in the guilt. Rather, we need to let it move us toward repentance and godly action, “forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead” (Philippians 3:13).
The most natural thing to do after admitting that the value of evangelism has slipped in your life is to talk to God about it. The battle to raise this value is won first in the private arena of prayer (which, by the way, was the most mentioned activity among the leaders I surveyed about the question of what they do to keep their evangelistic fervor). I like to use the classic, time-honored A-C-T-S outline—with an evangelistic twist to cultivate deeper passion for the lost. Below is an example of this prayer formula applied to evangelism. You may want to use it as a guide for your own prayer.
A – Adoration
Father, thank you for being such a merciful and grace-filled God. I worship you for your kindness toward me and for your patience with my friends and family members who don’t yet know you. Your Word says that you are slow to anger and that you don’t want any of them to perish, but to come to know you. What a loving and forgiving God you are! I’m glad you are my Lord and that I have the privilege of being your child.
C – Confession
Lord, I’m sorry I often fail to love people the way you do. You moved heaven and earth to reach them, and paid the highest price when Jesus died on the cross – yet I often resist taking even small steps to reach the people I care about. You are not willing that anyone would perish, but too often I’m afraid that I am! Please forgive and change me. Wash me of my sins of self-centeredness and fearfulness. Help me to know that as I’ve confessed these things, you’ve already been faithful to forgive and to cleanse me.
T – Thanksgiving
Thank you that the payment Jesus made on the cross extends to me even today. I’m so glad to be in your family, to know I’m forgiven and to have the privilege of serving you. Thank you for putting purpose in my life and for entrusting me with opportunities to make a difference in the lives of people around me. Thank you that your love and grace are examples for me as I try to express my faith to others today.
S – Supplication
Father, help me to reflect your love toward others. Help me remember that every person I lock eyes with today matters to you. May they matter to me too – in ways that move me to action. Help me realize that if they don’t yet know you, then they’re lost and in desperate need of the good news of Christ. Lord, prepare me and give me boldness so I’ll be able to explain your gospel well. Help me to be a genuine friend who will attract them to you and your church. Give me wisdom so I’ll know how direct to be with your message, and when to back off, so I can help them keep taking steps toward you.
Please, Father, use me! Make me effective in your hands today as I try to spread your love and truth. Help me to abide in Christ and to bear much fruit. Thank you for this great privilege.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
- Walk Authentically with God
Living a genuine Christian life is a prerequisite to having and expressing God’s heart toward lost people. You need to be convinced through fresh, ongoing experiences with Christ, that following him is the best way to live. You must have an unwavering conviction that your friends need what you’ve found in him – then you will be motivated to tell them about his love.
In the Becoming a Contagious Christian book we talk about developing a contagious Christian character, especially in the areas of authenticity, compassion, and sacrifice. We also talk about the importance of the age-old spiritual disciplines, including prayer, Bible study, solitude, and fasting. These are the nuts and bolts of gaining the heart of God and of developing the spiritual potency needed to truly impact those around you.
Peter Grant, a former pastor and now the president of PreVision Partnerships in Atlanta, wrote, “For me there’s probably nothing more motivating for evangelism than time spent in God’s presence. Out of that comes a compelling desire to share the good news, not only of salvation past, but of salvation present and future as well.”
“Supremely, I believe that the real incentive for witnessing comes from the worship of God,” adds Robert Coleman, author of The Master Plan of Evangelism, in his response to my question. Coleman is a man who has modeled God’s heart for lost people for over half a century. “It is the adoring love of Christ,” he went on to observe, “that compels us to declare the glory of his grace.”
In keeping with this, an authentic life of walking with God starts with and flows out of personal spiritual alignment. Notice the progression in Psalm 51, verses 9 – 12, when King David admits and repents of his sins:
Hide your face from my sins
and blot out all my iniquity.
Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Then, after addressing his own condition before God, David’s very next thought, in verse 13, is to proclaim God’s grace to others:
Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will turn back to you.
Similarly, John 15:5 tells us that if we’ll abide in Christ and let him abide in us, we’ll bear much fruit. The apostle Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that simply by gazing into the face of Christ we become transformed into his likeness. That means that the more time we spend in God’s presence, the more we have something to say and give to others.
In addition, God loves to answer the prayers of his authentic followers for increased evangelistic opportunities. Joe Aldrich, longtime evangelism activist and author of the groundbreaking book, Lifestyle Evangelism, wrote this to me in a letter: “I have had dry spells in my ‘efforts in evangelism.’ On several occasions I have prayed that the Lord would bring a prepared heart across my path, and sometimes within twenty-four hours that is exactly what happened. That is always a joy and confirmation!”
- Spend Time in Select Passages of Scripture
Bill Hybels often talks about how he was influenced early in his ministry by the message of Luke 15 – where Jesus, in response to the religious leaders’ calloused attitudes toward spiritual outsiders, told three stories in rapid succession that illustrated how much lost people matter to the Father. Bill’s life and ministry were marked by the lessons of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son – and the heart of God that is revealed through them. This deeply impacted the shape and priorities of the church Bill started, and of thousands of other churches he continues to influence around the world.
I find myself especially motivated when I review John 4 and see how Jesus interacted with the woman at the well. He showed concern for somebody society had written off. He winsomely piqued her curiosity by talking about “spiritual water” in order to start a spiritual conversation. He forthrightly told her he was the Messiah. Then he allowed her time to go get her friends and bring them back to the well to hear more about his message and mission.
What impresses me most in this passage is how, after spending time with this social outcast, Jesus summed up his experience by telling the disciples, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.…My food…is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” (John 4:32, 34). In effect he was saying, “I don’t care who this person is, what she has done, or where she stands on the social ladder. I just had a chance to alter the eternity of a human being who matters more to my Father than any of you can imagine – and I eat that up!”
The reason Jesus’ words affect me so much is that I’ve experienced what it feels like to be so caught up in the exhilaration of sharing Christ with another person that I really don’t care about eating or sleeping or any other seemingly trivial physical matters. On the other hand, I’ve known all too often what it’s like to be consumed by daily concerns and distractions and to lose focus on my primary purpose. So when I read Jesus saying, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me,” my spirit says, “Yes! That’s what I want to experience a lot more of the time.” It raises the value of evangelism in me and warms my heart toward people who need God.
Perhaps other passages will impact you in similar ways: maybe John 3, Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus; or Luke 19, the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus; or Acts 1-2, Peter and the spread of the gospel in Jerusalem; or Acts 8, Philip and the Ethiopian; or Acts 26, Paul boldly taking a stand for the gospel and evangelizing some of the very people who put him on trial for his faith! Or, like me, maybe Luke 16 and the story of the rich man and Lazarus moves you, with its clear warnings about the reality of heaven and hell – and how our eternal destiny is sealed at death. This is a sobering reminder of the importance and urgency of reaching out to tell others now about God’s salvation.
The list of Bible passages could go on and on. What’s important is that you find one or two (or three or four) that make your evangelistic heart beat quickly. Then meditate on them, write them out, post them where you’ll see them often. Teach on them when you have opportunity. Maybe memorize some of them too, and let God’s vision fill your heart and move you to action.
- Review What God Has Done in Your Life
Dr. James Martin, pastor of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon, told me, “Because I know what I was and what Christ has done for me, I want others to know God’s love and to experience the freedom and peace I have in Christ even in the midst of a troubled world.”
Similarly, Christian leader and author Chuck Colson said to me in a letter:
What happened in Tom Phillips’s driveway years ago when I surrendered my life to Christ remains as vivid in my memory and consciousness today as it was at the time. I have never forgotten – and I don’t want to forget – what happened that night. I realized for the first time in my life that I was a sinner, desperately in need of salvation and forgiveness. And that night it became clear to me that God was offering that to me – that Jesus Christ the Son of God actually went to the cross, died in my place, and took my sins upon himself, enabling me to be free.
Now, if someone does that for you, how do you respond? G. K. Chesterton said that gratitude is the mother of all virtues. One should be overwhelmed with gratitude for what God has done for us, and this gratitude then inspires us to do our duty, to do whatever God calls us to do. And the simple fact is that Jesus calls us to share that good news.
Over and over I’ve seen that when we review God’s merciful activity in our own lives, our passion grows for spreading his mercy to others. Reflect on the story of how God reached you, and you’ll find yourself becoming more motivated to tell others of his love and salvation.
- Spend Time with Other Contagious Christians
One of the most important ways I keep my evangelistic fervor is by spending time with others who live out this value in their own lives. This is especially true of the time I spend with my close friend and ministry partner, Lee Strobel. He and I have done ministry together for many years. One of our favorite things is going out for lunch somewhere with no formal agenda and just letting our imaginations and conversations run free with ideas of things we could try in order to reach people for Christ. As Hebrews 10:24 puts it, we “spur one another on toward love and good deeds” – and nowhere is this more important than evangelism!
And what’s exciting is that this kind of influence usually goes both ways. Here’s an email I got from another church leader I had recently spent time with and was encouraged by. It illustrates the effect Christians can have on one another when we spend time together dreaming about reaching folks for Christ:
Thanks again, Mark, for the burst of encouragement you have provided me – especially personally. I simply cannot express the wonderful feeling of being with brothers of like mind with regard to lost people. This is especially so in light of the spiritual desert I’ve felt I have been traveling alone in for so long. It’s nice to have the wind at your back once in a while!
Who could you get a “burst of encouragement” from? It might be someone in your church, a pastor from another church in your area, or someone from the other side of the country – but whoever it is, find ways to stay in touch with them. Invest in the relationship. Pray together, challenge one another, and watch God work!
Let me add that while you certainly can’t have lunch with Dwight L. Moody, you can “spend time” with him by reading books such as A Passion for Souls by Lyle Dorsett and experience a similar effect. I doubt that it’s possible to read about the life of Moody and not have your own passion for souls charged up. The same is true when you read about Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth, John Wesley, Hudson Taylor, William Carey, and many others.
Most of us will never have personal access to someone like Billy Graham, but we can listen to his messages and read his autobiography, Just As I Am. When we do, some of his contagious influence rubs off on us. Rick Warren can have a similar effect through The Purpose Driven Church, as can Bill Bright, through reading the powerful biography of his life, Amazing Faith, and his world-impacting ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ.
Even at a distance, people such as Chuck Colson, Luis Palau, Ravi Zacharias, Greg Laurie, and Bill Hybels can impact our attitudes and help us become more driven to reach the seekers who live all around us.
So get around the right people, and under the influence of people you can’t get around, and let their evangelistic hearts affect yours. It will help you to live out this vital value in powerful ways.
- Get in the Game
Other than the emphasis on prayer, the most common response I received to my question on how we can keep our evangelistic embers burning brightly was that we need to simply get out of the lab and spend time with real non-Christians. Before he passed away, D. James Kennedy told me that it was “the discipline of going out weekly with our Evangelism Explosion teams, which keeps the edge on your evangelistic sword.”
Wayne Cordeiro, a man who stays extremely busy as the pastor of the burgeoning New Hope Christian Fellowship Oahu in Honolulu, Hawaii, told me one of the main ways he keeps motivated is to “take time to be with people. I play on a city league soccer team every Tuesday evening. I belong to the Rotary Club, and I often speak to companies about leadership, excellence, and restructuring. This keeps me in contact with non-Christians weekly.”
Two of my own spiritual mentors, the now-deceased Bob Passantino and his wife, Gretchen, wrote, “We think one of the big mistakes Christian leaders make is that they tell their listeners to witness to the unsaved, but they themselves spend all their time in a Christian cocoon and don’t regularly do what they teach others to do. There are lots of ideas that sound good, but until you experience their practical application, you can’t effectively equip others to do the same.”
Pastor and author Gene Appel said “Nothing keeps my embers for the lost ‘hot’ like sharing my faith. The more I get to interact with lost people the more fired up I become. The more distant I get, the colder my heart gets.”
Actual face-to-face interaction with people who don’t know Christ is, without question, what motivates me more than anything else. I can listen to good teaching about evangelism, read Scripture verses about the priority of spreading the good news, and hear statistics about how many new unchurched families are moving into the neighborhoods around the church, but nothing moves me like getting to know a few real people who need God. Then they are no longer nondescript, generic “seekers.” They are people I care about, with real names and faces. And I’ll do whatever I can to try to help them meet Christ. How can you not value lost people when they’ve become your close friends!
The challenge, especially if you’ve been a Christian for a long time, is to deliberately step out of your comfort zone and get yourself around some people who matter to God, but to whom God may not yet matter. They’re going to talk differently – and sometimes much more “colorfully” – than you and your church friends, value things you don’t value, take part in things you don’t like or agree with, and at times make you feel uncomfortable. But before you get discouraged, just think about how the sinless Son of God must have felt when he came to this sin-tainted planet and walked among us, “seeking and saving that which was lost.” Let his love and example – and the fruit of his efforts – inspire you to do what he did. It’ll be a stretch at first, but before long you’ll see that it’s the adventure of your life! And sooner or later some of those wayward friends are going to come back around and thank you for doing what it took to reach them with the love of the Savior.
- Follow God’s Promptings
The final thing I’ll mention that will help us live out evangelism values is listening to God’s voice and staying attuned to his leadings. Chuck Colson wrote this to me:
I have disciplined myself to listen to the Holy Spirit. For example, I was giving the closing lecture at the C. S. Lewis Conference in Oxbridge recently, and in the prayer time ahead of my speech, one of my colleagues prayed for those who might be there from the Cambridge campus who were spiritually adrift or searching or seeking. Halfway through my talk when I was describing the influence of Lewis on my life, I stopped and said, “I’d like to share the same message with you that Lewis shared with me.” We had a prayer of invitation in the middle of the closing address at the Oxbridge Conference! But that’s only because I felt the prompting of the Spirit.
Lee Strobel relayed a similar experience that happened at a more personal level. He was meeting people after he had spoken at a church. A man poured out his heart to Lee about issues he was facing and told him how much he needed God’s help. Lee said his natural inclination was to simply encourage the man a bit and offer to pray for him. But Lee was dialed in to the voice of the Spirit, who prompted him instead to challenge the man concerning what was keeping him from trusting Christ. Before their time together was over, the man prayed with Lee to receive Jesus as his forgiver and leader.
Who knows what exciting doors of spiritual influence God will take us through if we will just listen to his voice and do what he tells us. God is actively reaching out to lost people. We just need to respond to his promptings and seize the opportunities he provides. When we do, he’ll use us to touch the hearts of others – and in the process he’ll work in us, too, expanding our own hearts.
Living Evangelistic Values
How about you? Are you so busy with church work that you don’t have time to do the most important work of the church? Especially as Christian leaders, we have to set aside needless meetings, unessential appointments, and the ever-present sense of busyness, and make certain we are getting up close to the people God wants to reach.
Let the love of God and your love for people motivate you. And let others in the church see what you’re doing. Let them watch you build relationships with nonbelievers. Talk to them about your efforts to start spiritual conversations and convey biblical truths to your friends. Tell them when it goes well, and tell them when it doesn’t. They’ll learn from your successes and your failures – and will be inspired by both.
Enjoying the Adventure: Risks, Rewards, and All
I’ve discovered that no matter who you are, what role you play in the church, or what step God is leading you to take in evangelism, big or small, it will always feel to some degree risky. It might be a relationship to build, a conversation to start, a question to ask, a misconception to correct, a group to train, an event to initiate, or any number of other possibilities. Whatever it is, it’s going to feel a bit threatening, and you’re going to be tempted to put it off or skip it entirely. Perhaps you’ve been avoiding it for some time already?
Both the Old and New Testaments tell us “the righteous will live by faith” (Habakkuk 2:4; Romans 1:17). The Christian life involves living in dependence on God. That was true in a major way when we trusted God for salvation, but the Bible is saying much more than that. Notice the verses do not merely say, “The righteous initially received eternal life by faith.” Rather, they say we live – present tense – by faith.
Just what is faith? One way to view it is as “God-directed risk”: l iving based on simple trust in God’s promises and unseen protection, obeying his unseen Spirit, building his unseen kingdom, looking forward to his as-of-yet unseen home in heaven. It’s the risk of taking him at his word and finding him completely trustworthy. A rough paraphrase of the verse might be, “The righteous will live lives marked by patterns of obedient, God-honoring risk-taking.” The question is this: Are you living by that kind of biblical faith?
To at least some degree, we must be courageous Christians if we’re to become contagious ones. We must get on board with what Scripture and God’s Spirit are leading us to do, even if it is new, even if it seems unusual, even if it might be misunderstood. We have to move ahead and set the pattern for the rest of the church. We need to lead the way and then, like the apostle Paul, say to the others, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). We must show what it looks like to live out the value that lost people matter to the Father and also to us. If we’ll do this, soon they’ll matter a whole lot more to our churches too.
Mark Mittelberg is the author of Becoming a Contagious Church, co-author with Bill Hybels of the Becoming a Contagious Christian book and training course, and he just released a new book designed to deepen the faith of Christians and help seekers trust in Christ. It’s called Choosing Your Faith … In a World of Spiritual Options. For more information see: