Transforming their fall banquet into the Harvest of Community Dinner is just one way Palouse Federated Church is making itself visible in this town of about 1,000. And the efforts are bearing fruit: Over the past year, the church’s average worship attendance has increased from around 50 each week to nearly 80 worshippers most Sundays. On Palm Sunday, six new disciples were baptized. “We’re doing evangelism, and we’re growing,” says Laughary, “but it hasn’t been a lot of revivals and altar calls. It’s much more about offering events that proclaim the gospel while letting people know they are welcome here.”
Laughary is a member of National Ministries’ National Evangelism Team (NET), a network of eighty American Baptist pastors, laypeople, executive ministers and regional staff, leading American Baptists toward the NEW LIFE 2010 goal of 1,000,010 new disciples by the year 2010. NET Associates receive training in Got Style?™, a personality style-based evangelism approach developed by National Ministries with Dr. Jeff Johnson’s leadership. Drawing on 16 years of pastoral experience, Johnson urges churches to approach evangelism with an attitude of discovery and discernment: “Churches need to believe that God has a plan for them. Their responsibility is not to create that plan, but to find and figure out God’s plan for them.”
Got Style? training helps pastors like Corey Laughary think about evangelism in fresh ways. “We pastors sometimes think only in terms of how we do evangelism ourselves,” he says. “But our members have different skills, gifts and opportunities. Style training can help churches think about how every member can be sharing their faith, sharing the good news, without necessarily being the preacher type.”
The members of Palouse Federated Church used a skills assessment to determine evangelism strategies that best matched their relational styles and life skills. “The assessment helped us see that we have a lot of people who are inviters — people who are good at establishing friendships,” Laughary reports. “That lends itself to a more invitational style of evangelism rather that something more assertive. We also have people who are good at planning and pulling off events. So we began to focus our evangelism around those particular gifts.”
Last summer, the church skipped its labor-intensive Vacation Bible School so it could instead offer a range of opportunities for people to make contact with the church. They offered weekly Bible story times for kids, held family movie nights with a short gospel message, and got to know youth with basketball and hot dogs in the park. In the fall, they had their harvest dinner as well as a table at the town’s annual festival where they raised funds for Katrina relief.
More recently, they hosted a women’s day with great food and a craft table, and opportunities for massages, manicures and facials. Every woman in the church was urged to buy a ticket for a friend or neighbor, in hopes that half the women attending would be from outside the church. But two thirds of 60-plus women attending were from outside the church.
“Sometimes the church can be like a house without a door,” Laughary reflects. “We know we want others to experience how God is moving here. We’re just trying to find more ways to open the doors and allow people to come and see that the church is a place where they can feel welcome, loved and appreciated.”
Doug Davidson is a freelance writer and editor living in Berkeley, Calif. He served on the Boards of American Baptist Churches USA and National Ministries from 1996 to 2001. Davidson attends Shell Ridge Community Church, an American Baptist church in Walnut Creek, Calif. |
