Ep. 051 | Evangelism as a Team Effort
Why Personal Witness and a Shared Church Strategy Need Each Other
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Why Personal Witness and a Shared Church Strategy Need Each Other
September 1, 2026
Episode 51: Show Notes
TL;DR
Five Takeaways From This Episode
Evangelism is not either personal or corporate. It is both, and a church that neglects either one will stall out.
The Great Commission was given to the disciples collectively, not to individuals in isolation. God's strategy for reaching lost people is his church.
When 94% of pastors do not feel effective at sharing the gospel outside the pulpit, a shared church strategy removes pressure rather than adding it.
Every believer should be able to articulate their own testimony in two minutes and clearly explain the gospel. Training for that is not optional.
Find the person in your church who is evangelistically gifted, empower them, and build your process around the gifts God has already placed in your body.
Is Your Church's Evangelism Personal, Corporate, or Both?
Bart opens this episode by talking about the weather, on purpose, so he can ask you a better question: have you taken the temperature of your church's evangelism and outreach lately?
If you lead a church that is plateaued or declining, this is one of the hardest conversations to have honestly. You know the vast majority of your people are not regularly sharing their faith. You may not be either. And the temptation is to swing hard toward one solution, either a heavy program of outreach events or a push to train every individual member to become a personal evangelist.
Nathan Bryant and Bart Blair make the case in this episode that the swing itself is the problem. This is a both/and conversation, and churches that only pick one side of it end up frustrated.
"I don't think you can have an effective corporate evangelistic engagement without personal evangelistic engagement happening, because it's actually the combination of the both." Nathan Bryant
Why the Great Commission Was Given to the Church, Not Just to Individuals
Nathan makes a point in this episode that reframes the whole conversation. When Western Christians hear "go and make disciples," we hear it as a personal command directed at us as individuals. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
Jesus gathered them first. He called his disciples together and commissioned them collectively, to go and make disciples together.
No individual has every gift. A single believer was never meant to carry a lost person through the entire journey from first contact to mature discipleship.
The church is the strategy. God's plan for reaching the lost is the collection of people and the varied gifts he has distributed among them.
Bart reads from 1 Corinthians 3 in the episode, where Paul describes himself as planting and Apollos as watering while God gives the growth. The passage is not just about unity. It is about the division of labor in kingdom work.
What Percentage of Christians Actually Share Their Faith?
Bart went looking for a clean statistic on how many born-again believers in North America regularly share their faith with someone who is not yet following Jesus. He came back without one. The reports vary too widely to give a clear number.
What the reports agree on is the direction: far fewer believers are sharing their faith than are not. And you can verify that in your own congregation, whether you have 20 people or 2,000.
One number did stand out. A Barna report referenced in the episode found that only 6% of pastors surveyed felt they themselves were effective at sharing the gospel with non-believers. That means 94% of pastors carry a quiet lack of confidence in their ability to lead someone to Christ outside of a Sunday sermon.
That number matters for a specific reason. Most churches do not have enough non-believers in the room on a Sunday morning for pulpit evangelism to move the needle. If the pastor is only confident in the one context where lost people are least present, the church has a problem no amount of preaching will solve.
Why Pastors Feel Inadequate at Evangelism and What to Do About It
Here is the reframe that makes this episode worth sharing with your leadership team: a corporate evangelism strategy does not add another burden to the pastor's plate. It takes weight off.
If you are one of the 94%, the answer is not to white-knuckle your way into becoming someone you are not. The answer is to look around your congregation and identify who God has already gifted for this.
Do the inventory. Run spiritual gift assessments so you actually know who in your church is evangelistically wired.
Empower, then get out of the way. Work through that person to facilitate what happens in the area where you are not strong.
Stop being the bottleneck. Bart shares that as a lead pastor he was leading every evangelistic study himself, and he simply did not have the time for the follow-up those relationships required.
"Find someone in your church who has the gift, empower that person, and then work through that person to facilitate how stuff is taking place in this area of not where you're strong, but where they are." Nathan Bryant
Do We Forget How Lost Lost People Really Are?
Bart raises this in a conversation he had with a pastor days before recording. One of the deepest problems in established North American churches is that we lose sight of how lost we ourselves were before we were saved.
That forgetting has consequences. We stop preaching and teaching it. We lose the sense of urgency. The lost sheep in our community, our neighborhood, our workplace, and our own family stop registering as genuinely lost.
Nathan adds a second layer to this. The cultural context has shifted underneath us:
Most people today have no church background. Their parents did not attend either.
Their education has largely been formed against belief in God. They may have heard of Jesus, but the framework is missing.
They have a great deal to understand before they can make an informed decision. A five or ten minute gospel presentation assumes a foundation many people simply do not have.
This does not mean you stop sharing the gospel when the Holy Spirit prompts you. It means you plan for a process rather than assuming a moment.
What Does a Shared Church Evangelism Strategy Actually Look Like?
Nathan lays out the practical shape of it in this episode. If you are wondering where to start building a coordinated plan, this is the framework:
Keep the conversation constant. Evangelism is talked about regularly, and the gospel is preached regularly from the pulpit.
Get clarity at the leadership level. How are we connecting with lost people? How are we connecting them to our people? How are we building trust? How are we generating spiritual interest?
Define where the gospel gets communicated. Name the specific place in your process where a person hears the gospel clearly and is invited to respond.
Think in process, not events. People move through stages: connection, trust, spiritual openness, gospel clarity, decision, discipleship.
Communicate the whole thing to your people. Your congregation should be able to answer the question, "What is the path to a lost person coming to know Jesus in our church?"
The philosophy and strategy will look different from church to church, and Nathan is explicit that he is not prescribing one model. What matters is that you have one, that it is clear, and that your people know what it is.
Why Outreach Events Alone Will Not Grow Your Church
Plenty of declining churches equate evangelism with events. A fall festival, a community breakfast, a Christmas outreach. Bart's assessment is direct: an event can be part of an overarching strategy, but events by themselves are not going to move the needle nearly as much as churches think they will.
The purpose of an outreach event is not conversion. It is to start new relationships, build trust, and invite people into community. That only works if your people are already in relationship with lost people and have someone to bring.
"If the people in the church are not actively engaged to make relationships with lost people and are in the lives of lost people, I don't care what you're doing corporately, you're not going to get any traction." Nathan Bryant
How an Evangelistic Bible Study Becomes Your Church's On-Ramp
Both Bart and Nathan use an evangelistic Bible study as the anchor point in their strategy, and this section of the episode gets specific about why it works.
It lowers the bar for your average member. If someone is not comfortable walking a friend through the Romans Road on a napkin, they can still invest in that relationship and invite that friend into the next study cycle, then sit beside them through it.
It puts the right gift in the right seat. The teaching is handled by someone with evangelistic gifting rather than by whoever happens to be available.
It multiplies. Bart and Nathan have both watched people come to Christ through a Gospel of John study and then begin using that same study to reach their own friends, in their neighborhoods and homes.
Everyone knows where the path leads. When a member has a friend who is far from God, they know exactly what the next step is.
Nathan pushes back gently on Bart's description of this as a safety net. It is more than that. It is the right distribution of gifts. If you have a gifted evangelistic teacher, why would you not want that person in the room at the moment of decision?
He backs it with numbers from his own experience planting Grace Community Church. He was running three evangelistic studies a week and could not add another, so he trained others to lead them. The results varied meaningfully by leader: one man saw roughly 80% of participants who completed the homework make a decision for Christ, a couple saw around 70%, and another leader saw about 40%. If you get one opportunity with a family exploring Jesus, you want the person with the strongest gift in that room.
When Giving Away Ministry Produces Better Results Than Keeping It
This is the most useful story in the episode for any pastor who is holding onto something too tightly.
In his last church, Bart handed the evangelistic study to a retired couple he had identified as evangelistically wired. He knew going in that they would not teach the material as well as he could. Teaching was not their gifting.
The success rate went up anyway.
They had time. This became their primary ministry. It had never been his only ministry.
They followed up. When someone missed a week or had lingering questions, they had the energy to nurture that relationship.
They had the gift. Personality and calling combined into something Bart could not replicate.
More than once, Bart's phone rang at 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening: someone had just committed their life to Jesus, the hot tub was warming up, call everyone, we are baptizing them tonight. Twenty or thirty people would gather in that backyard for a same-night baptism.
The point Bart lands on deserves a second look. The primary focus of an evangelistic study is not Bible teaching. It is not parsing Greek verbs or establishing the historicity of the text. It is helping people get to know the person of Jesus. And people tend to get to know Jesus by spending time with someone who looks and acts like him.
What Every Church Member Should Be Able to Articulate
Bart is emphatic that the corporate emphasis in this episode does not let individuals off the hook. Two things every person in your church should be able to do:
Tell their own story in two minutes or less. What life looked like before Jesus, how they met him, what they learned, how they responded, and how it changed things. The Apostle Paul's pattern.
Explain the gospel clearly. That sin separated us from God, that Jesus died to pay that penalty, and that those who believe and receive him are given the right to be called children of God, adopted into his family and indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
If your church has no intentional training toward those two competencies, Bart's assessment is that you are doing your church family a disservice. We consistently overestimate both what our people know and their ability to put it into words.
The caution is what comes next. Do not build that training on the assumption that everyone will then leave the building and start sharing their faith at Starbucks and the soccer field. Some will. Most will not. Which is exactly why the corporate strategy has to exist alongside the personal training.
Your People Have More Questions Than You Think They Do
One more practical note from Bart, aimed at your congregation more than at you: if a church member is walking with a lost friend who has spiritual questions they cannot answer, they should bring that friend to the pastor's office.
It will make your pastor's day. He will keep his office open all afternoon for it.
"I don't think the issue is that we've got too many people asking too many questions and we don't know how to handle them. I think the issue is we're not actually connected with lost people on the individual and personal level." Bart Blair
Questions for Reflection With Your Leadership Team
If someone in our congregation asked, "What is the path to a lost person coming to know Jesus in our church?" could they answer it? Could we?
Who in our church is evangelistically gifted, and are we currently deploying that person in a way that uses that gift?
Are our outreach events connected to a larger process, or are they standing alone and hoping something happens?
When was the last time we trained our people to share their own testimony clearly and briefly?
Am I, as the leader, functioning as a bottleneck in any part of our evangelistic process?
Share This Episode
Know a pastor who feels the weight of evangelism resting entirely on their own shoulders? Send them this episode. The conversation Bart and Nathan have here may be the reframe that changes how they lead their church into outreach.
Get Connected
If you have questions, want coaching, or would like access to the evangelistic Bible study resources mentioned in this episode, reach out. Fill out the form at revitalizemy.church or email Bart directly at bart@assistcx.org.
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