A pastor friend told me that he was often frustrated in the churches where he had served when the congregations would assume that evangelization was the pastor’s job rather than their own.<\/p>\n\n\n
I am sure this is common in American churches, but what is the solution?<\/p>\n\n\n
He had attempted to light a fire under church members to get out there and do the evangelizing themselves. Scripture makes it clear that the Great Commission is every believer’s duty.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But this had never produced any fruit. I’m guessing because the root of the problem was not laziness or passivity or busyness. The root goes deeper.<\/p>\n\n\n
This is a good opportunity to employ the “Five Whys”. This is a problem solving strategy where you keep asking “Why?” until you get to the root causes.<\/p>\n\n\n
Why do the church members think it’s the pastor’s job alone to evangelize? Because they don’t want to do it themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n
Why don’t they want to do it themselves? Because they don’t know how to approach these sorts of conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n
Why don’t they feel comfortable having these conversations? Because they don’t know what to say.<\/p>\n\n\n
Why don’t they know what to say?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Uh-oh! Because they themselves don’t know … the gospel?<\/p>\n\n\n
Trying to guilt believers into sharing their faith is a losing proposition IF\u00a0they <\/b><\/i>don’t know – with confidence – what the good news is.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But don’t despair, Pastor! Even the Apostle Paul had this problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
The solution is to put the solid food on the shelf for the time being and go back to milk.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A pastor friend told me that he was often frustrated in the churches where he had served when the congregations would assume that evangelization was the pastor’s job rather than their own. I am sure this is common in American churches, but what is the solution? He had attempted to light a fire under church […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-five-whys","category-maturity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2902,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2901\/revisions\/2902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}