Rollin With The Syndicate

I’d like to tell you about a great time we had today.  A few weeks ago, my evangelism study group decided to get out of the books and hit the streets.  We were looking to do some evangelism in ways that could really benefit our ministries, help hold each other accountable, and just make sure that we were really getting after it.

So we are making a circuit of our towns—Frenchburg, Salyersville, Morehead, and Camargo.  7 of us hit Salyersville—me, my son John, Mike Adams, Taylor Wilson, Jacob Wilson, Matt Ellis, and Andrew Donner, the pastor of Salyersville.

We met for breakfast and then we hit a neighborhood behind the parsonage.  With 7 of us, we really made short work.  Matt Ellis and I worked a section, and it was a good day, on a bunch of levels.  What ends up happening on a weekday is that you find a lot of people not home, and that’s ok… because part of what you are doing is getting the word out about your church and its services.  You can come back later of an evening or weekend and catch them at home, and they have already had some contact.

But you also find some people at home.  Three visits stick out.  We met a woman from the Church of Christ.  She was very happy that we were out talking to people about Jesus.  I find that happens quite a bit—Christians are happy to bless you in the work.  And I hope they are inspired to give it a try, to get out there and witness!

We walked up to a guy reading on a porch.  We saw pretty quick he had a Bible and a commentary out.  He is a Baptist Sunday School teacher, very committed to building up a small church in the country.  We had a good laugh because he thought we were Mormons. “Never been so glad to see some Methodists,” he said.  He offered us some cold water bottles.  It was getting hot.  He had a horse in his front yard.  It grazes a little in his yard then goes up to a cousin’s house and then to another house before it goes to the barn to sleep.  Ah, life in a country town.

I have to talk up Matt Ellis a little bit.  He took most of the visits and did a great job.  He wasn’t done when we left Salyersville.  He was still witnessing at a gas station when we stopped for drinks in West Liberty!  I have to say that some good ministry happened there with Matt, too.  I was able to tell him one of the secrets of evangelism.  One of my best buds Steve McKinney, if he hears me whining or complaining asks, “have you told anyone about Jesus today?”  It’s good advice, because as soon as my feet hit the street I’m a brand new man, telling people how good Jesus is to forgive us.  I get to pray for people who have it worse than me and at any rate I realize the Lord has been pretty good to me.  There will be a lot of hard fighting, but I’ve read the back of the book and we win. Pretty soon, my grievances and resentments are gone, and even my real sorrows fade away.

The visit that was the most important: we met a guy who told us that he had been hurt badly on  the job, showed us some wicked scars from surgery, and told us he lived in constant pain.  I was immediately transported to India, where I saw so many worn out bodies and heard so many stories of healings.  Why don’t we see it?  Probably because we don’t believe it, don’t know how badly we need it.  So we prayed right there for him fervently.  I am still praying that Andrew may get to visit him and hear a marvelous testimony of healing and the power of the presence of the Lord in our suffering.

The other two teams have their own stories to tell.  I think we are going to see a lot of fruit from this thing we’re doing.  I’m calling us “The Syndicate.”  If I am dreaming, we will expand this to a big team of other pastors and lay people and we will go out and hit the streets and country roads and byways.  How cool would it be if we prayed each other up and got together with our teams in each others’ towns and just blitzed it?! If 15 or 20 people handed out 100 flyers, tracts and door hangers, praying for the needs of people and sharing the Good News of Jesus?  I might be getting close to showing a critical mass of people that door-to-door evangelism is not weird or useless.

Visiting House to House

Visiting from house to house is the most controversial evangelism strategy I use.  If I stood on a street corner with a sandwich board and a microphone, perhaps that would be the most controversial.  What I mean by controversial, is that it spawns a lot of negative reactions in ministerial colleagues.  It’s the one I take the most grief for, and have to defend the most.  But, I also get a lot of encouragement. So people are divided on this one.  Two interesting tid-bits: the most encouragement I get is from people whose doors I knock on!  They are glad someone took the time to come by and is out doing the work!  I also get a lot of people telling me it doesn’t work, and yet those same people have never tried it, much less done it consistently.

We took a vow as a United Methodist elder to “visit from house to house.”  We love to dodge this.  Cynically, I have had a number of UM leaders tell me those are “historic” questions that don’t really fit who we are today.  Others confine it to visiting people who are members of your church.  Nope.  It’s the shepherd roaming the hills to gather the harassed and scattered flock. So you go from door-to-door.  And it works.

But you have to do it consistently, over the long haul.  In my first church, when I started this, I had a number of people say, “we tried that and it didn’t work.”  I asked them what they did.  They went out one time, two by two (because that’s what the Bible says), with some fresh baked bread that had a card that said, “The Bread of Life.”  “And no one came,” they told me.

I had to break the tough news to them.  You never engaged with our neighbors about Jesus beofre, you went out one time with fresh bread (which is a great idea) but there was no follow up.  The folks they visited literally had no clue what it was about!

What you have to do in visitation is be consistent.  Go back again.  If the people you talk to are remotely receptive, keep going back, with an invitation to services, to a special event, to a cookout at your house…

I will probably be talking about this forever and telling this same story, so bear with me.  When I was appointed to my first church, I had no clue about anything!  Larry Baker me a map of Clark County, one of those really detailed road maps.  One day driving back out into the country from town, I heard the Lord speak, “Every house to the county line is mine.”  I kind of went a little farther, into Estill and Powell counties, but I reasoned those places belonged to the Lord, too!  I got to the house, made a bookmark on card stock that had basic info about our church.

Then I started systematically visiting every church in a large swath of the county I had decided was my church’s area.  I went to every house at least once, most houses more than that, and the houses where someone was receptive to me and the invitation to church, I went to those houses many, many times.

The reasons visitation works is that you find people you don’t even know exist. You talk to people you would never get to.  Is it time consuming?  Yes.  It proves its worth when someone comes because you took the time to come to them, talk to them, pray with them, they know you love them enough to break down barriers!  And they tell their friends and family who also come!

Remember to take church members with you and teach them how to do this.  If you get some help, oh man can you cover some ground.  You can hit hundreds of houses in a few hours with 3 or 4 people.  Remember… to go back.  People who had not yet come to church would call  me their pastor.  I would get called to hospitals of jails on behalf of people I did not know well, but had stopped by their house.  I was the only pastor they knew.  We had 7 people come to our church because I visited their family members in jail. I was called to do funerals and got to minister to even more people in a family because they called the pastor who would visit them.

The how to:

Make some kind of card, not on printer paper.  You need something that can stand up to being placed in a door, or held between a screen door and the main door.  I have used bookmarks on card stock.  With just basic information about the church—contact info, directions to get there, service times, etc.  Lately I have been using a tract from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the classic “bridge” illustration.  Then I use an address label to put the church info on. They get our info and a really good basic intro to believing in Jesus.

Rehearse what you are going to say when someone opens the door.  “Hi, my name is Aaron.  I am the pastor at Morehead United Methodist Church.  I am just going out in the community, getting to know people, inviting them to church.  Do you have a church that you go to?”  That’s it.  Their answer might lead to some more conversation.  If they seem interested, I make a note of it in a notebook I keep for the purpose.  Then I write them a note, thanking them for their time and again inviting them.  And then I know that that is a place I will go back to.

That’s it.  If you will do visitation regularly, and consistently (meaning all your life), you will see church growth and conversion.

I will tell some other stories later that help show how it’s done and the fruit that comes from it!

Visiting Door-to-Door

I kept a journal for about ten years, 1998 to somewhere in 2007. Not exactly sure why I stopped. I have picked up the habit again.

I was reading through a section of it from when I served Dunaway United Methodist Church, outside of Winchester, KY. I came across something that may be of help in understanding why door-to-door visitation is so important.

I had an entry about a house I stopped at. It's strange I remember exactly where it was, and even some details about the house, even though the family never came to our church and I am not sure that I ever stopped there again.

A woman answered the door and I shared a bit about our church and was probing to see where she was spiritually, what doors might be open for a conversation about Jesus. Before I left, I asked her if there was anything I could pray for her about. She said yes, her 18-year old son was very sick with kidney problems. So we had prayer.

We often make excuses for why we don't do door-to-door evangelism. We say it is ineffective (which since most people who say this have never consistently done it, I am not sure why they say it is ineffective.) We say it is intrusive, an invasion of privacy, and Americans don't like that and they associate it with Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. I can answer from experience that very few people have ever been disturbed that I came by.

And more: there is such a great benefit. I got to pray with a woman with a deep concern for her son. I learned something about the community I lived in. When you add up all the homes I tried to visit and people I tried to talk to, I think I generally got a better perspective on what was actually happening than most other people.

If for no other reason than learning what is hurting and helping your community, learning what they pray for and praise, shouldn't door-to-door visitation be more of a priority? And was it not a great benefit to that mother? I have countless other stories of people who never came to the church but were blessed by a visit. And I also have countless stories of how many people did come to the church because of a visit to their house, being blessed by the knowledge that God cares, that His shepherds were out roaming the hills, gathering up the scattered flock! In net numbers, we grew by about 30 in worship in that little church. If you count my first year growing it down from 35 to 20, the net gain was closer to 45 or 50. And I am not sure how to count all the people who visited here and there for a season. Is it any wonder that one of the vows Wesley had his preachers take was to “visit from house to house?” We still take that vow, we are just not held accountable to it. In fact, it seems the majority of UM pastors don't think those vows actually mean anything!

After reading my journal entry, I was convicted that I need to get back out there. I realized I have not been as diligent about it this year. And here are some things to consider. Last year at Morehead, we had 20 professions of faith, bringing in 30-something new members. This year, 4 professions of faith and 12 new members. I get it, the Lord blesses how He's going to bless, so you can't just look at the numbers. But I think the numbers do mean something when you realize you were not out there as much as you needed to be. I let too many good things get in the way of doing the important thing! And how amazing is it that I have a lot of help in this work... more than I ever have had anywhere? Time to get serious about systematically using it!