The Missing Person Your Church Desperately Needs | Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelberg
By Lee Strobel & Mark Mittelberg
Churches are facing a Missing Person crisis. The sobering news from the Southern Baptist Convention — telling us that last year their membership had the largest percentage drop in a hundred years — is just one more reminder of this.
The truth is that many churches are struggling to reach their community with the gospel largely because of a leadership issue.
No, not the senior pastor’s leadership, but the leadership void left by the Missing Person — a strategic individual who should be playing a vital role in 21st century churches.
While this person’s absence certainly isn’t the only reason that baptisms in Southern Baptist churches fell another 4 percent from 2018 to 2019, we believe that finding, equipping, and deploying these missing leaders is critical for churches to effectively reach people in our secular culture today.
The Missing Person is the Evangelism Point Leader that every church needs to find, because the lead pastor can’t do it all.
The senior leader needs to uphold a variety of values in the church — from evangelism and discipleship to Bible study and prayer —and so he lacks the capacity to design and lead the church’s needed evangelism initiatives.
Pastors need a full- or part-time staff person, or a key volunteer in smaller congregations, to spearhead their church’s outreach efforts. This individual doesn’t do evangelism for the church; rather, he (or she) trains the entire congregation in how to naturally and effectively share their faith with others, and helps organize a variety of events and ministries designed to reach the community for Christ.
We believe this model is spelled out clearly in Ephesians 4:11-12, where Paul tells us that “Christ himself gave … evangelists … to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”
A highly successful businessman once told us that in order for a business to thrive into the future, it simply needs to do two things: serve its present customers really well, and always be finding new customers. Then he turned to us with a pointed question: “So who’s in charge of finding new business in the average church?”
The answer, of course, is nobody.
Most pastors have never designated a leader to partner with him — one who will lay awake at night strategizing, praying, and planning about how they can turbocharge the church’s evangelistic efforts to reach the neighborhoods around them for Christ.
Let’s face it: nothing gets done in the church until a specific person is put in charge of a particular area.
But let the right leader start devoting his energies to prayerfully creating a climate in the congregation where it’s natural to share Jesus with others, and look out— good things are going to start happening.
We should add that it’s not enough to just list someone as being the evangelism director; that person must be given the time and resources to energetically work on fulfilling the Great Commission in partnership with the senior pastor.
So we must avoid the temptation of adding a bunch of peripheral responsibilities that will sap the energy and attention of the Evangelism Point Leader. Their focus must stay on doing whatever it takes to reach more and more of the people outside the church, or they will quickly become overwhelmed with meeting the needs of the people who are already there.
Where can churches find this Missing Person?
Maybe your church has someone who would be perfect for such a role, but they need training. That’s one of the reasons we created our new Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University — to equip these individuals so they can help unleash the evangelism potential in local congregations like yours.
Among the 30 fully online courses being launched this fall are classes on the critical role of the evangelistic point person; advanced methods in relational evangelism; building highly contagious congregations; reaching next generations with the gospel; and advanced approaches to evangelism through small groups. Registration is currently open at StrobelCenter.com.
But make no mistake: churches in America and around the world must be increasingly strategic if we are going to make spiritual inroads into today’s secular culture. And this will include finding, training, and unleashing the Missing Person to lead the church in taking new territory for Christ.
Rick Warren has said that even if he were planting a church with only five people, he’d designate one of them to be the evangelistic leader. Without that kind of strategic focus, the church will remain at a distinct disadvantage in fulfilling the Great Commission given to us by Jesus.
But with that strategic focus — the sky is the limit.
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
– Ephesians 3:20-21
Lee Strobel is founding director of The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University. He is the New York Times best-selling author of The Case for Christ and three dozen other books and curricula.
Mark Mittelberg is the best-selling author of the Becoming a Contagious Christian Training Course, as well as The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask (With Answers), and he serves as executive director of the Strobel Center.
For more information on The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics, visit Strobelcenter.com