Turning Everyday Conversations into Gospel Conversations

Jimmy Scroggins, Steve Wright, Bennett Leslee

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781462747849
• eBook ISBN: 9781462747856
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

We live in a broken world. And the gospel is how God puts broken people back together again. Once we repent and believein Jesus, God's Spirit helps us recover and pursue His design. God is the one who created the world and every human being in it. Authors Jimmy Scroggins and Steve Wright outlinea reproducible method of sharing the gospel that has been tested in the real world. Turning Everyday Conversations Into Gospel Conversations is a simple strategy to train new and seasoned believers to join God in His reconciliation work. Turning Everyday Conversations Into Gospel Conversations equips believers to use the innovative "3 Circles, " a user-friendly evangelistic tool for a new generation. Scroggins and Wright trainreaders to incorporate the biblical metanarrative, as well as our own personal stories, to tell the good news that Jesus has made a way out of the broken places we find ourselves. Churches around the world are training people to share the gospel using this method. It has proven appeal across generations and cultures. They've heard stories about an 8-year-old boy leading his 26-year-old cousin to repent and believe in Jesus and a 70-plus-year-old church member, who had never before shared his faith, leading his Spanish-speaking neighbor to Christ. It's been used to train the Mixtec in Mexico, Maasai Warriors in Kenya, and prisoners in America. It's been presented on napkins, in concrete, in the sand, and using tortillas. The 3 Circleswork, and this book will train you and your church members to use it. It doesn't matter if you have been a Christian for decades or days, you can learn to do what God asks us to do—to make His appeal to others through us (2 Cor.5: 20). This short training manual will empower and inspire millions of Christians to turn hundreds of millions of everyday conversations into gospel conversations.

Chapter One

Our Mission Fields

When we were growing up, the church had a strategy, and it worked for a season. We believed in the church version of Field of Dreams—if we build it, they will come. We built bigger buildings and provided more and better programming. We attracted people to our churches, and many of them came.

This strategy works when people in our nation identify with church. After all, we were founded as one nation under God. For us, a clearer understanding of our missional context has motivated us to abandon this regional megachurch strategy. According to Gallup poll research, one-third of all Americans now consider themselves nonreligious, saying that “religion is not an important part of their daily life and that they seldom or never attend religious services.”6 The Pew Research Center has reported a growing number of nones—people who don’t identify with any faith tradition. Their most recent report cited a 6 percent increase in nones and an alarming 8 percent drop in the number of self-identifying Christians.7 This is certainly true where we live. There are 1.4 million people living in Palm Beach County, Florida, and 96 percent of them are irreligious and unchurched.8 In fact, West Palm Beach, Florida, ranks first on Barna Research Group’s report ranking American cities by the percentage of residents who have never regularly attended church.9

Couple this with the fact that Americans are no longer motivated to go out of their way for many things, including church. We can access everything we want electronically from the comfort of our own homes. If you don’t believe us, just consider the fate of the American shopping mall. No new enclosed malls have been built since 2006, and Robin Lewis, author of The New Rules of Retail, predicts fully half of all our malls will close in the next ten years.10 If we’re going to reach the millions who have yet to hear the gospel, we need to rethink our current invite strategy. Since we aren’t going to get them to “come and see” what we’re doing, we need to figure out ways to take the good news to the places they live, work, and play.

When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Have you ever walked through the food court of a mall and been offered a free food sample? The restaurant giving out the free samples is hoping that one taste of their product will convince you to buy your own entrée. Imagine if instead of giving you the free sample, they gave you an invite card to come to a taste sampling four or five days away in another location. How many people would go to that trouble?

Yet this is the invite strategy many churches have adopted. In fact, we have often taken it further than that. If we can’t motivate our people to hand out invite cards, we go ahead and do a direct-mail piece. We think that people will want to come and see what we have to offer. The ever-shrinking Christian population and changing U.S. trends demand that we reconsider this strategy. No clever social-media push, pithy sermon series, trendy worship style, or relevant programming is going to draw them in. Honestly, they could care less about all our bells and whistles, and most of them just aren’t going to come.

We Need to See Multiplication

The task before us is massive. If we want to turn back lostness in North America, we need to stop talking about faster addition and start considering strategies for multiplication.

Our Family Church strategy is this: abandon the regional megachurch model and create a network of neighborhood churches. Our method is to mobilize disciples to make disciples who make disciples.

In the book of Acts, we see that the movement of the Holy Spirit spread like wildfire in the ancient world. Jesus commissioned the apostles, and within weeks there were already more than eight thousand new believers! Everybody was telling everybody. Churches were being planted left and right.

The apostles didn’t have years of seminary or formal training under their belts, but they did have the power of the Holy Spirit and the things they had seen and heard. Our challenge is to take what we have seen and heard about Jesus and tell everybody—to multiply disciples by the thousands and millions.

It’s not something we can do if we just leave it up to the “professionals.” We have fifteen pastors on staff at our church and 1.4 million people to reach. This is an impossible task. We don’t need fifteen pastors working harder and doing more to reach and disciple 1.4 million people. We need more like two hundred thousand people engaging in the mission to reach and disciple seven people each!

We’re going to have to engage hundreds of thousands of people, and that means church will have to look different. It may not be church in a building with a full-time pastor and staff. It might be church in a store or a park or a home. If we do this, we can reach millions of people and plant thousands of churches.

Markers of a Multiplying Movement

As we began to reconsider our strategy and method, we started looking at emerging movements of new believers and new churches around the world. We found the following common characteristics among movements in China, Southeast Asia, India, and Africa:

• expanded vision
• focused prayer
• simple, reproducible gospeling tools
• abundant seed sowing
• frequent, intentional training
• rapid obedience
• generational discipleship
• loving accountability
• celebrating stories
• multiplying churches

Expanded Vision

Leaders in multiplying movements around the world are seeing God reconcile millions to Himself. They are committed to consistently keeping the big picture in front of people and connecting it with daily gospel responsibility. They continually urge believers to pursue the lost and relentlessly train believers to share the gospel.

Consider our context at Family Church. In order to move our county from 96 percent lost to 95 percent lost in one calendar year, we need to make fourteen thousand new disciples (1 percent of 1.4 million=14,000). Let that sink in for a minute. We were forced to ask whether the strategies that we now embrace enable us to reach this goal. Remember that we are merely considering a strategy to effect a 1-percent change. What about your mission field? How many new disciples would you need to reach to turn back the lostness in your immediate area just 1 percent? Churches across America need to begin having this conversation. We believe that if more churches would own a vision like this, then we could see a multiplying movement in America.

At our church, we have tried to bring the air war (vision and motivation) and ground war (strategy and training) together to keep this vision before our people. Our big idea: we want every resident of South Florida to have repeated opportunities to hear and respond to the gospel. Let’s reach South Florida through the power of the gospel. We are committed to communicating it at every turn—every worship service, ministry event, new members class, leadership rally, staff meeting, training event, and meal with a church member. We regularly remind people that 96 percent of the people with whom they interact every day don’t know or pursue God’s design for their lives. Unless our church has ignored every word we’ve said, they know our vision is to plant one hundred neighborhood churches made up of people who have repented and who believe in Jesus.

Focused Prayer

God is reconciling the world to Himself. It’s His work, and we have to trust Him to do it. Prayer aligns our hearts with God’s heart for the lost. It helps us tune in to do God’s work in God’s way. Jesus said people only come to Him if the Father draws them (John 6:44). He says that we can ask for anything in His name, and He will do it (John 14:14). We know that praying for people’s salvation is in His will because the Bible says that He doesn’t want anyone to perish (2 Pet. 3:9).

We also know that as we set out to take Satan’s territory from him, we’re going into a battle zone. We aren’t fighting against flesh and blood, but against the rulers of darkness and spiritual powers of evil (Eph. 6:12). Our weapons in this war, according to Ephesians 6, are the Word of God and prayer. Jonathan Edwards once said, “It is God’s will through his wonderful grace, that the prayers of his saints should be one of the great principal means of carrying on the designs of Christ’s kingdom in the world. When God has something very great to accomplish for his church, it is his will that there should precede it the extraordinary prayers of his peo...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Our Mission Fields
• Chapter Two: The Gospel
• Chapter Three: Everyday People and Conversations
• Chapter Four: Transition to the Gospel
• Chapter Five: 3 Circles Gospeling Tool
• Chapter Six: Invitation and Responses
• Chapter Seven: Rapid Obedience
• Appendix