Hugh Halter - Evangelism track and missional author
Wrote the Gathered and Scattered church for pastors wanting to shift their churches towards being missional. He hated writing and reading, doesn't like being a pastor but loves lost people. He likes proclamational evangelism but the world has changed. We have to do something. Church attendance plummeting and this is likely to continue. Nobody will be in the room to hear us.
How do we do evangelism to the people who don't go to a building on Sunday. How do we engage this as incarnational people. This is the stuff of his latest book.
Followers now pick their leaders.
The basic grid is: This is the Way of Jesus:
incarnation > Reputation > Conversation > Confrontation > Transformation.
Incarnation 1 John 1:15. Jesus to save us yes, but also to teach us how to be human.
Paul says he will stay with them until Christ is formed in them. Our job is to form Jesus in people. He doesn't talk about evangelism in his church but how to be like Jesus..then evangelism will happen naturally. The truth became flesh and moved into our neighborhood. If we incarnate like Jesus, people will begin to talk...
Reputation...people will talk to others or just in their head. Leads to conversation.
Incarnation...most people believe in God...they are honest when they say they are spiritual. To help them with their dissonance, Jesus stood in front of them and modeled God. We are modeling God. Google 'Jesus was' and it's all positive. Google 'Christians are' and it's all negative. The challenge is to be authentic and love with heart. John 17 intimate relationship Father to Jesus, Jesus to his Disciples. He prays the heart of evangelism...incarnation. The heart of evangelism is not conversion but adoption. Our motivation is not to see the church grow but to build family. Our posture as a pastor is as a brother or a sister.
People outside the church have deep stories , mostly about a bad church or Christian...they can't figure it out so they don't mess with it. He had a two coffee rule...terrible rule...it takes more than two coffees to bring someone to faith...it takes hundreds of dinners, inconvenient late nights, watching their kids play bad basketball...that's incarnational evangelism.
Jesus worked a job. The Adamic curse...Jesus submitted to the curse of work. Stonemason and maybe carpenter. Our work is a fertile place for bringing people to Christ. Trappist monks were the only ones who didn't beg for money...they worked for their money. This is reputation. Jesus got into public fights. He moves away from his disciples, pissed off at seeing people abused and finds leather to make a whip and turns over the tables. This is human Jesus. You bet the families talked about it that night around their supper tables. You need a public fight to care about the world. Incarnational reputation...Jesus was a friend to sinners. That's his approach. No pulpit of bullhorn but eating and drinking with sinners.
Jesus went to the cross for sin, but he sat with people and overlooked their sin. All the time. Eating with sinners does not condone their sin. Will we be friends of sinners? If Jesus was the only baker in town, yes, he would bake a cake for a gay couple, says Hugh.
Love your neighbor. How is that going for you? James says pure religion is giving priority to the widow and orphan. Do we find it easy to say gay lifestyle is a sin while we help ourselves to an unneeded donut.
Friendship is the primary context for evangelism because you get to know then in the context of their stories. Otherwise to can find yourself judging people.
Being a friend of sinners leads to conversations. Dignify where people are at. Good news draws people. People came to Jesus. When we have a Jesus reputation people will come to me, and my people, because they are good news people.
Conversations leads to confrontation. Make friends of lost people genuinely, invite them to dinner with your most enjoyable saved people. Tells a story of an unsaved guy becoming part of their circle of saved friends and at some point wanting to then come to a social and prayer evening. They'll pick up on your faith and they will try to get their head around your faith and that will bring some confrontation, and they will bring themselves to faith.
So the book is written as a dispels hip course and an evangelism course. You were never meant to be a solo incarnational person but part of an incarnational community. Just get reading groups going.
The two things that work are prayer and redemptive relationships.
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