Tuesday 26 February 2013

How to use an evangelist effectively..

At King’s we don’t do a gospel appeal every week - perhaps on average 1 in 4 Sundays there will be a gospel application and we would make an appeal. On occasions we might invite an evangelist to speak; churches that can’t afford to employ a full-time evangelist (and not many of us can afford that luxury!) can bring one in from elsewhere for a particular day. Many of us on the King’s team have a little bit of the evangelist in our make-up, but we don’t have an evangelist like we have an Ephesians 4 teacher. Such gifts are great but they don’t carry the church on a day-to-day basis.

My observation would be that too many leaders bring in a specialist for their second or third staff appointment and do that too early. If you’re a smaller church then you really want a generalist as your second appointment because the main thing that needs to happen is to release the senior leader into other areas. I’ve seen this happen time and time again - an evangelist is taken on and when the pastor wants the evangelist to carry some further areas of responsibility the evangelist says, ‘No. I just want to preach the gospel and speak to unbelievers...’
However, each church could get an evangelist in on occasions. Our observation of gifted evangelists that have come to our church is they spend more time on the appeal than most of us do because the rest of us are generally teachers and are less comfortable with dwelling on the appeal. Lex Loizides has shown us a way to do this…