-You're either a missionary or you're a mission field.
I think that missionary mindset is what Mike is talking about.
Missionary is not a location,
it's a mindset.
Bible gives us six reasons or six methods of evangelism.
The first one is confrontational.
It's gender baptist style.
Repent, Ray Comfort style,
and honestly, I want to say something.
I think we need to save people by any means and every means.
For those people who are called to do--
We do that every week on the streets, in the mall, for one hour every Sunday.
Not my favorite method.
I'm going to be very honest with you.
Is it most effective?
No, but it's in the Bible.
And there are people who need to have that method.
It's going to reach them.
The second method is intellectual.
It's when you debate.
It's when Paul debated in Mars Hill.
It's also very least effective because you win arguments but not souls.
But we still need to do that.
We still need to have people like Ravi Zacharias hopefully,
without the other stuff
who will be able to debate people into and explain Christianity apologetics.
The Bible says, "To know your faith that you'll be able to give reason."
The third one is testimonial.
And this is what I think every believer can do that.
And this is the one where the blind man says,
"I don't know about Jesus. I don't know if He was God or not God."
"But I just know one thing. I was blind, now I can see."
"And you all need to go to His church right now."
And the Pharisees were like, "You're born in your sins,"
and so literally, they're so theologically proper.
And this guy has no idea on his theology.
He doesn't even know Jesus is God or sinless but he knows one thing.
Because testimony is the best, I feel like the most attractive
especially if people recently got saved.
Number four is relational.
It's what Mike just talked about.
Relational is when Jesus tells the man that He delivers. He says,
"Go home and tell your family."
That means live it.
And this is the hardest one.
Go home.
Go to your neighborhood and live it.
Let them see that.
Because it's easier to come to Mexico and Africa and present the message.
But when people see you day in and day out,
and you're able to help them with yard work and some other stuff
but this is also a method.
But to say that this is the only method that is not true
because with some people they need to be told right away
because they literally have two days to live.
And so number five is the invitational method.
Invitational method is when the Samaritan woman
she just went and she hand out tracks to every man she probably dated.
Because if you notice the Bible doesn't say that she brought the women of Samaria,
it was the men.
The girl had hookups, you know, she had connections and stuff.
What the enemy used to bind her with, the Lord used those very connections.
Those same contacts that she had.
The same followers.
She just posted a story and then everybody showed up.
And that's called invitation.
I think lot of churches do that.
We give people touch cards to hand out to their co-workers and et cetera.
And then number six is the serving method.
It's a method where we serve our way into bringing people to Christ.
And so confrontational, intellectual, testimonial, relational,
invitational and serving.
But we're going to transition right now more into
evangelism within the context of the church.
I'm going to be very honest with you:
Evangelism is hardest thing for me.
I can fast,
I can pray,
everything else come a lot easier.
Evangelism is the hardest part. Personal evangelism.
I am very horrible at it.
Like, not horrible very horrible.
Embarrassingly horrible.
When a pastor would ask how many people you led to the Lord
in the last six or seven months six or seven months?
Or if I ask that question,
I'll be honest with you I'm the first person that fails at it.
And it's honestly-- it's one of my strongest, one of my biggest prayers is
"God make me into winner of souls."
I tell people about Christ,
I invite them to church,
but to say that I am successful, I'm not.
And I used to struggle with that
because I would feel so horrible about that.
That I would say, "Man our church will never win souls."
"Because the pastor is not a like a soul winner on steroids."
Even though I invite people to church, I tell my neighbors everything
but I don't have necessarily a lot of success.
And then one time I had a change of heart.
When I realized that as a pastor,
God can use me to build the culture of the church.
And since 16 when I was a youth pastor, I'm 34 now,
for the last four years I've been the lead pastor of Hungry Gen,
I've seen the most successful evangelists are not Christians.
It's the new Christians.
Now being a person who's like led five people to Christ, that's good.
But I'm talking about people that actually stayed in church right now.
If you ask who brought them, it's the new people.
It's not the people who've been in church.
So that comforted me.
That even though I am not the best at it,
I've realized, nobody else is.
Even those ones who like have amazing stories.
And I love, you know, Ben Fitzgerald and so many others
who are like, incredible stories.
But if you will track where the people that they won to Christ,
like, if we speak very honest,
this is a lot of pastors so I'm just going to shoot straight.
I'm not going to sugarcoat
and I'm not going to portray myself as some kind of a hero when I'm not.
But if we do a proper diagnostics and analysis,
we will see that a lot of people that are won,
they end up in amazing sermon illustrations to make the rest of the people feel bad
but in reality, a lot of times those people are nowhere to be found.
This is not to discredit that ministry.
And this is not to make ourselves feel better.
But I'm just sharing with you from a pastor to a pastor, it's my struggle.
When I started to see about six years ago,
when one guy named Louis,
and there's a whole story and I won't go into it.
Me and my wife we gave all the money that we had.
We were so sick and tired of people not getting saved in the church
that we sacrificed everything that we had financially.
And God started giving me this you were talking about burden for the lost.
And it wasn't necessarily that I started going on the streets
and to every person I told them about Christ.
It's just I couldn't sleep at night when somebody didn't get saved.
(Inaudible)
I had a hard time.
Before, years would go by, nobody was getting saved.
Two years, not one water baptism.
It didn't bother me one bit.
I was just bothered why people were not engaged with my sermon.
But it started to bother me.
I was honestly,
like God took away the peace.
And I started to become anxious, desperate,
saying, "God I want to see people saved."
But I didn't pray, "Lord I want to be the person to save them."
I just want the climate of the church--
because we have to understand one thing about the culture of the church.
The culture of the church happens by default or by design.
By default, church does not win the lost.
By default, we maintain the aquarium instead of fish for souls.
By default we drift toward maintenance not toward multiplication.
If you let go of the church, we don't drift into evangelism.
We drift into selfishness.
And our church drifted into that.
And so we started to practically kind of--
I started to see that when one guy Louis got saved,
my cousin, David's brother invited him, Ilya's brother invited him.
he came and he got saved.
Next week...
and this is not to exaggerate.
I think it was from five to six people he brought from Chico's Tacos
where he was working.
Chico's Tacos, yeah.
He was working he was making stuff.
The shyest guy you will ever meet.
He barely says a word.
How in the world was he able?
We didn't even tell him, "You need to bring people to Christ."
How was he able to bring six people the next week?
Out of those six people, one person got saved.
The week after that, that person brought a little bit more.
And it started a snowball effect.
I'm going to tell you one thing;
I still feel bad about my lack of evangelism.
But what you are responsible for as a pastor,
is to create a climate in the church,
when new people come,
where they bring other people to Christ
and where you create a service people want to invite other people into.
And where the lost people will be saved.
And then those people who get saved that they can bring other people to Christ.
People aren't inviting people to church for three reasons.
This is what I wrote down.
They don't like your church.
I'll be very honest with you.
This is not just your problem, this is our problem.
There was a time I invited my neighbor.
I witnessed to my neighbor.
I had a real estate.
And I told him to go to a baptist church.
I was, "Make sure."
He asked me, "What about your church?"
I was like, "No, you don't want to do that."
Why? Because I knew,
the devil is not going to be his biggest problem.
The way everything- we are structured.
The way we are with translation, everything, it just won't work.
I just knew it won't work.
I knew the guy enough, so I then commanded him.
I even followed up on him, "Hey, did you go?"
He was like, "Yeah, I went with my family. It was an awesome church."
I was like, "Man, keep on going."
"I know the pastor. I can introduce you to him,"
and stuff.
I'll be honest with you;
The services were not conducive.
And so before we start seeing people getting saved,
we had to sit down with our team and said "What do we have to do?"
I'm not talking about watering down.
I'm not talking about creating laser lights,
and offering pizza and giving everybody coffee,
I'm not talking about that.
I'm just talking about that you will feel comfortable to tell a stranger
without feeling horrible.
And so one of the things is that we had unpredictable schedules.
We had guest speakers.
(foreign language.)
Anybody from Belarussia.
Anybody from there would be there.
And you're sitting there, you brought a friend,
"Oh shoot!"
"I forgot this was that service."
And it so happens to be every service.
I'll be honest with you.
And so we had to remove that.
We had to talk to our pastor and say,
"Pastor, if we were to focus could we just-- a lot of these guests
with all the precious respect, they do not come to win the lost."
"They come for fundraising."
I said, "Pastor let's give them double of what any church would ever give them."
And for speakers that would come, they're missionaries
even some that you guys know would come, would never speak,
and they would leave with two thousand dollars from our church.
Why? Because we made a goal.
We're going to always support missions
but we don't have to give them a microphone.
We have to start at the parking lot.
Meaning our services, people have to be welcomed from the parking lot.
That's why we got a golf cart.
I remember for a month I was looking for a golf cart.
We have such a small parking lot, it takes five seconds to get across it.
But I saw Mason's offered golf cart during Christmas in the mall
and that left an impression on me.
I was like, "You know what? What would happen if we would offer for elderly people
who parked a little bit further and drive them on a golf cart?"
It would show that we care a little bit extra.
And so it's simple things like that.
That you become intentional.
Pretty much when you invite a friend into your house,
you typically pick up underwears from the living room,
you pick up diapers,
you don't make your house a mansion
you just make it just enough so that they're not throwing up
disgusted or like ugh.
And so you clean it up.
And that's exactly why a lot of us need to kind of revamp our services.
And that's what we had to do
because this is one of the reasons why people don't invite.
Second reason why people don't invite is because
they're honestly, not true disciples of Jesus.
There are Christians with diapers and pacifiers
and they are in the spiritual nursery, not in the spiritual army.
Period.
The third reason is because they're honestly, as pastors,
we encouraged our people, we didn't equip them.
Five-fold ministries job is to equip the saints.
Not to pamper them.
And a lot of times we as pastors we failed.
We didn't teach them,
We didn't provide classes,
we didn't provide instructions,
we didn't give them touch cards.
We didn't equip them.
The only thing is we were so happy the fact that we have a crowd
and we forgot that we have an assignment to raise an army.