How to Proclaim!

Relational Outreach – church members need to be in the community making friends, building friendships. There is no real clear agenda here, simply build a friendship. The goal is to be redemptive, but not pushy. And don’t treat people like they are your project. Build a friendship with a co-worker, with a neighbor, with someone at the fly-fishing shop, invite someone to go hiking with you, or out to eat a good restaurant. Be there when they have a crisis. Help them celebrate big wins. Have a barbecue in your backyard and just be relational with the long-term goal of being redemptive. Imagine when your church comes up in a conversation with your friend and someone else. Imagine you hear them say, “I have a friend that goes to that church and I like her a lot!”

Service – Get into the community and serve it for the best interests of the community. Rake leaves, clean up a park, wash windshields in Wal-Mart parking lots. You could pain an elderly person’s house, clean up a house, fix cars. These are the Random Acts of Kindness kinds of opportunities, but they are also the social justice issues that many in our community are interested in. Again, this isn’t the place to do major pushes for literature or to get people on their knees, but rather it’s to go out and serve. What if someone was thinking, “I have a friend that goes to that church. I’ve noticed that their church is out in the community a lot – doing good, and serving. They are always doing good in this community.”

Value-Added Reach – This section is where we are trying to add value to people’s lives without a highly spiritual overtone. So we have financial classes, depression classes, classes on parenting, budgeting, stars, stop smoking or other health related classes. It might include a vegetarian cooking school. It could include your local pathfinder club, an after school latch key program. Anything where you are a helping them be better people and do what they do better. Self-help classes, reading clubs, evening juice bar, Kids classes, VBS/Summer Day Camps, etc. The goal here is to get people to come to your church for a non-spiritual event where you can bridge them into the church facility before you preach to them. Imagine, someone says, “I have a friend that goes to that church. I like them. That church is always out serving in the community. I’ve been to one of their financial classes and learned some really good things and they weren’t pushy about religion.”

Sharing – This is all about giving them things to read, watch, or listen to that will help them along on their spiritual journey. Specifically, we would suggest giving them some Adventist literature to read. A great book is Steps to Christ, but there may be things like SIGNS magazines, YouTube links to sermons, or other biblical informational resources. It might be a sermon, a tract, a Bible study, book, CD, DVD, Link. The goal is that they begin to experience something uniquely Adventist while at the same time growing in their lives. It doesn’t have to be Adventist right away, but be careful about leading them down a different path. Pray for wisdom from the Holy Spirit before you step into this. Imagine, “I have a friend that goes to that church. They serve our community all the time, and I’ve helped them. I’ve gone to a parenting class at their church and it was good. I even picked up some material to read before I left. It made a lot of sense. Now, I see they are having a seminar, I think I’ll give it a try….”

Proclaim – This is what we might call traditional evangelism. This is a seminar that is specifically designed to get people to make decisions. It’s also very clearly trying to teach the unique view of the gospel that Adventist have – saved by grace, changed by grace. Traditionally they have been Revelation Seminars, Prophecy Seminars, etc. These seminars is where we help direct our coaching from this website. If you are interested in getting help for an upcoming seminar, we have seen incredible results from the principles we teach others and have seen many churches exponentially grow because of following these principles and this 5 point step of this blog. The most exciting thing is that our retention rate hovers around 70-75%