My Favorite Posts of 2011

Here are my favorite posts on going Beyond Outreach from 2011, a year with few posts.

1. Daily Evangelism

   The best evangelists I know are not pastors or preachers. They are not ordained. They are not very good public speakers. They are not “leaders” in the business sense of the word. Most of them work full time jobs, but they are lower-middle class at best.
   
   What separates these evangelists from the rest of the pack, including me, is that they can not have a conversation about anything without including Jesus. Read more ...
   
   

2. Excluding People from the Good News!

   Ninety Percent of church evangelism methods, discipleship materials, and ministry strategy targets the highly literate. In fact, the overwhelming majority of church ministry is done in such a way that it is difficult or impossible for an oral preference learner to follow.
   
   Many churches have not addressed the need to evangelize and disciple using oral methods because they have not felt the need. There are always enough literate prospects in the area to grow a church. The result is, that a great number of people are selectively excluded from the gospel message.  Read more...
   
   

3. When Values Collide

   It is among those outside of traditional church culture that the fields are white unto harvest. This is where the lost sheep have gone...[Unfortunately,] many Christians think that crossing cultures is a step beyond the general mandate. 
   
   
   One of the great challenges for churches, however, is to make that transition to real evangelism among those who don’t readily fit. Many churches don’t even understand that a transition is needed because they have a skewed perspective of who they really are... But the values a church claims to hold are not always the values a church demonstrates by its actions. A church’s true values are revealed in their behavior, not their mission statements. Read more ...
   
   

4. Top Evangelistic Churches–Things to Copy

   Just 3% of the churches in the Georgia Baptist Convention accounted for more than 26% of  all the baptisms in the state association in 2008. These churches reached and baptized nearly ten times as many people as the typical Georgia Baptist church of the same size.
   
   These churches were studied and the Georgia Baptist Convention published a booklet revealing the statistics and lessons learned from these churches...  Here is my summary of the top ten observations underscored in this booklet. Read more...
   
   

5. Daily Telling

   All day long I will tell the wonderful things you do to save your people. But you have done much more than I could possibly know. -Somewhere in Psalm 71

   One of the greatest means of evangelism is a daily broad-based telling of what you have learned of God each day. Like scattering or sowing seed, some will land on good soil and produce a harvest of souls. It is neither argumentative nor manipulative (a straw-man argument many make against witnessing). Read more...
   
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