Baby steps to creating an evangelistic culture

Bud Brown March 4, 2020

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You worked up the courage to chart the last 10 years’ trends in giving, baptisms, demographics and attendance. The trend-line is alarming; it forecasts the church’s fatal crash a few years hence. 

You can’t turn a blind eye any longer. Something must be done because “grow or die” is the stark choice before you. And it’s on you, pastor, to overturn the church’s culture of missional malaise and evangelistic indifference. 

It falls on you to lead the creation of a fresh, new culture in your church—a culture of evangelism. 

But where’s a pastor to start a monumental undertaking such as this, one for which you’ve not been trained? Figuring out where to start will be somewhat easier if you recognize everything that contributes to your church’s current culture of spiritual lethargy and Great Commission irresponsibility. 

Think of a church’s culture as “the way we do things here.” Culture is a self-maintaining and self-refining system of beliefs (assertions accepted as true), values (relative worth of things), artifacts (useful objects) and behaviors (visible conduct). These components interact to create and sustain a living system greater than the sum of its components. 

Because culture is a system, change in any of its constituent parts will ripple through the whole. 

You could attempt to create a culture of evangelism by starting with the church’s belief system, by assessing which values are actual and which are mere aspirations, by cycling through new artifacts or by nurturing new behaviors. 

Although pastors typically attend to the belief system first, there’s an easier way to get at the culture: take baby steps by making small changes in the artifacts that create the physical environment.

Baby steps for the pastor

1. Rearrange your office. (You’ll be surprised how the effort focuses your mind on what’s important!)

2. Block out one lunch hour per week to be spent with an unbeliever.

3. Hang a sign that reads “If evangelism isn’t priority No. 1 it’s not a priority at all!” where you’ll see it every day.

4. Spend more time with spiritually healthy church members than with the needy, the passive and the indifferent.

5. Put an evangelism tract on the dashboard of your car.

6. If you don’t already have one, include “The Pastor’s Prayer” in your worship services; use this to pray for the mission and evangelism.

7. Work from a new “scorecard.” Instead of tracking income and attendance, start tracking the congregation’s evangelistic encounters, the number of tracts distributed and so forth—metrics related to outreach and evangelism.

Baby steps for the congregation

1. Put top quality evangelistic tracts in the bulletin and ask people to use them.

2. Hang a banner that says, “Evangelism is our first priority” up front where everyone sees it.

3. Hang another banner that says, “Remember when you go out—evangelism is your first priority” that everyone can see when they leave.

4. Feature a once-a-month testimony during the worship service in which a member shares a recent evangelistic encounter.

5. Every week ask for a show of hands: “Who prayed for someone by name to be saved this past week or gave a word of testimony to an unbeliever or went out of their way to establish a new relationship with an unbeliever?” (This is going to feel weird at first, and some in the audience may resent it. But remember—what gets measured gets done.)

6. If your church has wall space, put up prayer request cards that the members post, asking for salvation decisions. 

7. Post the new scorecard (see above) where everyone can see the numbers—in the bulletin or on the wall in the sanctuary.

Patience, grasshopper

Rome, as they say, wasn’t built in a day. Neither was any other notable culture. It takes time. So slow down, take small measured steps and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. After all, that’s how Dimitrion Yordanidis finished a marathon in 7 hours 33 minutes at the age of 98. 

^1.“Four things to look for in your church’s culture.”

^2.In the church’s system, introducing new artifacts and cycling out old ones leads to changes in behavior, subtly influences the values, and may even shed new light on the belief system. 

Photo source: istock 

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Bud Brown is an experienced ministry leader, writer and educator. He is co-founder of Turnaround Pastors and co-author of the ground-breaking Pastor Unique: Becoming A Turnaround Leader. He brings special expertise to change leadership in the local church, mentoring pastors to become revitalization leaders, training churches how to find and recruit the best talent, and training leadership teams how to achieve their shared goals. Learn More »

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