Baptizing & Making Disciples

Posted: 11/10/06

Baptizing & making disciples

By Barbara Bedrick

Texas Baptist Communications

DALLAS – Baptists long have focused on bringing people down the aisles to make professions of faith in Christ. But how Christians live when they walk out the church doors may offer just as important a way to measure the effectiveness of a congregation’s evangelism efforts, some pastors and theologians agreed.

Churches should encourage people to come to faith in Christ, but they also need to disciple members intentionally to have the largest impact they can, they said.

“You don’t judge the health of an army by how many people sit in a cafeteria and eat chow,” said Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life. “You judge the health of an army by how many people are out on the front lines fighting the battle.”

Dan Wooldridge, pastor of Crestview Baptist Church in Georgetown, shared that sentiment.

“Baptism is one way to measure evangelism, but more and more we are asking: ‘Have we effectively impacted the community? Do they know we care, and do they know what our message is?’” said Wooldridge, second vice president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. “I believe churches need to intentionally try to saturate their communities with a loving presentation of our message of Jesus Christ.”

Making an impact on the community through lifestyle evangelism also is key for Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler. Network, the church’s Sunday evening ministry, calls for personal visits into the homes of prospects. But the church’s greatest evangelism occurs at schools, neighborhoods and in the workplace as members naturally share their faith.

“Each year, we set a goal of seeing at least 200 people follow Christ in believer’s baptism, and we have averaged more than that goal over the past 15 years,” Pastor David Dykes said. “However, a more reliable measure of our evangelistic effectiveness is how many of our members are sharing their faith with their FRAN (Friends, Relatives, Associates and Neighbors) network.”

Some leaders insist churches should look at how many people are sharing their faith combined with how many people walk the aisle.

They see that as a more accurate tool to discern the success of evangelism.

“In church history, quantitative cannot ever be the final evaluative structure of God’s movement, but it’s a good helpful tool on track to the final answer,” said Chap Clark, author and professor of youth ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary.

“The ultimate best way to evaluate our evangelism is by asking: Are we truly moving people from disconnect, from non-believers, into faithful followers of Jesus Christ?”

Recommending that quantification and numbers should be played down, Bill Tillman, T.B. Maston Chair of Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary, contends many times in the past, Baptists placed too much emphasis on numbers instead of on intentionality and Christ-like character.

“Numbers are not important in lots of senses,” Tillman said. “It’s not the true dimension of kingdom work. It’s hard to categorize or quantify how God is working in lives. Qualitative dimensions of discipleship include the intentionality. Whatever they say and do is a witness to the gospel. They’re authentic believers.”

There is an inherent flaw in church baptisms as the only measuring stick for effective evangelism, said Wayne Shuffield, director of the BGCT missions, evangelism and ministry area.

Sometimes people get baptized because they’re changing denominations or renewing their commitment to Christ, not taking an initial step in their newfound faith, he noted. “But Christians in today’s society must practice the art of evangelism by focusing on bringing more people to Christ for the purpose of becoming like Christ. Jesus commissions his followers to ‘go and make disciples,’ not ‘go and gather decisions,’” Shuffield said.

“The primary commandment for evangelism is to love God and love others. Christians must love God with their heart, soul and mind and fall so deeply in love with Jesus Christ we can’t help but to love lost people as Christ loves them and want to talk to them about a personal relationship with Jesus.”

Some churches focus on loving people into a relationship with Christ. “The Saddleback movement is committed to honoring the stories of others before they try to change them,” Clark said. “When people are walking with Christ authentically, they can’t help but bring others to God.”

Warren founded Saddleback Church in 1980 with only seven people and now averages 20,000 in attendance. The church lists 200 ministries to the Orange County community, and 4,500 members participate in mission projects worldwide. Its website reports Saddleback has baptized 12,000 new Christians in the past 10 years.

While Saddleback has tens of thousands of members, its pastor points to more important issues. The strength of any church is judged not on its seating capacity but on its sending capacity, Warren noted. Seeing individual lives committed to membership, maturity, ministry and mission to the glory of God drives him, he said.

Echoing the same sentiment, Wooldridge emphasizes intentionally linking church members’ lives to segments of their community through ministry. Relational or friendship evangelism and storying are two evangelistic styles proving effective.

But a new evangelistic outreach also is surfacing online where millions of unchurched and unsaved people are surfing the Internet. For example, Crestview Baptist has a website, www.peoplesharingjesus.com, where visitors find two icons noting “Good News” and “Why Baptism?” which direct traffic to evangelistic videos.

“I literally have people making decisions by watching videos—even people who live outside Georgetown, so we’re realizing you can be evangelistic on your website,” Wooldridge said.

Baptist churches that are not evangelistic, Wooldridge noted, are “like little fortresses or spiritual retreats.” He points out that Christians and churches need to penetrate the community and every culture.

Working toward that goal, Crestview started two missions—one in a nearby community, the other in a Hispanic community—in the past year. Members invested almost $150,000 in a Hispanic mission in which members have developed a literacy program and a children’s ministry, and they have blitzed the community with literature.

Crestview determined its Vacation Bible School was not reaching the unchurched, so it turned VBS into a daylong camp. More than 75 percent of the community’s children participated.

Crestview still holds revivals but not the traditional fall and spring events. Instead, the church holds a harvest weekend or a harvest Sunday. Wooldridge points out the church works hard to make the events more creative than the old-fashioned tent revival. The church offers bus rides to non-believers to encourage their attendance.

“We can’t sit at the building and wait for people to come,” Wooldridge said. “I’m absolutely convinced if we’ll penetrate the community, God will send people to the building.”

The objective is to relate in a positive way. The primary intention is to share Christ, to care for nonbelievers, pray for them and then trust God for the results.

“Not that we don’t have results, but it’s about the kingdom, not the success of the local church,” Wooldridge said.

As more faithful are equipped and more mentors are developed, the harvest for God grows, some pastors added. Churches may then start measuring their effective evangelistic efforts by the numbers of disciples they develop each year instead of baptisms.

“We bring them in, we build them up, we train them, but we don’t keep them here. We send them out to reach the whole world,” Warren said. “So, it’s our sending capacity that is our strength—not how many people we seat in an auditorium.”