Discipling Evangelistically: Introducing Evangelism Values into Every Corner of Development
There's only one thing that can make good news better: sharing it.
Think back to a time in your life when it felt easy for you to share about Jesus.
There’s a good chance you thought back to a conversion moment or a “mountaintop” experience–a time when you were so captivated by Jesus that all you wanted to do was tell people about him. You may have been afraid of saying the wrong thing, or messing up a relationship, but you were even more afraid of keeping the good news to yourself. You probably didn’t have any specific training or a detailed plan but, in the end, none of that mattered because you had something even better: you had a story to tell. And it was easy to tell because it wasn’t something you were rehearsing, it was something you were living.
This is the “joy of our salvation” that so often feels like the fleeting gift of new believers and, if we are intentional with our discipleship strategy, we can learn to harness its lessons to bless our students for a lifetime. If discipleship is the way we live out the story of Jesus, then evangelism is the way that we share that story with others.
When we seek to create communities where the good news is experienced, responded to, and shared, we help to unravel the myth that evangelism is an add-on to our discipleship. The truth is nearly the opposite: evangelism is our discipleship in action. When we embrace this, not only does it supercharge the day-to-day work of our ministries, it energizes our chapters by integrating practices of witness into the DNA of our spiritual life. At its best, this can turn every day into an adventure of discovering and rediscovering the joy of Jesus’ good news to us.
Our Guide
The following guide is focused on utilizing familiar frameworks to introduce new ideas that will help students live holistic, witnessing lives. For each major structure, we are recommending you consider adding one structural habit to introduce, one new resource to utilize, and one spiritual discipline to emphasize.
Small Groups
Habit
- Open with reflection on where Good News was experienced in the week, or where it was longed for. Invite members to share songs or memes that encouraged them, videos that caught their eye, etc. The goal is to create familiarity with associating the gospel message with daily experiences and felt reality.
- Gather a weekly offering as a small group to be used for an act of kindness later at the discretion of the group. Pray that God would give discernment to someone in the group on who to give it to or how to use it. This creates a corporate rhythm of seeking to be good news for someone, and linking the purpose of gathering together with blessing of others.
Resource
- Use the 5 Thresholds to familiarize student leaders with where their small group members and friends may be in their spiritual journey.
- Volunteer as a small group to run the Questions Proxe or run a multi-week small group GIG
- Organize the semester to include at least one invitation to faith initiated and led by small groups
Spiritual Discipline
- Encourage leaders to practice and model vulnerable confession of sin and sorrow. When sin or longing is acknowledged, the need for Jesus is clarified, and his intervention is both more readily seen and appreciated. Additionally, the insecurities managed and skills that are developed from practicing vulnerable confessions are often the same ones present in sharing the gospel with friends.
Large Groups
Habit
- Weekly testimony sharing, ideally in response to the previous week’s challenge or action step
- Corporate risk. Once every 4-6 weeks, use the gathering time to Prayer Walk or to seek God for insight on how to put what has been learned into practice, in real time. Consider creating goodie bags and use LG time to send students off in groups to pass out and ask recipients if they’re open to receiving prayer. Rhythms like these teach students the natural end of learning more about Jesus is putting what has been learned into practice.
Resource
- Consider doing a LG series using the content of a GIG or evangelistic study like the Justice Bible Study
- Write Psalms of encouragement or lament and share as a corporate action step.
Spiritual Discipline
- Corporate giving. Create rhythms each semester to gather an offering for a person or cause that cannot repay. Do so as a community, share joys of generosity, and debrief.
1-on-1 or Discipleship Groups
Habit
- Open time together by Listening Prayer for any risks that God may want them to take. These need not be explicitly evangelistic, just authentic.
- Increase innate Gospel contextualization by asking ”What’s the good news/Gospel been to you this week? Where have you seen it or been reminded of it?”
- Reviewing 2+ Prayer card
Resource
Spiritual Discipline
- Repentance accountability. Review the ways confession has or has not overflowed into repentance via things done or undone.
- Prayers of expectation: “God, if you make the opportunity clear, I’ll take the risk.”
- Prayer Ministry
Lead Meetings / Apprenticeship Groups
Habit
- Forgiveness. Open the first 15-30 minutes of every meeting by reminding them of Jesus’ encouragement toward reconciliation among the body followed by space to confess and reconcile with anyone in the room there is an issue with. This reminds students of their own forgiveness and reconciliation, and brings the good news to the surface every meeting as reconciliation is experienced again.
Resource
- Incorporate training on cultural differences as an aid to help leadership teams begin to think about who they are and what they do in the context of culture. This can help them become better contextualizers of the gospel, as they grow in awareness of values and how they shape experiences of good news.
Spiritual Discipline
- Prayer for the lost. Invite new student leaders each week to lead a short exercise or prayer centered around remembering and engaging with God’s love for those who don’t know him.
- Lament for the ways the world does not reflect the reality of good news. Invite students to grieve and pray through the ways the Gospel is the hope for a broken world. This helps grow a sensitivity to the ravages of sin and often translates into clearer gospel communication because it clarifies the problem with our world and God’s solution to it.
In all of this, we are continually asking students to reengage with three primary questions:
- What is the good news to me?
- Where am I experiencing it?
- How am I helping others to experience it?
