Sharing the Gospel is something that I am passionate about and I recognize that it needs to be a priority in our Student Ministry. I talk about it all the time. Whether presenting the Gospel in our large group setting or challenging students to share their faith, I keep it in front of my students every week.

What I am learning in the midst of all of this is that the students I lead respond overwhelmingly more positively when I give them something simple and practical to do in response to the call to evangelize. When I talk about it and share scripture about the call from God to share our faith my students will nod their heads in agreement, but very few of them will take the principles and put them into practice on their own. However, when I talk about evangelism and then give them a clear action point to do in response, the participation of students increases greatly.

Here are just a few ideas that we have implemented this past year that have seemed to work well with our students:

1. We consistently ask students to think of 1 friend or family member that doesn’t know Christ. This helps keep the need for evangelism personal in the lives of our students. We’ve had them write that persons name on the wall (on butcher paper), on their hand, in their Bibles, or on THE Cause Circle (a tool provided by Dare 2 Share). All of these are very visceral ways for students to be reminded of that 1 person.
2. We spend time in our large group and small group settings in prayer for those individuals.
3. Recently, we distributed a single copy of the Life Book to our students as a tool to start a spiritual conversation with a friend at school. We had them write a note to their friend or family member on the inside cover to add a personal, friendly touch. This was a practical way for our students to engage in evangelism before the end of the school year and preview into the campus saturation we are planning for in the fall.

Here are a few more ideas that we will be implementing in the next 6-12 months:

1. We are planning a campus initiative in the fall that will tie in the Life Book Movement campus saturation as well as See You at the Pole.
2. We are partnering more and more with 1st Priority as way to keep our students involved in evangelism on their campuses.
3. Next winter/spring we are taking all of our students to Dare 2 Share’s FOLLOW tour.

If you are looking to get started I would highly recommend you utilize THE Cause Circle provided by Dare 2 Share. CLICK HERE to download the PDF. This is a great way to help your students start a visual action plan to begin praying, pursuing, and persuading their friends toward the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What are things you are doing to implement evangelism in a practical way in your student ministry? What ideas have you put into practice that your students have responded to? Share your thoughts below and let’s help each other fuel the priority of evangelism in our Student Ministries and on every High School and Middle School campus in the nation!

What are you going to do to end the Silence?”

—From dayofsilence.com

Or should we? Are we called to do anything to end the silence? By “we,” I mean those of us who have placed our trust in Jesus Christ as our only hope of salvation. Call us “Christians,” or “Christ followers.” And because of those titles and the commitment that lies therein, are we called to do anything? Or can we just bury our heads in the sand and wait for the day – April 20th – to pass?

Well, head-burying is rarely an effective faith-sharing strategy. So one of the first things we must do as Christians is drop the labels and begin to see all people, regardless of whether they are living outside of God’s blueprint for sexuality, as our neighbor…

If you find opportunities to discuss this topic with your friends as a result of the Day of Silence – dialogue, don’t preach. We’re all broken people in need of a redeeming relationship with our God through Jesus. Christians should be among the first to reach out toward LGBT. After all, we have Jesus as our model and He was often criticized for hanging out with the wrong people.

So what’s a Christian to do with the Day of Silence?

Acknowledge the struggle it presents for you as a follower of Christ. Personally wrestle with the tension between not compromising your convictions about morality, while loving all your neighbors as Jesus said in Mark 12:31… and also sharing the good news of Christ. 

Click here to read the entire Soul Fuel Article specifically designed for students to relate to current events.

As a leader, how can you help your students respond in a Christ-like way to the Day of Silence?

I usually start by saying something like, “So, tell me what you know of the gospel.” This is usually followed with Sunday school answers taught by well-intentioned Sunday school teachers.

They say, “Oh, it’s good news.”

“Right. What’s the good news?”

“That Jesus died for our sins.”

“Good! Why did He have to die?”

“Because we’re sinners.”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with why Jesus died?”

Pause… “Umm, what do you mean?”

At this point I’ll share a story that was posed to me by Charles Ryrie many years ago.

“Let’s say you’re walking down the street when a terrible car accident suddenly happens right in front of you. One of the drivers ends up on the concrete and is in critical condition. A civilian runs over to help him, sees that they’re about to pass away, and looks up at you. The person motions for you to come over and says, ‘Hey, don’t you go to that church down the street?’

‘Uhh, yeah, I do.’

‘This person only has about 30 seconds left to live! Quick, tell his man whatever he needs to know to go to heaven before he’s gone!’

You’re on the spot. What do you say?”

Usually a student’s first reaction is to point out how unlikely this scenario actually is, which we obviously agree (thankfully!), but that’s not the point. I want to hear the student strip everything out of the gospel that unnecessarily bloats it and distracts from the core message of what someone must do, know, understand, or believe in order to be saved.

Rarely do I actually answer this question during our first lunch meeting. Instead, their first assignment is to think about it, research it, and even pose the scenario to other people. I want that student to come back the next week with some sort of idea of what’s at the heart of the gospel message.

To get them thinking I’ll ask questions like, “Does the man need to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Does he need to understand the concept of sin? Does he need to believe in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection? Does he have to say a prayer?”

Every time I go through this exercise with a student it reminds me that teenagers don’t always know the gospel message as clearly as we might hope they do, which may be one of the reasons why evangelism is difficult for them. The best thing they know to do when sharing Christ is to use a bunch of church lingo they learned in Sunday school, like, “Ask Jesus to come into your heart,” and their friends have no idea what that means. And honestly, neither do our kids. And neither do I!

Let’s teach our kids clearly what the gospel message is. The better they feel they understand it the easier and more clearly they’ll be able to share it with others.

What would you say in 30 seconds or less to that man?

No one likes to talk about it. Very old fashioned. Very not cool. Just ask any teenager. The label “sin” is not politically correct. Some may even categorize any mention of sin as “hate speech.”

But despite this aversion to the word “sin,” most teenagers have an innate sense that some things are right and some things are wrong.  For example, teenagers who are into porn typically don’t engage with it in front of adults. Why?  Is something inside them whispering that porn is not a wholesome, acceptable behavior?

That’s Not Fair!

Or consider how teenagers have a penchant for outrage over what’s “fair” or “unfair.” But the whole concept of fairness only makes sense when tied to a standard of behavior that lies outside of our own personal preferences. Without an external standard, fairness is an absurdity, for everything would be judged based on individual, personal preferences.

With a little help, most teenagers can…(read the rest of the Energize Article Here)

Seriously though, the transformation Captain America experienced after being injected with that serum was incredible.  It actually reminds me of how we are considered a “new creation” when we accept Christ into our hearts and lives.  The apostle Paul said it this way:

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:17 New International Version)

Which has also been translated this way:

^16-20Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons!  (2 Corinthians 5:16-17 The Message)

It is simply incredible to me the transformation that happens in the life of an individual when the God of this universe is invited in.  Captain America was a good guy to begin with, almost too good to be true.  The serum made his good qualities even better though.  On the flip side, it also made his adversarial bad qualities even worse.  When Christ is invited into our lives and injected into our beings however, we are a new creation.  The old is gone!  The bad is not made worse!  Seriously, this is good news, people.

So, the next time you are planning an outreach or a film and faith night, consider incorporating Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) into it.  And take the opportunity to explain the ultimate story of transformation – the redemption and hope found in Christ.

And in case you were still wondering, Jesus would kick that Captain America’s butt any day.

How has being a new creation actually made your life’s transformation in Christ good news to someone?  How else can we relate the movie Captain America to the story of Jesus redeeming us?

But I think the real key to any evangelism strategy in a youth group actually has nothing to do with Dare 2 Share nor its conferences nor curriculum. As helpful as they are, they are no substitute for the key element of prayer.

Sometimes I think youth workers quickly jump to programming efforts when they want to teach their kids about evangelism. They pick up a curriculum series or even take them to a conference and think, “This will help my kids share their faith more,” and sometimes it does! But these programming efforts usually have little long-lasting impact if they’re not bathed in prayer for an on-going basis.

What kind of prayer does an evangelism strategy need?

• Prayer from the youth worker that covers teenagers’ evangelism efforts.
• Prayer from parents who desire to see their kids spiritually challenged by sharing the gospel.
• Prayer from kids for their unsaved friends.
• Prayer from the church’s leadership for the lost souls that congregation members come into contact with every day.

It really needs to be saturated in prayer! It must be the foundation of all our evangelism efforts! Otherwise it’s all based on our efforts rather than partnering with the only one who can really change someone’s heart: the Holy Spirit.

I’m not talking about using prayer as bookends to our meetings, as if the Christian equivalent to the fat lady singing is the leader closing in prayer. I’m talking about bold pursuit of God in passionate, unwavering prayer that not only asks God to move, but expects that He will do so. The kind of prayer that continually approaches God on behalf of teenagers and lost people because our heart is as burdened for them as God’s is. Sometimes when we sing we ask God to break our heart for what break’s His. With the kind of prayer I’m talking about, that becomes a reality when it comes to unbelievers around us.

But it’s just so much easier and even feels more productive to go to a conference or buy a curriculum series instead. Those things are great and very helpful, but continual, on-going prayer will make them way more effective and powerful because now the Holy Spirit is moving on our behalf, convicting hearts and teaching minds in ways a curriculum never could.

What role does prayer play in your youth group’s evangelism strategy?  How do you apply prayer?

The premise of the article is simple to the point: Are we distracting teens from the Gospel by cramming various non-essentials, or peripherals as he puts it, into our weekly student ministry programs? I’m grateful that Mike posed the question and that Group gave him a national platform for youth leaders like you and me to hear it and be challenged by it.

We subtly start focusing more of our time, energy, and resources on enhancing the gospel, and less of our efforts on actually sharing the gospel.  (Mike Kupferer, Selling Out the Gospel)

Here are two questions posed in the article that we should ask of ourselves and of our ministries: Where’s your focus? and What’s your draw? I would even encourage us to ask other staff, adults and students that are involved in our ministries.

In fact, earlier in the school year I asked the students, from the stage, to recall some of the key points we had studied through our recent sermon series. There response? Silence. While I hold to my conviction of giving the gospel weekly (which our students do remember) the teaching of the gospel on a week-to-week basis was being drowned out by video clips, games, humorous announcements, and the level of production we put into our worship environment. As I honestly evaluated the ministry, I realized our “focus” and our “draw” wasn’t the gospel. #fail

Something I really appreciated was that the article doesn’t just highlight the problem, but it offers a 4-step solution that can get us all on the road to making the gospel the priority it should be.

1. Live it out.
2. Reference the Gospel in conversation from the front.
3. Take your focus off of the peripherals.
4. Listen as an entrée to invitation.

Two additional items I would add to the list that will undoubtedly help us bring focus to the gospel in our weekly meetings:

1. Pray it up. Pray for students to hear the gospel, respond to it, opportunities to share the gospel, etc. Pray these things in your own life but also with your students and leaders every week.
2. Look to scripture.  I love the words of Jesus in John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!” What better way to introduce students to the gospel than simply looking to scripture and letting it speak for itself.

“When we spotlight the gospel, we ultimately spotlight the God who thought it up. And when people come face-to-face with God, they are forever changed.” Mike Kupferer, Selling Out the Gospel

I would highly encourage you to take a few minutes and read the article in it’s entirety and if you can swing it, pick up a subscription to the best Youth Ministry magazine available: Group magazine!

CLICK HERE to read the full article online!

CLICK HERE to subscribe to Group magazine!

What are ways that you spotlight the Gospel? How do you program the Gospel each week? What do you need to do less of in order to give more attention to the Gospel itself?

A few years back when I was serving as a volunteer small group leader for our church in Colorado I took my group through the GOSPEL Journey Maui (if you haven’t done this study with your youth group or small group you should get the curriculum and implement it as soon as possible).  After 9 weeks of amazing spiritual discussions that were faith stretching and fortifying I took my students to a local shopping district north of Denver to engage strangers in spiritual conversations, pray for them, share the gospel, and invite these people to church. I’d love to tell you that a revival broke out in our area as a result of our efforts and that hundreds came to Christ, but that’s not quite the way it played out.  But what did happen was still impressive and God was working in the lives of these teenagers:

• I saw students become more and more bold in their faith
• With each passing week students would seek out kids they knew from school to start discussions with
• I began to hear stories of my students going to school and having conversations with their friends
• These students were praying for people as they met them and learned of their needs
• People did come out to our church as a result of conversations they had with these teens

When I have a chance to connect with these kids, now over 2 years later, they still talk about those experiences and how faith forming they were.  As a result of those evenings out having spiritual conversations and sharing the gospel God was at work in the lives of these teenagers shaping them to be more evangelistic with their friends and family, as well as strangers.

When your students do good things for others, they too will earn a reputation throughout their school as someone who loves God and loves others. This reputation can open the door for them to share Jesus in a powerful way.

That’s one of the reasons why a life of doing good is a critical piece of our God-given faith sharing gear. And as youth leaders, we need to coach our students to use this piece of gear effectively.

Scripture explains it this way:

Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:15-16).

David Kinnaman’s book UnChristian documented the damage Christian hypocrisy (perceived or real) wreaked on the 16 to 29 year old nonbelievers the Barna Group surveyed. Hypocrisy was one of the distinctives this age group most commonly associated with Christians and Christianity.

This demonstrates how essential it is that we help our students understand that how they live their lives before the world really does matter. Sharing their faith isn’t just about words, it’s also about actions. Tilling the spiritual soil with a life of good deeds opens doors for the gospel message.  It also allows us to represent Christ well to a watching world, for we must always remember that 2 Corinthians 5:20 tells us we are Jesus’ ambassadors:

We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

So here are some specific ideas that can help you get your students started down this road. Encourage them to try one or more of the following:

• Buy lunch for someone
• Invite someone to the coffee shop for a long conversation about how they’re doing
• Write notes of encouragement to those who seem down – either pen and paper notes or Facebook posts will work
• Take time to listen
• Help others with their homework
• Sit with somebody during lunch you don’t know well and get to know him or her
• Coordinate a school-wide canned food drive for a local rescue mission
• Coordinate a toy drive for kids
• Organize a lunchtime fast to raise money for a food bank
• Get a group of teenagers from your school to visit a retirement center on a Saturday just to talk to the elderly and to encourage them

Challenge your teenagers to be creative. The list of possibilities is almost endless. The point is to motivate and mobilize your students to live a life of good deeds – not to “earn” their way to heaven – but so any charge of “Christian hypocrisy” can die the death it deserves. Help your teenagers see that a life of good deeds opens doors for the message of the gospel and allows the light of Christ to shine in their lives for all the world to see!

In this week’s video blog post, I share three things I learned the hard way to avoid when doing outreach events in our youth group.

I’d love to hear from you guys in the comments below about what things you’ve learned to avoid in your outreach events.