This post is something I want you all to read and, if needed, consider implementing
in the congregation where you worship.
Usually when you think about a Bible class on evangelism you pretty much figure you are going to talk about how to reach out. You spend time on techniques, tactics, and share experiences that hopefully get people to become more evangelistic. I am a teacher at heart and my usual answer for just about anything is that we just need to teach on it some more. Well, my wife has helped me to see that sometimes more words don’t result in the needed changes. Sometimes you have to be the change you are seeking in others. Sometimes you have to do and invite into that experience what you think people need to be doing in order for it to happen. Having said all of that, a few weeks ago we ended our men’s class in order to start an evangelistic class. I don’t mean we are talking about how to evangelize. We spend the class time coordinating outreach of real people. We are still tweaking it as we go but I thought I would share what we are doing in this class so that someone else could start this if they wanted to. Before I lay out the class, much of what is done in the class comes out of the Church Steps that I wrote about a few posts back:
- Casting a Vision for Evangelism: Introduction to Our New Approach
- Casting a Vision for Evangelism: What We Are Doing
- Casting a Vision for Evangelism: Church Steps
- Casting a Vision for Evangelism: Church Steps in Action
Summary of those posts:
The gist of all of those posts is that we decided our evangelism was way too passive. We pretty much hoped it was happening. Then we decided it was time to make a plan and execute the plan week in and week out. The plan involves five steps of where people usually fall in becoming a Christian (people we know who have never come to anything, people who have come but haven’t gotten plugged in, those who have some relationships in the congregation, those who are studying about Christianity and finally those who have been baptized but need to get involved). Each step describes their current situation and the need that will get them to the next step. It really isn’t always that cut and dry in the real world but you have to start somewhere.
Evangelistic Bible Class:
So what does an evangelistic Bible class look like? Many of you have probably done this at some point as well and I value your feedback. Here is what we do:
- Devotional related to evangelism. Topics like what it means to be lost, conversion, new life, resurrection, etc (10 minutes)
- Review what action people have taken from last week’s class (5-7 minutes)
- Celebrate success (5 minutes)
- Who do you know we can reach out to? (5 minutes)
- Church Steps – Communicating various needs of our visitors and lining up contacts and studies from within the class. We go through who is visiting, who needs studied with, etc and get people in the class to do that this week (15 minutes)
- Prayer – Hand our prayer list of all the names we are discussing for class members to pray over. Prayer time (5-7 minutes)
Throughout the class we sometimes have a prayer here or there where it seems like the thing to do. If someone is talking about their neighbor they want to reach out to we don’t mind stopping things and praying for them right then and there if that seems like the thing to do. So this class has some flexibility but these are the main six things we do. We have also encouraged those who are going to study with non-Christians to just do it during class time in other classrooms (using Jesus 101).
