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FAST Missions

Daniel Vis

The Missing Key

Father in heaven, we sense that we are nearing the end of time.

There is a great work for us to do in our communities and around the world even.

And yet we are seemingly powerless to reach almost anyone.

If there's something we've missed in your word, I pray that you would open our eyes, make it simple and clear this morning.

I mean, spiritual multiplication sounds good and all, but if it's not combined with some kind of evangelism, if there's not some mechanism for bringing people in, then that spirit of multiplication is gonna come to a close, amen?

I mean, we're gonna run out of people to train.

There has to be some combination where we're not only training, but we're also reaching out to new people or multiplication will not work.

Memorization is important, having the Word of God right on the tip of our tongues and the back of our mind, ready to go.

That's important, living out the Word of God so that our life is an example to others, where there's a difference between us and the rest of the world.

That's important too, that'll give power to our testimony.

But is there some mechanism or key to evangelism that's outlined in the New Testament maybe that we've missed?

I believe there is, and for a number of reasons.

Here's 1 reason why I think we should question the way we currently do evangelism.

Most churches, when they think of evangelism, they rely on 1 of 2 different models.

First model is what we might call the public evangelism model.

Now there's a place for public evangelism, don't misunderstand me, but think about it for a moment, right?

There are some limitations to this approach, right?

For 1 thing, public evangelism is very expensive.

If you run an evangelistic campaign, a large 1, try and reach a major metropolitan area like we are here, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to mail just out the flyers.

And if you add meeting locations and you bring in a speaker and just all the expenses, it can cost upwards of 30 or 40 thousand dollars to run an evangelistic series.

And most churches just don't have the budget to do that Day in, day out, day in, day out.

If you're meeting 4 or 5 nights a week for 2 hours or Whatever and you have commute times, most people have full Time jobs and other responsibilities and to come out 4 or 5 nights a week for 4 or 5 weeks on end.

By the end of this year is all you want to do is just take a break.

It's also maybe you never thought about it, but it's also tends to be vulnerable to the enemy's attacks.

I remember 1 time I was in a conference and this conference, they organized this massive evangelistic campaign all over the state and they printed up hundreds of thousands of flyers for all the churches.

They were all gonna start the same night.

They put the wrong phone number, the registration number on the flyers.

They printed hundreds of thousands of them.

1 little kink in the plan could have been a disaster, but fortunately God intervened and they were able to get a hold of that number and it worked out.

But 1 little kink when you put all your efforts into 1 focused, You know, it can be vulnerable.

Here's another 1, maybe you haven't thought about.

Sometimes it can lead to what I sometimes call a spectator mentality.

This is the idea that evangelism is something you come out and watch.

It's not something you do personally, it's something you come out and watch other people do.

I don't think that's really God's plan for his people.

He wants us all to be actively involved in evangelism.

And another thing that goes right along with that, sometimes we get the idea that evangelism is a seasonal event.

Oh, we're going to do evangelism in the fall.

We're going to do evangelism in the fall, or we're going to do evangelism in the spring, rather than it being a year round part of our lifestyle.

We don't want to communicate that message, do we?

We're not intending to, but sometimes that comes across.

And another problem with public evangelism is that many times there is little or no follow-up plan for those that do make decisions, and we know the results of that.

Many people may be baptized, but within a year, 6 months, or whatever, they're gone, they're not even coming.

There's no follow-up in place many times when public evangelism is done.

There's other problems too, I'm not trying to belabor the point.

There's another model that many churches follow and this is problematic also, and that is the personal Bible study model.

This is where we rely on each person to be out individually giving Bible studies to their friends and neighbors.

And I've done this myself as well as doing public evangelism where you knock on doors.

If you knock on doors I guarantee you within an hour or 2 you can find someone that wants to get Bible studies.

It's not that hard to find people And you can give Bible studies to them in their home and share our message.

1 thing, most of us are terrified of the thought of going out and knocking on a stranger's door and asking to give them Bible studies.

Most of us are just too afraid to even get started with something like that.

And many of us, there's a good reason why we're afraid.

It's because we don't really know our Bibles that well.

I mean, we're afraid we're gonna run into some Baptist preacher or something and we're gonna offer to give them Bible studies and we're gonna end up being confused ourselves because we don't really know Our Bible as as well as we think we should as we know we should Or maybe there's a lack of spirituality in our own personal life, right?

We're struggling with our own life with different things and we don't really feel comfortable going out and trying to export our faith to others.

If it's not working for us, how am I going to give it to someone else?

And to be honest, even though occasionally we'll do Bible worker training, many times that training is very shallow and superficial.

And so we go out, but we don't really know how to recognize conviction.

We don't know how to deal with objections.

And so we go out and give Bible studies, but we can't seem to get that decision at the end.

And we can do it for months and months, and we never get the decision that we're hoping for.

Many times we are limited in our experience.

And so maybe we know a little bit about Baptists because we have some background, but maybe we've never studied with a Catholic, or we never studied with a Jehovah Witness, or we never studied with a Mormon.

And there's all kinds of different theologies out there and different ideas.

And if we don't have some kind of background, we may just feel ourself overwhelmed because we don't have the experience to deal with all those different kinds of things.

And here's another 1 that maybe you haven't thought about either.

And that is that God has created each of us.

That was actually our children's story, right?

God has created each of us with different gifts and trying to squeeze every single person to exactly the same mold.

I'm not sure that that's God's plan either, right?

Trying to convince everyone they have to do exactly the same way.

And yet this is an approach some churches take.

With an approach like this, even if you do say do some Bible worker training and you get 10 or 12 people wanting to go out and start doing Bible studies, what's going to happen 3 months or 4 months down the road?

Motivation almost invariably fizzles out because you're out there by yourself alone.

And it's hard to do evangelism by yourself.

All right, so there's problems with both of these approaches and if we build our whole evangelistic model on either 1 of these, I think we're gonna have limitations in our success.

But we need to think about how we can be effective and involve as many people as possible in ministry if we want to see our church grow explosively.

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The Missing Key

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