If any of what I have said here and here is true, we may be looking at all our programmes and evangelistic efforts and worry that we might be squandering our resources. It is hard to look at the trends, see what we’re doing and realise we have built almost everything around the stuff pecking around at the bottom of the effectiveness league tables. But seeing it is half the battle! The question is, once we see it, how to we stop burying our talents and start doing the work that is likely to see kingdom returns?

One options is to nuke everything and start again from scratch. Whilst that might feel appealing from a planning point of view, I strongly suspect in an established church context the suggestion will go down less happily. I know as a pastor, when I suddenly see something that we have been doing for decades but am now convicted needs to change, I have a big gulp and feel that tendency in me to justify the value of it. Our members will be just the same. Nobody wants to feel like they wasted their time over many years, even if that is the reality that we must sometimes come to acknowledge in the end. Only, one difference is that when I, as a pastor, see these things it isn’t usually an overnight revelation. It might feel that way sometimes, but on reflection there has often been a lot of long-term thinking undergirding what I have come to see now.

Imagine you are a member who has laboured away in a ministry for decades. You haven’t done any of the prior thinking your pastor has done, you haven’t really read any stats on the subject, ultimately because it wasn’t on your radar. You were just faithfully ministering away in whatever it was you, and most churches like yours, believed was an effective way to reach people. Suddenly, you are presented with a bunch of stats and a statement from your pastor to the effect that we’re shutting everything down. How would you feel? If even we pastors sometimes feel that sense of self-justification rising up when we have spent quite some time thinking strategically about these things, how much worse is that going to be when you are hit cold with a stark claim that this isn’t worth doing? It is hardly surprising we get pushback, not because the reality of the situation makes the person right, but because the emotional investment they have made means nobody wants to think, feel or hear they have wasted their time. 1 Corinthians 15 has something to say to that effect.

A better approach might be to open up the conversations more broadly concerning effectiveness. It is usually better for people to realise for themselves that something isn’t working rather than have it spelled out bluntly for them. So, simply suggesting that we might want to review our ministries and talking together more broadly about effectiveness and best use of resources might help people begin thinking through the issues even before we start talking about which ministries, in particular, need shutting down.

Another helpful thing we might do is repoint and repurpose existing ministries rather than closing them altogether. I noted in one of those earlier articles, for example, food clubs and English Classes are amongst the least effective things in bringing people to faith in Christ. Now, someone might read that and legitimately ask why we bother running both those things. The answer is not because I think anyone will come to faith because we taught them to parse some verbs and handed them a few tins of beans. The answer is because I think these things are steps to us getting people to the things that will be effective in bringing them to Jesus.

The food club and English Class is not the end in itself, they are means of getting us in contact with people so that we can make friends with them, share the gospel and read the Bible with them entirely apart from those activities. These things are only problems if they have become ends in themselves or we think it is specifically through them people will be saved rather than seeing them as means of getting to the things that are likely to see people saved. So, if your church runs these kind of things and thinks they are doing evangelism through them, or these are the means by which people will enter the kingdom, you don’t necessarily have to shut them down. You might just need to repurpose and repoint them. Make sure people realise the goal isn’t the giving out of food and teaching of English, it is establishing meaningful relationships within which the gospel can be shared and the Bible opened entirely apart from these activities.

We can also help our people with these things – both seeing what is currently effective and thinking through what they might start doing differently – simply by asking how this ministry will serve our mission of making disciples. Get your people to be specific about what this ministry is achieving and what particular role it plays in disciple making. So, is this ministry simply a means of establishing contact with people? If so, how do we make sure it moves from mere contact to an ongoing relationship in which the gospel can be shared? Or, is this an outreach at which the gospel will be heard quite clearly? If so, how do we make sure it isn’t just a ‘one-hit wonder’ statement of gospel facts and it leads to relationships forming in which the Bible can be opened further, more gospel content can be shared and real questions can be asked and answered?

Some of the things we might run may be pre-evangelism. That is, not actually sharing the gospel of themselves but establishing contact with people we wouldn’t otherwise meet. Some stuff might involve overt evangelism from the guy at the front, where the gospel is proclaimed to those who have been brought, but everybody else will only do evangelism if they continue talking to whoever they brought afterwards. Some stuff might be more event driven and attractional i.e. come here to get something, other stuff might be more relational and organic i.e. let’s hang out as we normally do, other things still might be more going out and organised. All of these things might be legitimate. Some might be more helpful than others.

But the key shift in thought we want our people to make is that the most effective evangelism happens in long-term, Word-centric relationships and ongoing contact. We want a shift in focus away from ministries = evangelism to an understanding that evangelism is sharing the gospel ourselves with an actual person and we are unlikely to be effective unless we have ongoing, repeated opportunities to share the gospel with those same people in a friendly, caring relationship. We can point our people away from activities towards a focus on people. We can point them away from running things as evangelism towards establishing relationships for the gospel. We can point them away from providing ministries to share the gospel and more towards running ministries, such as our context requires them, in order to establish gospel relationships for the long term.

Some of things you run already as “evangelistic activities” will almost certainly be able to be repointed this way. As an example, if you run a mum’s and toddler’s group with a little talk at the end and call that your evangelism, it doesn’t take much to see how you can continue running that group but encourage your people to see the group itself isn’t going to see many people convert. Rather, the group is a vehicle for relationships in which the gospel can be shared over the long run entirely apart from that group. When you view it this way, the little gospel talk at the end becomes much less significant whereas the gospel conversation between friends becomes considerably more important. The same is true of most activities we may run as a church. They are means of establishing relationships in which the gospel can be shared over the long term, not by an unknown guy at the front who has no knowledge or particular interest in you, but by your friend who loves you, shows such love for you over time and, in the context of that loving friendship, is also pleased to tell you the very greatest and most important news they’ve got. If it’s genuinely an integral part of them, it will inevitably come up.

So, there is no need to nuke everything. There is no need to start from scratch. All we need to do is point our people and our activities towards the goal of building relationships in which the gospel can be shared over the long term. The real questions to ask about our ministries are these:

1. Is this genuinely effective? Has this actually led anybody to become a disciple?
2. Can we explain how this thing will credibly move someone from unbeliever to membership of the church? Where does this sit and how does it serve that aim?
3. If this isn’t effective, can we repoint it so it can lead to one of the more effective means of making disciples? Can we turn this into a mean of establishing long term relationships?
4. Will this new thing lead to long term relationships being established and repeat contact with people? Will it move people towards those Word-centric relationships that tend to lead people to Christ?