You know the banners are coming down eventually. Every pastor knows that’s why it won’t be featured in your denomination’s promotional video for the new evangelism training your church is rolling out this year. Attendance spikes, some folks sign-up to serve, there’s a nice little buzz for a few weeks, folks talk about their faith at the grocery store checkout line, in the car-pool line, over coffee, and then it all starts to fizzle out. Eventually the church gets back to its normal rhythm, maybe a little busier on a Sunday in February than it will be in October, but no one really notices.
You can’t blame your evangelism curriculum for disappointing you; it did what all good campaign-style initiatives are designed to do, create a moment. You didn’t plan for what comes after the moment, because that was never really part of the plan.
A campaign can create a moment, but leadership is required to sustain a movement. It’s almost tautological to say, but easy to forget, especially three weeks before launch, when the graphics look really nice and everyone on the committee can’t wait to get started.
Campaign Mindset versus Culture Mindset
A campaign has a beginning and an end, a theme and a budget, momentum and metrics. None of these are bad things; campaigns are exceptionally effective in rallying a congregation around a specific ministry need during a particular season of ministry. The problem comes when we start conflating the means and the ends, believing that the trajectory of the campaign metrics is indicative of the church’s health long after its launch. This is where we start to confuse a moment with a movement
A culture rarely has a launch-date, explicit or otherwise, because it wasn’t manufactured by one specific moment. It was forged in the spiritual DNA of the congregation through the collective experience of the whole. It’s demonstrated in the ways small group leaders carry themselves in the context of their groups, among peers and in the larger congregation. It’s enacted in the relationships between volunteers, between volunteers and the broader congregation, usherers and newcomers in the lobby, all of which contribute to the overall culture of the church. If your evangelism training prepared people to serve in the context of a campaign, you only prepared them for maybe six weeks out of fifty-two.
Why You Lose If You Skip Out on Leadership Development
It’s easy to overlook leadership development. It’s a long-game that often competes with more immediately gratifying initiatives for both time and budget. Still, churches that fail to invest in it consistently suffer the costs of their ignorance in three different ways, at least one of which you’re almost certainly experiencing.
Burnout
People prepared operationally, but not relationally or spiritually, to have evangelism conversations, burn-out faster because they were never equipped, or had believed, that there was a reason to continue evangelism beyond the campaign.
Disciples who lack depth
People reached through campaign-style ministries, especially those utilizing more transactional approaches, often return to spiritual darkness in short order, without much in the way of fanfare. That spike you were so pleased to see on your weekly or monthly attendance reports, never really manifested itself in any meaningful way in your congregation’s overall health.
Leadership bottlenecks
Without leadership development, a church’s evangelism initiatives will always bottleneck in one or two people. You, or someone on your staff, becomes the evangelism “champion” for the entire congregation, and everyone else assumes there’s not much of a role for them, since you’ve already got someone doing it, or you can’t do it in addition to everything else you do.
Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand, taught them for a little while, and sent them on their way. He didn’t really treat them as a campaign, because he saw the bigger picture. Instead he invested intensively in a small group of followers, for three years, so that when the rest of the five thousand showed up, someone would be there to show them the way. He didn’t just see the crowd; he saw the next wave. Jesus had a multiplication mindset
EQUIP is built around that same conviction that the most lasting church growth strategies are those that emphasize leadership development. That’s why we always talk about multiplication, leaders who develop others who develop others, ad infinitum. Paul wrote Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, “And what you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who also will be qualified to teach others” (NIV). In that one verse you can see the essence of multiplication ministry, with Paul, Timothy, the reliable people, and those others who will also be qualified to teach, representing four different generations of leadership in the early church, connected through mentorship. In this model of leadership development, the emphasis is on building in-depth, lasting discipleship relationships, for as long as it takes, with as many people as possible, so that your influence will continue to be felt long after you move on to other things.
The Multiplication Mindset
Asks different questions than a campaign does.
Instead of ‘how can we get the biggest possible harvest in this season of ministry?’ it asks, ‘how can we develop the deepest possible disciples, so they can continue to lead people into the harvest long after this season is over?’
It looks further down the road, and further along the chain, asking “how many leaders are we developing who can keep reaching people for Jesus long after this particular initiative has concluded?”
That’s not to diminish the value of a campaign, or suggest that the big harvest isn’t important. It’s really just a recognition of the simple mathematical reality that a campaign, by definition, has an end date. The bigger it is, the harder it is to sustain, which is why it’s often not feasible for a congregation to have a campaign every single year. It’s not really a indictment of your ability as a pastor or church leader; it’s more of an observation that the arithmetic simply doesn’t allow it.
What Lasting Evangelism Training Always Requires Formation, not just training, Leaders discipling leaders, so everyone can go and do the same,
And connection to your congregation’s overall leadership development strategy, because evangelism really isn’t an island unto itself. A siloed campaign will never have the same sort of longevity and influence that a well-integrated initiative can.
That’s why EQUIP always ties evangelism to leadership development, through Beyond Success, our seven-part table ministry training, and Bridge Builder, our partnership and multi-year planning initiative, where we work with congregations to identify, design, implement, and evaluate an integrated evangelism and leadership development program. We’re not talking about a moment, we’re talking about leaders creating disciples who create more disciples, long after the original initiative has concluded.
Stewardship, Not Spectacle
If your church has seen its share of campaigns that produced nice little spikes, and then fizzled out eventually, hopefully this serves as a helpful reminder that when it comes to evangelism, the next best thing to a nice little spike is a lasting legacy. That’s why we’re here, to help you steward that legacy, using our free resources at iequip.org.
