Many Christians struggle with evangelism, feeling unsure, awkward, or fearful of coming off as too pushy. But sharing faith doesn’t have to feel forced or uncomfortable. In the Natural Outreach Workshop, I break down common mistakes Christians make when sharing the Gospel and provide practical steps for effective, natural outreach that fosters genuine relationships.

Common Evangelism Mistakes
Most outreach efforts fall short because they rely on formulaic approaches that don’t resonate with today’s audience. Many Christians feel they have to convince others or pressure them, often leading to uncomfortable conversations that do more harm than good. Instead, learning to simply live out your faith authentically and build trust can make a world of difference.

Building Real Relationships
People respond to love, respect, and understanding, not to feeling like a “project.” Genuine outreach begins with friendship and compassion, allowing others to see how God’s love transforms lives. This workshop walks you through how to build real relationships that make others curious about the hope you have in Christ.

5 Key Sessions to Transform Your Approach
The Natural Outreach Workshop originally launched as one in-depth session but is now split into five focused sessions to help you understand and apply each concept.

• Session 1: Discovering your “why” behind sharing the Gospel
• Session 2: What NOT to do – avoiding the common pitfalls
• Session 3: Preparing yourself spiritually and emotionally
• Session 4: How to invite others without pressure
• Session 5: Reflecting on your journey to strengthen your outreach

Check out the playlist embedded below and explore each session to see how you can transform your approach to sharing the Gospel with confidence and compassion. If you’re ready to make an impact for Christ, this workshop will give you the tools to do it naturally and effectively.

Handouts

As our world responds to the COVID-19 outbreak by staying home, many churches are scrambling to keep the Body of Christ connected. At Saint James in West St Paul, thanks to some expertise among some of our staff, a passionate commitment to the Gospel, an a deep desire to bring the love of Christ to our entire congregation and beyond, we’ve quickly developed a collection of methods to bring church to the church.

Services

Since we’re not meeting live, there’s no reason to livestream the services, so we record them in advance and release them on our YouTube channel on the day of the service, recording multiple services on the same day but scheduling their releases for the correct Sunday and Wednesday (Lent services). We also embedded the service playlist on the front page of our website for easy access.

We also mail out DVDs of services to shut-ins, cable access channels, and nursing homes, and we’re working on using Dropbox for the cable access channels and nursing homes to avoid contamination.

Bible Classes

Because we have Google’s G Suite (free for nonprofits), we can use Google Meet for Bible classes. The leader speaks on his phone or laptop, and participants can either click a link to join in or call a phone number, thus allowing people to listen and ask questions live. Using a handheld recorder, the leader also records the class for those who listen on the website or subscribe to the podcast.

Youth Group

We’re using a combination of Google Hangouts & Google Meet for youth group. They tend to prefer Hangouts, since they already have it installed on their phones, but Meet is a decent option, too. It’s easy to have discussions, and for our first session, we played a combination of Charades and Pictionary. You can find plenty of word games online, or you can find a shared game like Kahoot. You can also use Google Jamboard for whiteboard games like Hangman.

Sunday School

Our teachers are sending lessons to the students’ families via email: the Bible reference and a summary and discussions questions for families to use with their kids, along with craft and other activity suggestions. They’re also calling each family every week to see how everyone’s handling the situation, reporting to pastors or elders if care is needed.

Committee Meetings

Each of our current groups uses whatever works for them. I’ve used Zoom (which has a free option, but the paid option is currently free during this situation) and Google Hangouts/Meet, but there’s no shortage of options. Workplace from Facebook is also currently free. Again, Google Meet has the phone-in option for offline members. We’re also looking into GoToWebinar for congregational voters’ meetings.

Ministering to Offline Members

I’ve already mentioned some offline strategies, especially conference calling via Meet. We’ve also implemented a call-in option (using our phone system) with a recorded service (like a voicemail message, but only an OGM) so people can call and listen to the most recent service at their convenience.

We also have a group of volunteer “phone angels” who are calling everyone (specifically offline people, but hopefully eventually checking in with everyone), weekly when possible, to see how they’re doing, making sure they can access services and classes, and offering to pray with them.

We also offer a weekly update via our website and share all new content to our Facebook page, along with our emailed and printed (sent with DVDs) Daily Prayers, which includes a Bible reading based on the pericopes and an accompanying prayer.

English: Church attendance stamps. The second stamps in each of the bottom two rows have a Shield of the Trinity diagram. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Church attendance is down. That’s partly due to living in a post-churched culture and partly due to more activities that compete for time. People’s schedules are jammed, and for many, church is less essential than so many other agenda items. Why?

The 20th Century approach to doing church presented the church as a member-based club like the Lions, Masons, or Girl Scouts. It worked well in a churched culture, and attracted people who were looking for that sort of community, but not so well for those not actively looking for it. The Church Growth Movement came out of this mentality, essentially creating competition among churches for numbers, focusing on butts & bucks (public worship attendance and offerings).

But that’s not working anymore. Honestly, it was never really working, because we never should have focused on those markers. They’re important, but they’re not measurements of success or effectiveness, and focusing on them can actively inhibit true success.

So how do we discover the problem? Go back to the start: Genesis. God created us in His image. (Genesis 1:26-27) Trinity: a multiple unity. The first problem? Being alone. (Genesis 2:18)  God solved this by creating Eve, also in His image. And when we’re isolated, things get bad. (Genesis 3:1-8) This has been demonstrated in the lab and has massive repercussions for legislation, parenting, and especially churches.

So if we’re created for community, why isn’t the church flourishing? We gather people together every week! I was listening to a leadership podcast with Glen Jackson, the co-founder of Jackson Spalding, which talked about how to compete, and it left me asking, “What is the church’s competition?”  I realized that the answer takes us back to the first problem: isolation.

When we gather, we look at the backs of each other’s heads! It’s not community any more than a movie theater except that we know the names of more of the people around us, usually. We might know some details through prayer requests, like illnesses or anniversaries. We might know some superfluous details through small talk before or after the service, like who went to the fair and what they ate there.

But think about the people sitting around you. Do you know how they struggle with sin? Do you know their life dreams, what they’re doing to accomplish them, or why they’ve given up on them? How many could you call up at 3 AM in a crisis, and they’d be glad you called and insulted if you didn’t?

Realistically, you can’t have that deep of a relationship with dozens of people. Outside immediate family, most people could only handle about a half-dozen, tops.

The answer, then, is small groups with no more than 6 people. These can be same-sex groups like Journey Groups, interest-based groups, or anything else. Topic isn’t all that important, but they need 2 components for spiritual success: safe vulnerability (created by an informal-but-explicit confidentiality agreement and willingness to unconditionally accept and forgive each other) and a framework to promote spiritual conversations, like a topic-based discussion, Bible study, or accountability group. Groups should meet regularly, face-to-face whenever possible, and stay in touch when not meeting. Serving others together in some capacity strengthens bonds, as does enjoying some entertainment together, and welcoming newcomers into the group expands the benefit to others. (Although when the group gets larger than about 6, it needs to multiply into 2 groups so it doesn’t lose its closeness. Friends should remain friends, but they’ll often find their level of connection changing due to each person’s social capacity.)

Other forms of communication (social media, texting, phone calls, greeting cards) can supplement this personal interaction, but they’re no substitute for sharing spaces and faces.

It’s no coincidence that the church grew exponentially in its early years through this method. (Acts 2:44-47)

So why did we give it up? I don’t know. But it’s time to take it back.

A little background: When the church first started, it met with a lot of opposition. It was a pre-churched culture, where people didn’t know what Christianity was about and had never heard of some Hebrew preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. But over time, the Gospel spread, because Christians had a reputation for extreme love, like picking up discarded babies on the roadside and adopting them, or when a plague would hit a city, and the healthy would leave to avoid the plague, the healthy Christians would stay behind to minister to the sick and dying, even though many of them would end up dying in the process.

Most Western churches use the Attractional model and have used it for over a century but especially within the past 70 years. It focused on attracting people to come to church, bringing them to the property. Once on site, we hope they’ll stay based on the preaching, music, décor, friendliness, or whatever. That model worked in a churched culture where “Christian” was synonymous with “good citizen.” More or less, the Western world has been churched since Constantine legalized Christianity and essentially made it the state religion in the late 4th C. In a churched culture, politicians attend services on Sunday morning regardless what they believe, because it makes them look good to the general populace. Note that the Attractional model will increase the number of people in the pews still today, but mainly transfer growth or churched Christians, not the unchurched or dechurched.

But since the 60’s, and especially in the past 20-30 years, we’ve been moving gradually to a post-churched culture. The church is now seen with suspicion. It’s irrelevant. Evangelism is considered extremism. We find ourselves in a similar situation as the early church, where the church is no longer at the center of the culture, except people have heard of Christians and see us more as a voting bloc than a movement of love.

Figure of a Missional Perspective (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In response to that, a new movement started in England by Mike Breen, who saw the Christian church there decaying. He looked at the way the church functioned in its early years and decided to follow the model of the apostles, so he formed “Missional Communities,” small groups (like “the 12” or even the 4 in the Gospels) centered on the Bible who would go out into their local contexts (neighborhoods, workplaces, etc.) and get involved in the community together, building relationships, inviting others into their Missional Community. Eventually, those small groups grew and split and grew until multiple groups came together for medium-sized groups (like “the 72” in the Gospels) who would have Bible studies similar to what we have here (while still meeting and serving with their small groups), and the medium groups eventually came together for large groups (like “the crowds” in the Gospels) for corporate public worship. This model has been replicated around the US with great success. I’ve talked to Mike Breen personally about implementation and spent a couple thousand hours listening to him and others who use the Missional Model. I’ve also listened to pastors from China, where they’re Baptizing 30,000 people per day where they can go to jail for it, and the model they’re using is very similar, because when trained to live their faith and pass it on to others, disciples make disciples.

Understand that Attractional and Missional aren’t mutually exclusive. Heating the church in the winter, having a website and sign out front, preaching to “felt needs” (every one of my sermons centers around a real-life question with an answer found in Christ.) and remodeling the sanctuary are all Attractional methods, and they’re necessary to seeing people come back, but they won’t get an unchurched person here in the first place. That also gets to the question of what’s our goal in outreach, but this is getting long enough already.

To this end, we’re developing Delivered Hope. So what does Delivered Hope have to do with this? It gives people who are used to a solely Attractional model a taste of what Missional outreach looks and feels like. It gets us collectively into the community, changing our focus to working with the community for the greater good. It’s a way to make it easy for people who aren’t used to outreach that reaches out.

Strange phenomena seen with churches that shift their focus to more Missional: people start showing up—not the people directly affected by or involved in the efforts. I hear this over and over. It’s as if God is saying, “OK, now that you’re shifting your focus outward, I’ll send help.” But we also need to move our focus and goals away from numbers on the weekend to number of disciples making disciples.

This summer, we ran a week-long morning camp for age 10–high school to teach kids some acting skills, discuss our hope in Christ, and give them an opportunity to express that to others. We culminated in a final performance that combined what we had learned in a series of skits with a running story that tied it all together. Here’s our notes and script from the week for anyone who’d want to do something similar:

• Final Script
• Planning Notes
• Skit Resource: We used a lot of skits from this site for practice and ideas
• Montage Video: Google Photos made it easy to put together a video showing off what we did all week. We played this video during the offering the following Sunday.

We can’t show the final production, because parts of it were improv, and we used the kids’ names, and we don’t share photos or video that connect kids’ names with images publicly, but I hope this will be a helpful resource.

Five K-Cups (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s a quick description of Shepherd of the Ridge, North Ridgeville, OH‘s guest integration system:

Integration

Our guest integration process is customized based on a person’s first Point of Contact, how they first encounter us.

Road Sign

2 “Reserved for First Time Guests” parking spots

Sunday Worship

• PowerPoint Preservice Slide

• Parking Lot/Entry
  • Guest Parking (3 spots designated)
  • Greeter with Guest Packets in hand
• Sanctuary Greeter to watch for new faces and welcome after guest sits
• Coffee/tea/water on back table, Keurig, water pitchers for drinking or to refill Keurig, ice bucket, paper racks for newsletters and other documents on table so they take up less space, cups, lids, napkins

First Time Guests

• Red Guest Packet: Custom folders/envelopes
• (In bulletin: Fill out & turn in card, we donate $5 to Love, INC., a local organization that helps by giving a hand up, not a hand out)
• CD: Fountain of New Life (worship band) music
• DVD: Vision, DQuest, Journey Groups, Family Secrets Sermon Series
• Documents: Future magazine, Gospel statement, communion statement
• Fridge Magnet
• Service Feedback Form w/ extra $1 donation

During Service

• Post-service look-around: Before you leave the sanctuary, look around you, find someone you don’t know well, and introduce yourself

On Exit

• Greeter inviting them back
• Hospitality team: Someone invite them to lunch (Simple for the 1st service people who go out for brunch after. They could pitch in to cover the guest’s bill.)

Follow-Up

• Phone call: thanks, hope to see you again, anything I can pray about for you or someone you know?
• Email with link to service, online survey, share, etc.
• Hand-written postcard
• If made prayer request, phone follow-up a week later
• 2nd Time Guests
• Arrival/Preservice (Greeter watches for those parking in guest spots)
• Greeter asks if already received guest packet, if so, offers next steps packet
• Usher welcomes back after seeing next steps packet & points out hospitality table
• Usher points guest out to Sanctuary Greeter, who also says welcome back

During Service

• Post-service look around

After Service

• Greeter Invite back
• Make sure got packet

Next Steps Packet

• Blue for easy identification
• DQuest manual
• Sermon DVD set: some new series, CD set until then with Family Secrets series
• Sign-up sheet with SASE: Family member list; (DQuest, Journey Group, audition for band, AV team, welcome team (greeter/usher), marriage enrichment, community action team, intergenerational incarnational recreation team, CLM), what are your hobbies?; description of different items on sheet; will donate $5 if return sheet or use online form; Next steps & contact info for different life situations (As we connect the people in our community to Christ’s love, we strengthen each other as we make a difference side-by-side. We accomplish this through spiritual training and compassionate kindness to those in need.)
• Voucher for free DVD movie next visit (With DVD comes pass to get access to Table after next visit)

Follow-Up

• Phone call: thank-you, invite back, offer to pray
• Email like 1st visit, link to online sign-up form
• Prayer request follow-up a week later

Preschool

• Parent Night Presentation & more info sheet
• November kids sing in service: use standard guest protocol

Journey Group

See separate manual

God & Grub

• Informal over dinner/pizza and/or non-word game like Uno
• Everyone invited to bring questions about God, no question off-limits, no minimum participation, silent observers welcome. Adult, teen, or kid; not cross-generational except leader.
• Led by DQuest mentor & apprentice
• Separate teen & adult events
• Meet at restaurant or other public space allowing food (park, etc.), nothing with too much background noise so all can hear. Corner booths or picnic tables work especially well.
• Ppt slide: Got questions about God or the Bible? Got doubts? Got friends with questions or doubts? Or just want to hear some forbidden questions asked & discussed? Meet us at the next God & Grub: a meal at a local restaurant where no question is off-limits, and anyone is welcome.
• Suggested Catalyst questions:
  • What keeps people away from God?
  • What’s your experience with churches, good or bad?
  • If you could ask God one question, what would it be?
  • If God had a job in our community, what would He like to do?
  • What is the best objection you’ve heard to Christianity?
  • Would you like to have Jesus at your Super Bowl party?
• End with Next Steps handout like 2nd time guest

DiscipleQuest

Not normally a first point of contact, but rather a destination for the rest.

Camp Soter

• Closing program Sunday morning during service
• Standard guest protocol
• Picnic following service: opportunity for congregation to make connections

Membership Steps

1. Begin DiscipleQuest
2. If LCMS member, Seasoned Veteran, train to honorary apprentice
3. If not, begin as Trainee
4. Baptized member after Meet the Mystery
5. Communicant & Voting Member once Honorary Apprentice
6. At end of Member mission, honorary trainees complete membership class as final challenge and sign a Membership Covenant.

Churches don’t have to keep being ineffective in their communities and even within their walls. Pastor Dale Critchley offers a wide variety of tips to help churches of any size to fulfill the mission to which God called them.

This talk was originally shown at the Transforming Communities Worship Conference in Cleveland on May 18, 2013.

via Do’s and Dont’s of Transforming Towards Church Growth #TCWC13 – YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/gHQ-5s4m4Gk

DiscipleQuest: a lifelong quest for spiritual growth, discovery, and action.

DiscipleQuest is open to anyone in 6th grade or anytime afterward and continues for a lifetime. Participants are taught to teach, trained to train, and coached to coach. While the process has milestones, every participant continues on as long as each draws breath. That’s what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

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