An Anglican Archbishop defined evangelism this way:  “To evangelize is to present Christ Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit that men and women should come to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Savior, and serve Him as their King in the fellowship of His Church.”

Evangelism, therefore, is not only reaching people with the gospel message and bringing them to a decision for Christ; it is making them into disciples.  This definition ties commitment to Christ with commitment to the church.  So much of evangelism doesn’t connect the targets of our evangelism with people actually becoming responsible church members.

My recommendation to you is that you spend the bulk of your evangelistic activities and energies on those things that will turn people into responsible members of your church.  It is certainly appropriate and right and good to have a prison ministry, to preach the gospel wherever there are ears to hear—to the homeless, the people living in nursing homes, to folks living in another community.  But so often churches spend the bulk of their evangelistic energy and activity on those things with do not result in countable disciples in their own local churches.

Now, you will note on this list that I have not listed Servant Evangelism, which I believe is primarily pre-evangelism and saturation evangelism, a way to saturate your community.  So because I understand Servant Evangelism to primarily be pre-evangelism, that doesn’t show up on my list.

I believe that if a senior pastor wants to have an evangelistic church that the beginning place for that is an understanding of his own crucial role in making the church evangelistic.  In fact, virtually anything that is going to be birthed into a church, up until a church is a certain size, perhaps 1000 people, is probably going to require a significant amount of personal involvement by the senior pastor.  The senior pastor stands in the center of the stream of what they want to happen in the church.  The senior pastor must model evangelism through regular open invitations in Sunday morning sermons.

Pastors must regularly “pull the trigger.”  A good book recommendation on how to pull the trigger would be The Effective Invitation by R. Alan Streett (Revell).  However you do the invitation the goal is to get people’s names so that you can effectively follow-up on them.

The senior pastor must also model personal evangelism, whether "friendship evangelism" or "proclamation evangelism" through open air preaching, "servant evangelism," so that other people can observe you having a passion for and interacting with the lost.

The church must also create seeker-sensitive services.  Here, we need to distinguish a service that is targeted at seekers, such as the Willow Creek model of Sunday morning targeted services from a seeker-sensitive service, which is targeted at believers, but is sensitive to the needs and the presence of non-believers.  You must create an atmosphere in which people are inclined to bring unchurched friends to the service.  In this regard, I would recommend that you examine your church from the perspective of an unchurched person.  One simple way to start is to examine your Christmas and Easter services.

I believe that you must also regularly offer courses in personal evangelism.  And since the type of witnessing that might work for the senior pastor or the evangelism director of the church may simply not work for the introvert or the untrained, the people need to be trained in ways that compliment their personalities and gifts.  If you look at the approaches of different evangelists in the Bible, we see that Peter was a confrontational straight shooter who told the crowd at Pentecost exactly what they had done—crucified God’s Son.  Paul’s analytical approach allowed him to write intelligent, deep theological letters to the church.  The blind man in John 8 gave his testimony of God’s power to heal him.  The Samaritan woman invited others to come and see.  As a servant of God, Dorcas used her sewing abilities to minister a witness to the needy.

So the kind of personal evangelism training that I would recommend is helping people to know their personality types, to see whether they are strong-willed, opinionated, confrontational, choleric, passionate, or energetic.  Are they charismatic sanguines?  Are they peacekeeping phlegmatics, caring, gentle and desiring of serving?  Are they melancholic, who are patient, analytical, and logical?  What are they?

I discovered number of years ago that my assumption that individuals are hearing the gospel on Sunday mornings and would have already responded before coming to our Newcomers’ Class was entirely false.  People were coming to our Newcomers’ Class, which for us is our new membership class, with only the vaguest notion about how to come to Christ.  They wanted to join the church because they thought it was neat, because it was relevant, they liked the music and they thought I was funny.  Advertisers say that a message must be heard seven times before it sticks.  Never assume that someone has received Christ.  So now, I preach the gospel at the beginning of every Newcomers’ Class and we see dozens of people make first-time commitments in every Newcomers' Class.

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