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You Can't Afford to Downsize This One Big Thing


3. Give it Away

A couple shifts have occurred in church culture over the last 20 years. First, we have hired experts to oversee evangelism and outreach within the church. Second is the commitment to the “seeker” movement, which has caused the church to design costly services and programs to reach the lost. Both are great things and their efforts have won many people to Christ, but both have a significant price tag attached to them. For many churches, these two things have put the responsibility of evangelism on the paid professionals in the church and taken the responsibility of evangelism away from those in the church. I often wonder what the enemy thinks of this. Instead of an army of evangelists, we have reduced the responsibility of evangelism to a few paid professionals and experts. 

My favorite model for evangelism is found in Luke 10:1-12. It’s when Jesus sends out the 72 on what you could say is the first evangelical mission in the New Testament. Jesus gives us two key thoughts in this passage. First, he reminds us that the “harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.” When it comes to evangelism, that is the cry of many churches I know today. The second thought is in verse three, when Jesus says two simple yet profound words, “GO NOW!”

Evangelism is about sending our people out to fulfill the Great Commission. I believe God is calling us to be Army Generals and GO NOW churches; to give evangelism away to those who attend and worship at our church, and not to just those that are paid to do it. If you want to be a church with an army of evangelists and a GO NOW mindset, then I suggest you study this passage with your staff and teach it to your church. As you do this, ask the simple question: God what are you telling us to do differently?

Keep this in mind … we tend to think great preaching will transform lives and impact the community. This is a myth. Great preachers don’t transform the community, disciples do.

4. Rethink Everything You Do

A couple years ago, my church decided to drop 30,000 Easter eggs from a helicopter to attract families from the community to our campus and Easter services. Well, it worked ,and thousands of kids and their parents came to the coolest egg hunt I have ever seen. Here is the genius of what we did. For years, we paid a ton of money to advertise our Easter services in local newspapers with minimal results. We intentionally decided to advertise much less than previous years, but leverage what we were doing with the helicopter drop.

Where we did decide to advertise, we had something more to say. Don’t just come to our Easter services, but join us as we drop thousands of Easter eggs from a helicopter. This idea actually allowed us to advertise more with less. We actually spent significantly less with the egg drop, and by advertising in fewer, more strategic, places than we did in previous years, we got way more out of it. We also discovered a couple other benefits from rethinking everything we do. Marketing went viral; we gave our people something easy to invite their friends to and something for our community to talk about. We also got free media coverage. The local papers did a couple front-page stories on our church and our story.

So what’s the point? Simple: We live in a world where you can get much more for less. If you take time to rethink your strategies and the technology available to you, you might actually accomplish a lot more than you thought possible. Rethinking forces us to find new opportunities and ways to get to where we dreamed of being.  

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clagerlof@churchplants.com'
Chris is a strategic thinker, project specialist and experienced leader. His passion is to help leaders and churches move forward by maximizing their focus, clarity and performance. Chris worked for 17 years as a Pastor and Champion of several ministries at Mariners Church in Irvine, CA. Chris spent the last several years using his experience and expertise to consult churches and nonprofits. Chris recently launched Mission Orange County, which exists to mobilize and multiply churches in Orange County to collaborate within their cities to impact every man, woman and child with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Chris lives in Irvine with his wife Kristen and their two daughters Tessa and Mandy. Chris likes to golf, cook, snowboard and tailgate with his family and friends at UCLA football games.