Evangelism In 2018 (Luke 19:10)

Introduction

I also want to welcome the visitors. We’re so glad that you’ve come. I hope you’ll come back another time when you get to hear Tony preach. Tony’s the A team. And but tonight’s my turn, so I hope what I have to say is beneficial to you. I need the clicker news. So before I get started, I wanted to let everybody know if you don’t know already. We have started a prayer group through an app called We Pray. I sent everybody an email on it. I also sent most people a text inviting them to join the group. I think we’ve got about 13 people here in it, but it’s an opportunity for us to enrich our prayer life and to throughout the day share prayer requests with one another.

Sometimes people are reluctant to ask people to pray for you. You may be reluctant to do that. This will give you an opportunity to do that. It’s a real really well-developed app. So you can go to the app store and look for We Pray, and then you can look for Search for Me or search for the group that we’ve created, and I would invite you to do that. In case you can’t read this, it says, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may update your Facebook status. I don’t know if that looks familiar to any of you or not. Maybe not. Maybe this one does. How are you? Fine. For details, read my blog. Social media, a term that wasn’t in existence before 1997, is now a part of most people’s vocabularies, even old Togis like me that are over 60.

Social media is a term that means community. And you may already know some of this. Facebook’s market value is over 300 billion dollars, which ranks it ahead of General Electric, a company that’s been around since 1890. It puts Facebook number seven on the S P 500 list. And if Facebook were a nation, it would be the third biggest nation in the world. Snapchat, a more recent social media platform, it’s been around for six years, is already worth $60 billion. So social media is not only here to stay, but it’s going to continue to grow. And I know it’s very much a part of many l many of your lives here. In fact, I my understanding is that there’s some people sitting here tonight whose very existence would be in question without Facebook.

So just saying. So what does that have to do with Decor Prairie Church? So I’d like to talk tonight about evangelism at Decor Prairie in 2018. I’m talking about evangelism outside of what Tony does. Matthew 28, 18 through 20, all authority has been given to me in heaven and earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, teaching baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. We know of that as the Great Commission. Most of us know that and know that it’s our mission statement. It’s what we all are supposed to do. Each one of us has a responsibility to do that, and for some reason a lot of us struggle with that.

1. Evangelism Outside the Box

So last year, realizing that we took tried to take an approach where we could have a group effort that would help individuals be better at evangelizing. So we started the neighborhood Bible study program. We spent a lot of time setting that up. We spent a whole quarter you know with a class on it, and then arranged these Bible studies in neighborhoods to invite you know our friends and colleagues to. So we’ve had very few results from that, but we kind of knew that going in, if you recall. Most of the churches that have used this said it takes years and years for it to get going. And so and we did we made the decision to do that based upon what we knew then.

So some of the issues that we found that may be unique to us is that we’re so the our members here, all of you are so geographically dispersed that if it’s really truly going to be a neighborhood study, there aren’t a whole lot of us that live in the same neighborhood as other of us. And so we’ve had very little inviting going on, at least that I’m aware of. I think another issue is that at least in the one in the one in my that met in our home, we had up to six people from the neighborhood come. Mary’s had up to two people, two or three people. I think Tony says had four to six people. Mary’s in our house, we had people that already knew their Bible, they were already well versed in their Bible, they had absolutely no intention of changing anything they believed, and so you know, which was fine, and we kind of expected some of that going in.

So the question is do we is it gonna be profitable for us to keep studying the Bible with people who really have no idea, no, you know, no intention of changing, or should we do something else? and so and one of the reasons we took on the neighborhood Bible study is traditional approaches no longer work. So I’m gonna qualify that a little bit. I’m not so you know, things like gospel meetings, handing out tracts, Bible correspondence courses, my experience has been that in the last decade or so, those produce very few very few results. Those are more traditional approaches. So the neighborhood Bible study was something we came across that other congregations of the Lord people are doing, and they’ve had some success by can you know by just reading the Bible with people and getting more people to read the Bible.

So it we’re we’re for currently are we’re gonna we’re gonna suspend the one at our house and the one at Mary’s house. Tony’s gonna keep his going because he’s got some people in his neighborhood that are more receptive to the message and to studying together and that sort of thing. So but it but again so we want to try a new approach. We I think we think elders think a new approach is needed. You know, the phrase of outside the box, evangelism outside the box. So with the next generation of people coming up, so some people may call them the millennials, the generation X’s, Generation Y’s, the Googlers, they have all sorts of different names.

They’re not going to respond to the traditional approaches that we use for trying to evangelize. So we’ve got to think outside the box. We’ve got to do something different. Old commit old met methods of communication do not work. General Eric Sin Shinsecki said if you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less. And if you think about it, change is God’s signature on life. The word creation is another word for change. Romans 12, 1 and 2, a passage that we frequently quote is all about change, about us being transformed. so we need to we need to think outside the box about evangelizing in this year. So even though a lot of time and effort went into the neighborhood Bible study, and we’re not gonna ditch it, I’ve continually looked for other methods that we can use and finding what other churches are doing that has been successful in sowing the seed and in evangelizing.

2. Developing Friendships and Soul Awakening Events

I read three books in the last six months all around this very concept. One is called Evangelism Outside the Box, the second one is called the Connected Church, and the third one is called Viral, with a subtitle of How Social Networking is Poised to Ignite the Next Revival. And so I’ve discovered a few things I want to share with you tonight. So the author of the outside the box book takes an approach based upon three premises. One is called experiential truth. People are looking for truth that is experiential, for communication for communities in which faith is lived out and for spiritual experiences that are tangible and real. So experience comes before explanation. Secondly, community before message. People are looking for a safe and accepting community in which to work out their identity.

So belonging comes before believing, and the theory is that the next generations coming up do not decide to believe. In community, they discover that they believe, and then they decide to affirm that publicly and follow Christ intentionally. And then thirdly, imagination. the battle for allegiance in today’s next generation’s spiritual mindset is a battle of their moral imagination. So image comes before word. And so the author of that book believed that reaching, I’m going to use postmoderns, millennials, googlers, all interchangeably describing the next generations that are coming up. He believes reaching them spiritually depends on two things, developing friendships and having soul awakening events. Soul awakening events. People need to be awakened to their need for God. They need to become anxious for their souls.

And so postmoderns are drawn to relationships as much as they are to ideas, which gives them really a head start in Christianity, what Christianity is all about. It’s easier to talk to postmoderns about Jesus than it is about the five points of Calvinism or whether Israel still deserves most favored nation status among God. So the person of Jesus is much more interesting to them than thoughts about Jesus. So these two concepts, developing friendships and having soul awakening events will help transform them into the people necessary to become disciples of God. So a little bit more about soul awakening events. So in soul awakening events, we bring the Christian community into the pre-Christian world. So we use methods of communications that pre-Christians will respond to. We talk about topics and struggles they face.

3. Paul's Model for Soul Awakening Events

So we need to become excellent at communicating in ways pre-Christians respond. Paul actually did this exact same thing in Athens. Tony mentioned Acts 17 this morning. So in Acts 17, starting in verse 16, talks about when Paul was at Athens in the Areopagus, and he had been traveling around the city.

And according to verse 16, it made him angry. The Athenians spent all of their time telling about or listening to new things. Which actually is a good description for this the postmodern generation that’s coming up. So even though he was upset about what he saw, look at how he approached them, he chooses to love and affirm them and look at the effect it has. So in verse 22, he affirms their religious orientation. He says they are seekers. You know, they might be misguided, they might be idolatrous, but he doesn’t start there. He affirms what he can, he finds the good in what they are doing, and he picks up the sign post that points to the one true God in verse 23. It’s the altar of the unknown God.

So rather than criticize them for their many deities, he picks out the one that has the potential to point them to Christ, and he tells them about that God in verses 24 through 31. So look at some of the principles that Paul used that we need to think about using as well. First of all, he connects to their culture, he uses their language, he uses examples from the Athenians’ own context. And then he affirms their spiritual interest and search. He chooses to like them and let them know that he likes them.

And he affirms what he can and builds on common ground. And he proposes to answer a question they’ve already been asking. Who is this unknown God that’s above and beyond all other gods? Thirdly, he challenges their way of searching. So and he does this by quoting their own authorities and reasoning in a way that makes sense to them. At first, he obeys their rules of truth before he makes them listen to his.

Evidence that supports his message and point and points to an unexpected way to fulfill their spiritual search through Jesus. So Paul’s model is a great model for having soul awakening events. He uses the Athenian culture powerfully, and but he doesn’t compromise his Christian beliefs or distinctiveness. And so the results, you can see the results in verses 32 through 34. Some scoff, but others want to learn more. Paul leaves and some become believers. So, how do we imitate Paul? According to this man’s research, postmoderns value authenticity as their highest moral ethic. They can’t stand hypocrisy. They’re committed to reconciliation and relationships and are highly motivated toward community. So, as Paul did, we need to start where people are. Begin the dialogue at the point of people’s need and interest.

If we don’t start there, we’re not going to have anybody to talk to. However, at the same time, just as Paul did, eventually we need to make people come to face the crisis of the cross and of self-sacrifice. The other great need of postmoderns that he identifies is their need for spirituality and spiritual insight. These, according to his research, the postmoderns, the millennials, are spiritually hungry group of people. They want to create and control their spirituality. They don’t like hierarchical spirituality.

But there’s a whole lot of other things we can do that would get us more involved in the community and you know, think do some thinking outside the box, outside of normal traditional evangelistic methods. So I’m not saying that we’re going to give up on gospel meetings and that sort of thing, but we but I’m proposing that we start thinking of new ways to attract people that we haven’t thought of before. I think sometimes we’re hampered by traditions in evangelism. We need to take off the blinders and explore new approaches that don’t compromise our beliefs or our or biblical authority. Just because we haven’t done something before doesn’t mean that it’s not scriptural and that it won’t work. so we’ll talk about that a little bit more.

4. The Bible and Social Media Are a Perfect Match

So now we know a little bit about the psych psychological makeup of this next group of people, this next generations that are coming up. How does that relate to social media? So some may ask, is social media the right place to share the gospel message? You know, whenever a new technology hits the market, think of radio and TV. The first application to it is usually commercial use. But eventually both of those mediums became effective mediums for sharing ministries. so can we think that maybe social media can do the same thing? Here are some reasons to think to think that it can and why the Bible and social media are a perfect match. You know, social media is not just about cat videos or vacation photos.

It’s it’s actually a place where the connected audience, connected audience, looks for answers to some of life’s biggest questions and problems. Questions about their work, about their home, about their relationships. It’s a place where people find information that influences their thoughts and actions. You know, we are, as humans, we’re social beings. And we turn to our trusted sources, our circle of friends, our family and others that we have confidence in to help us make decisions. And that’s that’s not different than what we find in the Bible. Think about Moses as one example. Jethro came into his life at just the right time, his father-in-law, and gave him a piece of advice that he listened to because he was a trusted source, and it helped Moses tremendously.

He was getting worn up by doing all the judging all by himself. Jethro offered a solution that he took and put into practice and helped him tremendously. So as humans, we often take the advice of trusted sources to solve life’s problems. So the question is this. Do we, the Decapary Church, want to be the trusted source in the Tomball Magnolia area that the community looks to for answers on spiritual matters? Do we have the answers that will help people? I think the answers to those questions are pretty obvious. That’s what God put us here for. Now we have to let people know that we have the answers by spreading our answers on social media. How can we share answers with people when they’re asking questions in places where we currently have no presence?

Another reason they’re a perfect match is people today face many problems and challenging situations. They’re looking for hope. They’re looking for motivation. They’re looking for encouragement to help them overcome their challenges. What better place of encouragement than the Bible? And also the Bible, the Bible has global relevance. We have the potential today to reach people all over the world using social media. The Bible is meant for a global audience, as is social media. Jesus said, go into all the world. I mean, who knows where we can have influence. And then lastly, the Bible and social media are a match because the Bible is search friendly. In the beginning was the word. The Bible is based upon words. You used to hear the phrase that we are people of the word.

I don’t hear that phrase anymore, but I would submit that we still are people of the word. All that we do around Christians is centered around the word of God. But social media is also about words. If you want to search for anything, you type in words.

5. The Great Commission and Social Media

So if the Bible and social media are a perfect match, what can we do to maximize its use? So back to the Great Commission and social media. Thanks to the internet and social media, we are better equipped than any generation ever to carry out the Great Commission. For the first time in history, most of the world is connected. The majority of humanity. Over 200 million people log into Facebook every day. Over 70% of those are outside the U.S. So Jesus told us to go make disciples in Matthew the 28th chapter. Discipling is an ongoing activity that takes time, it takes effort and consistency to equip people to become disciples. And social media can help with that. Most of you have very busy lives between working and keeping up with your kids’ activities.

So, how do you have time? If you find someone that needs to be discipled, how do you have time to do that in an already busy life? Well, I think social media can help us with that. if we combine technology and social media with church services, we can foster discipline on an ongoing basis. We can take what we teach and use it as a source of inspiration and encouragement all week long at any time of the day. We can take some of Tony’s sermons on Sundays and reinforce that content all week long with a series of social media posts. And of course, discipleship can only happen with teaching. and you know, we have to be able to teach the Bible to people in depth for them to understand the principles of God and to understand what it takes to become a disciple of God.

And social media enables teaching in the following way. So consistent delivery is one way. You can take a specific subject and deliver teaching material consistently on social media for a long period of time. If you’re on TV or radio, you’ve got to set time limit, and then your time goes away. On social media, you’ve got your own broadcasting station you can use as long as you like to deliver your teaching material, and you can pace it without any external pressure. Interactivity.

Comments, feedback, and input flowing in both directions. Almost all of the platforms allow for a free flow of communication, which creates a highly interactive teaching experience. Context, everyday context. So teaching on social media is very different than teaching in a classroom. Being able to teach during the day can make the context more relevant and immediately usable. Let’s say, for example, that we have something we’ve posted that is a lesson on forgiveness. And somebody reads that while they’re on work, at work on their lunch hour, and they’ve just had an argument with a coworker. They can take that, they can take that teaching and put it to use immediately and make the context immediately applicable and make the teaching come alive. And then empowered to share. So today many of us face questions from family and friends and co-workers about our faith, about religion.

If you have easy access to teaching material that you can access on the spot, you can engage in conversations more easily and answer questions more quickly with people that are asking you about your beliefs about what the Bible teaches.

That’s what Jesus did. Jesus went to the synagogues, Jesus went to the public squares, he went to where the people are. Today, the people are on social media. 2.3 billion people actively use social media.

And God designed us to be communicators. So the connected audience, they’re called the connected audience because the because of the global connectivity and affordable smartphones, a lot of younger people and a lot of you are constantly connected. You use your smartphones and your devices for all throughout the day, in all areas of your life. And the thing about the and this phrase the because they’re the connected audience, one of the other books labeled the same group of people, but Googlers. so and in fact he differentiated the Googlers from people of my generation, which he called the Gutenberg. If that doesn’t date you, so but their characteristics are they’re eager to learn, always connected, open to other views and opinions, and willing to be your brand ambassador.

The author of the viral book called them again, called them googlers, and they tend to live by values that early Christians would recognize. They believe there is much more truth in relationships than in propositions. They yearn to do more than interact with others, they want to share life. I think that’s pretty obvious if you spend any time on Facebook or other places. So one example he used, he said while Gutenberg Christians spend are busy parsing a group, a Greek root to uncover the meaning of the word submit in Ephesians 5. Googlers are friending another 200 people, reading the text message that came in the last 10 minutes, and meeting someone for coffee. Totally different environment. And he said almost verbatim, what the author of Evangelism Outside the Box said.

These people, the Googlers, the postmoderns, they live in the age of experience, participation, and connection. More reasons why the Bible and social media are a perfect fit to evangelize the next generations. And then the Bible has the answers. You know, people, as I said, and as you’re aware, people face many challenges today. They’re looking for hope. Most of them don’t know, haven’t learned that they can find answers to any challenge in the Bible. So we need to get that message out to a wider audience in a relevant way, in a way that they will listen and that they will pay attention to. So you may be asking yourself, how do we do that?

6. Expanding Our Presence in Social Media Platforms

We have hired a consulting group called Paradigm Consulting out of Dallas. They work exclusively with churches. And they help churches in a number of ways. One way they help churches is to help them manage growth. And we’ve taught we’ve already talked to them about probably having to have conversations with them about that. But what we’ve initially hired them to help expand our presence in social media platforms.

And they found some things they liked and that were doing well, and they found some things that we need help on. And so one of the things that needs help, some of the things that need help are our website, our logo, and our Facebook page all need to be updated. That’s not a criticism on anybody who’s worked on that. It’s just the fact that if we’re going to use this for evangelism, they need to look different. Our website, our website, for example, has been internally focused, and now we need to make it externally focused. But some of the things that where we stand out are our demographics. When they looked at the demographics of Decker Prairie and found that 60% of our members are between 30 and 44 years of age with two kids.

They said, Do you know how many churches would kill to have demographics like that? They also said there are 65,000 Facebook users within a four-mile radius of the of the building. They said that’s very high. So that’s on our side. our video a video hit rate. We have one video on our Facebook page that’s been viewed 1700 times. They were blown away by that. They said that shows you that your people that are coming to your Facebook page want more videos. So they’re going to help us with that too. On the other hand, our comment response rate needs improvement. So they found two comments made on our Facebook page that were never responded to. And so they said that’s kind of like somebody asking you, how are you?

And your answer is their own answer. So we’re going to fix that too. And the other thing they commented on was our building. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you to hear someone say that the building on the outside looks dated. However, they found the interior to be, in their words, eclectic. And they said that we need to focus on highlighting the interior of the building. So they’re gonna help us reach our target audience, help us accomplish the things I mentioned earlier, building a community and having a soul awakening events. So here’s our here’s where we’re going with them. First thing we’re going to do is update our Facebook page. So and then along with our website and logo, and then we’re going to add, we don’t have any presence currently on Instagram and Twitter.

One of the things that was interesting that they said was Instagram and Twitter are not number two and three behind Facebook, they’re one B and one C. They are so much in demand or use or whatever that they’re almost on a par with Facebook. I mean, take think about Twitter, for example. If you didn’t know about Twitter before Trump became president, you sure do know. He tweets often, much to his detriment. But if you think about it, so did Jesus. Jesus was a was an expert at sound bites that bit with terseness and immediacy and was a master at truth simplified. That’s what tweet that’s what tweeting is all about. And the author of the viral book says v tweeting on Twitter will become more popular than likes and on Facebook because it’s a viral, and that’s a perfect way to spread messages about the gospel because it’s viral and it could and it gets resent over and over and over to more and more people.

And so and then a little bit farther down the road, a phase two is we’re gonna add Snapchat and Facebook Live. If you’re not familiar with Snapchat, that’s a website that has two-minute videos that disappear in twenty four hours. And they are very high on using Snapchat to reach the millennials, the eighteen to twenty five year olds. They are 60 million people from ages 18 to 25 in the US on Snapchat every day. And so here’s their quote.

And then Facebook Live is another alternative. So we’ve already, before we, before I ran into this company, we already been looking at streaming Tony’s, much to his chagrin, streaming Tony’s lessons live over the internet. And Facebook Live, they said is a much better alternative than live streaming. The only issue we have is that Comcast won’t, because of where our building is, Comcast won’t provide cable service. So we’re gonna have to work on that. But so they’ve already, so they’ve already been starting to do some work, which maybe you’ve seen if you’ve been on our Facebook page. They’re already capturing some domain names. They had ideas which I really like, Decreperious hashtag DecapariusFamily and things like that. the other thing they said was there’s six people, six places people go to look for a church.

If they want to go try to find a church to attend to, there’s six places they go to, none of which we are on. Google, Yelp, the white pages, the yellow pages, the super pages, and Yahoo. If you do a search on Google for churches in Magnolia, we don’t show up till the second page. So we’re gonna change that. And we’re gonna show up on all these places. So people, if they’re looking for a church in Magnolia, they can find us. So our plan of action is starting with consistent intentional posts. If you’ve been to the Facebook page in the last week or two, you’ve already seen this happening.

And the consistency of posting is based upon their research that shows that most churches make a posting once every 48 hours. So that’s what we’ve started to do. And if you go out there, you’ll see that people are responding. Some of it’s you, but some of it’s other people. And so, and then we’re gonna look at some exploring some community outreach programs. What kind of things can we do in the community to let them know who we are and that we’re here? Nobody in the Magnolia Town area knows who we are or that we’re even here. Okay, no nobody may be an exaggeration, but very few people. and so sometime in January, I’m not sure which weekend, the p people from Paradigm are going to come back here and they’re gonna take a bunch of pictures.

They want pictures of all of you on our website. to that’s more about the outward facing change to our website. So yeah, there’d be some people that we don’t want. No, I’m just kidding. and so again, the but as with any evangelism approach, the goal is to solve this sow the seed. And this is not absolving every one of us from our own individual responsibility. We also we all still need to be out looking for people that are looking. We need to be looking for people whose lives are in transition. Usually people whose lives are in transition are open to life changes. Somebody who’s just moved to the area, somebody who’s had a loss, somebody who’s just gotten married, those kind of things.

A lot of times in those situations, people are receptive to you know to change and to looking at new things. So we need we each need to continue to do that. However, we’ve now got another way that you can share your faith and share the gospel message through social media. I would ch I would say to many of you, a less challenging, less intimidating way to share information with others. And so one of the first questions I asked them after they came here and met with us was so we already have a growth issue. Where are we going to put all these people? And they said, you’re not gonna, this isn’t gonna cause an explode. Their experience is this doesn’t cause churches to explode. The growth is going to be organic.

And so we’ll see about the same amount of growth we’ve continually seen. And what a problem to have if we outgrow the building and we need to approach that, and they can help us with that too. So anyway, there’ll be a lot more to do as this unfolds. so we’re we’re gonna have we have a social media team in place, and again, so we can control the contact content, but that still leaves once we get this going, and once we start having tweets and that sort of thing, it still allows every one of you to have access to that and share it with your own circle of influence. So that’s all I have to say. Hopefully, this is exciting to you.

Conclusion

It’s exciting to Robert and I, and we’re looking forward to this as more and more as time goes on. So the question is: where do you stand with God today? Have you been waiting for the right time to commit your life to Christ? Why not do it today? We’re here to help if you come to the front as we stand to say.