When you were in ministry as a pastor in a traditional church, did you have unsaved friends? Do you feel like you had to work harder than you do now?
Oh yeah, I had to work a lot harder because of responsibilities at the church: visiting, counseling people with their own issues. So I had to work harder at building relationships with people outside the church. It might be neighbors or people at the gym. I would just have to look for more opportunities.
It’s a lot more work because the church wasn’t built around evangelism and discipleship. You end up running a lot of programs versus going out and really building relationships to evangelize and disciple and to bring other people along to watch you do it.
So now, church is really centered around we’ve got to get to these people one way or another; let’s figure out how to do it. Follow me, and I’ll make you a fisher of men because that’s what I’m doing right now.
We have rules in our office. There’s this thing called the 30-minute limit. I don’t want you in the office for more than 30 minutes without either being in prayer or going out and sharing your faith with someone and trying to make a disciple. Otherwise, it’s going to become like your typical church office environment where everyone’s just sitting around talking.
Once you get out of the typical church model—you’re just stuck in so many meetings and discussions with other believers over methodology, practical things, trying to talk people into repenting that really don’t want to. We just lose our hearts for the lost because we’re just buried in the problems of the church.
