Evangelism Handbook

Ed Stetzer and David Putman argue winsomely for the need of the church today to engage the culture in a missional manner. In their book Breaking the Missional Code they note how our culture has become “glocal”—a convergence of the global world with our local communities.¹ Or, as Thomas Friedman would put it, the world has become flat. That is why when you call the toll-free number on your laptop for help you talk to someone from a call center in Bangalore, India. The Internet, among other factors, has shrunk our world.

Before now, in most communities in the West the church was the first choice of the spiritually hungry because the church was the dominant spiritual force in a given area. Now, we must be more proactive, more intentional in stepping into the culture around us and doing what Paul did—reason in the marketplace with unbelievers where they live. Stetzer and Putman argue that we must “break the missional code” in our given contexts to be able to communicate Christ effectively. I think they are right, and I think the shift from an institutional evangelism (“ya’ll come”) to an intentional, missional approach stands as the greatest challenge facing established churches. Good news: such a change is not only possible for new church plants; conventional churches can change too. They give examples from the young, expansive Mars Hill Church in Seattle (only a few years old) to the First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia (over 150 years old) to demonstrate that both the planting of new churches and the refocusing of established churches can and must occur.