We have a thread on your personal witnessing tools, but let us also talk about what your local church is doing to reach the unsaved. Just to share some ideas, experiences, activities that are already going on. And if you also provide the outcome that would be great as well.
I will start it off.
Well starting April 6th we are going to make the change permanent. We have started what we called a Shake it up Sunday. We started off the day at 9am with some coffee and doughnuts provided by the deacons for the Sunday School/Small Groups teachers. During that time one of the Deacons prayed for the teachers and their class. They then spent the rest of the time until 9:30am preparing their rooms. At 9:30am we have choir practice in the main sanctuary. 10:00am we had service start..people coming in got to hear the choir practice and enjoy the music. At 11:15am the Pastor "tries" to have service over. We dismiss with the urging to connect in our small group Sunday school classes. From 11:25ish to 12:00pm the small groups classes are diving deeper into the message they heard at 10.
We have found that this has provided less stress on everyone that is involved in the services for the morning. And more importantly we had come to the realization that most people when they walked out of service normally the message of the day was lost within a short amount of time...unless it was very personal to them or they went out to lunch with someone and happen to talk about it. But now we go into a discussion about the message and dig a little deeper into life applications and in a smaller setting...people are retaining what the message is alot longer.
We also found that if we have anyone come to the alter during the church services we are not keeping people "hanging out" waiting on them while someone is working with them in the back room. We have a good hour after church services to witness with them and talk with them without any pressures of having to go someone or knowing that someone was waiting on them.
Then Sunday night we have 3 different teams. Bronze, silver, and gold...yeah I know very original
. At 5:30pm we have training by the different team leaders. They are on different levels...the bronze team is teaching salvation but somewhat generically. This team is focused on handing out literature and things of that nature. They get training on how to approach someone, what to do when approached and things like that to get them more comfortable with it. Then our silver team is focused on connecting with people, these are folks that have visited or special prayer needs like hospital visits and such. Our training focuses on the gospel as well, but also on our church doctrine and things because we are trying to connect with people that have come. Then our gold team. They are deep into the gospel and salvation. They are the cold callers so to speak. When they knock on the door and you answer it all you will hear is "Let me tell you about Jesus"
The teams have training until 6pm then they go out. If they are not involved with someone they try to be back at 7pm. While they were out we have another team that is preparing a meal. So at 7pm we have our rally time. Once everyone has pretty much gotten their food and starts to eat the Pastor or one of us Deacons will get up and try and get a status report...we talk about how many tracts we handed out, did we get to share the gospel with anyone, all positive feedback and good news. We excite in what we have done and it is really uplifting.
We normally have a childrens ministry on Wednesday night that we moved to Sunday night...it gives them more time which they wanted and allows more parents to come out to outreach.
We are a small congregation of average attendance of 80 on Sunday mornings (children included). We normally had 4-6 come out on Monday nights for outreach. Now we have 20+ adults for outreach and their kids in class as well. Our first time out we reached over 400 people through visits or tracts. We had one young lady come back, who is extremely shy, and she was just beaming and proud to announce that she had talked to 5 people and invite them out to church while giving them a tract. We were going to stretch this pilot program out over the next 5 months but everyone wants us to do it now so we are moving the date up to April. It has really really been a blessing and an encouragement.
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