Outreach & Discipleship

Building relationships is a lost virtue in our society today. Guys ask girls out on dates via text messages, we make friends by clicking a button on a website and hoping the other person reciprocates, and despite all of our technological advances, we are becoming more and more isolated.

Throughout the years I have seen many Christians who possessed a great passion to share their faith in courageous ways. They would seize every opportunity the Lord would bring across their paths to be faithful witnesses for Him. I embrace this same passion wholeheartedly! What a thrill it is to share God’s wonderful message of salvation with someone and then see that person make a personal decision to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour. That one decision changes his life and eternity forever!

In the Bible, although angels were used by God for a variety of purposes, the primary use was to deliver a message. In fact, the very word “angel” means “messenger.” Webster’s 1828 Dictionary further defines an angel as, “One employed to communicate news or information from one person to another at a distance.”

As church leaders, we challenge others to reach the lost. We remind them it is Christ’s last command and should be our first priority. We encourage them to schedule time for purposeful outreach.

Have you ever considered the basic convictions that motivate a soulwinner to be faithful? Convictions are the spark plugs that keep the engine of faith going forward. And biblical convictions regarding the eternal souls of men and women move us forward in reaching the lost for Christ.

When God guides a visitor to your class, He is entrusting you with a very precious gift. He is giving you the responsibility to follow up and care for this person’s interest in growth. Making follow up visits is key to encouraging growth!

If you were choosing men to turn the world upside down, who would you pick? What vocation would you draw from? I might pick lawyers (they know how to press a point), political activists (they engage fully), writers (their pens triumph even the sword), investors (they understand that large undertakings require capital), or CEOs (they get the need for oversight and administration). But Jesus chose fishermen.

In 1980, Cambodia was just emerging from one of the most horrific periods of time that any nation has ever endured. Between 1975 and 1979, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, under the leadership of the infamous Pol Pot, abused the Cambodian people in a way that is hard to describe and even harder to comprehend.

One of the sad byproducts of this modern age where “tolerance is king” is that Christians have lost the urgency of the gospel message. We are so afraid of being criticized, ostracized, or marginalized that we oftentimes unintentionally make our presentation of Christ sound like something that can be taken or left with no consequence.

I have found that it is helpful, occasionally, to start new soulwinning groups just as it is good to start new Sunday school classes every once in a while.

Sharing the gospel is a very controversial topic to most churchgoers. Most Christians would agree that we are to share the love of Christ. The controversy comes from the very few who actually do it. Curtis Hutson once said, “The only alternative to soulwinning is disobedience.”

Sometimes knocking on doors during your scheduled outreach time is the easy thing to do. Please do not misunderstand me. Our church strongly promotes knocking doors in our community in order to witness and invite people to our church. We organize the effort with highlighted maps, print attractive invitations, and try to hit every door in our community about four times a year. Yet the most difficult work is going back to the same person until he is saved and baptized.

March 7, 2012—it was the beginning highlight for what would become the delight of my year. That evening, I had the joy to begin leading a young Christian through our church’s formal discipleship program.

The soul of a man is worth enough to God that He was willing to give His most precious possession—His only begotten Son— in order to redeem that soul from Hell. The worth that God places upon a soul is undeniable and undebatable. But what about the worth of a soul to you and me? I mean, how much is it really worth to us in terms of time, effort, and money to see that a soul has had every chance to not only hear the Gospel, but come to Christ?

People do not trust Christ as their Saviour by reading our critiques of evangelism strategies. Nor do they get saved in response to discussions about our busy schedules.

The first revival meeting I ever preached was in Rock Island, Illinois, back in the early 1970s. The church already had another evangelist coming to preach to their adults, but wanted someone to hold a children’s crusade in conjunction with that revival. I gladly accepted.

One of the most important aspects of our soulwinning program has been mapping. We are blessed with a number of soulwinning members who have responded to the call to tell others about Jesus. When they come during our scheduled soulwinning times, we want to help them strategically reach our community.

Largely through the planning and organization of one of my staff members, we recently developed a more comprehensive, five-part discipleship approach. We put the picture of each new family with whom we are working on a piece of paper and are able to track from that one sheet of paper in these five areas:

Sometimes people wonder why I emphasize soulwinning so much. An evangelist once preached at our church and asked how many of our folks went soulwinning on a regular basis. When approximately half of the evening crowd raised their hands, he said, “Look at that amazing sight!”

Christian hospitality is one of the most fruitful of ministry disciplines. Over the years, my wife and I have made a habit of having people over on a regular basis, and we’ve found that opening our home for fellowship often opens hearts for discipleship and mentoring.