Connecting with the lost

This entry is part 3 of 12 in the series "Church planting".

Starting in a new place

“I’m new in this place. I don’t know anyone. Where do I begin?”

How do we get started when we enter a new town or city? In this blog post, we will provide a few tools you may be able to use to get started in connecting with the local people. A couple of the tools are discovery questions to get to know the people and a brainstorming tool to help you determine how you can enter their world.

It all starts with prayer

When entering a new area, there is no question that we need to begin with prayer. After all, it is the Spirit who opens peoples’ hearts to understand their need for Christ. I had a prayer partner during my Bible College days, and we would pray, even back then, that God would be going ahead of us and preparing souls for when we arrived in the ministry area. As I look back on my life in winning souls and planting churches, I can honestly say that I believe that all those who came to Christ were on a spiritual journey before I came along into their lives with the gospel. God had been working with them and preparing them even when they were unaware of his work in their lives. Therefore, every new team should have an intentional prayer strategy.

God works through relationships

In God’s plan, he uses human relationships as his main element in opening doors for the gospel. And that has been our experience. Some I had to befriend and join in their journey toward Christ and it was a long journey. It took time. One friend took many years to surrender to Christ, but later on he became one of our elders and preachers in the church. Others were already at the door and all I had to do was open the door with the gospel key and they were ready to step through.

Today we want to talk about how to connect with people in the first place so they will give opportunity for us to share Christ with them. In a survey of people more than16 years old who came to Christ, almost all of them said that the main factor in their decision to follow Christ was a relationship with a real Christian.¹

This means that if we are going to be able to lead people toward a personal relationship with Christ, we need to either have a personal connection with them, or have people with us who know them and can help us reach them for Christ.

Persons of peace

Our fastest church plant happened when we could hardly find any missionaries to work with us. We ended up developing and training a group of local believers to help us reach, win and disciple their own people. These people already had networks of relatives and friends who knew and trusted them, so the gospel could spread quickly. These local believers fall into a similar category to the ones Jesus called “persons of peace” who can provide natural openings for the acceptance of the messenger and the message.

Interests and needs

But when we are entering a new area, we need to take extra time to connect with the local people and establish ourselves as trustworthy people. I believe this is part of the reason Jesus told his missionary trainees in Matthew 10 to both “heal the sick” and “preach the Gospel.” The healing ministered to felt needs and so validated the messenger and prepared their hearts for the Gospel message.

This means we have to understand their interests and needs, and connect with them in their world. In our team-building retreats, we would spend quite a bit of time brainstorming on a white board about the interests and the needs of the community. We discussed how we could connect with their needs and interests. In other words, how could we participate in their areas of interest and help meet their areas of need.

Learning about the people

This discovery process involves going out and discovering by watching, asking and listening to find out the following information:

where they live
where they go to relax and recreate
what they do to relax and recreate
what are their preferred ways of communicating
what they do with friends and family
their neighborhoods
what and when they celebrate and how they do it
where and when they vacation
whether they have free time during the day, and how they use it
what their dreams and ambitions are
where they meet to eat
their daily rhythms of eating, working, resting, fellowshipping, recreating
in what areas they would like to improve their personal and professional lives
what brokenness exists in the community
what the areas of felt need are
how their religious beliefs affect their lives

Each team member should share their discoveries with the rest of the team.

Restaurant hopping

One of the young couples Kathy and I were able to reach were neighbors of ours. One time I just asked them, “What do you do here in the city in your free time?” Their answer was, “Restaurant hopping. We meet with friends and try out different restaurants and go somewhere else for dessert and coffee. We go to different places each time we meet.”

Kathy and I thought, “We can do that.” And so we did, with them and with several other couples, becoming close friends in the process and having wonderful opportunities to talk about our faith.

Saddleback Sam

Rick Warren in his book, “The Purpose Driven Church” took time to draw a picture of Saddleback Sam, a typical young adult living in the Saddleback Valley. He developed a list of characteristics of this person to help him and his team visualize who they were trying to reach.

Consolacion Chris

At one point we did the same thing. As a team, we brainstormed, and came up with Consolacion Chris, a typical resident of our target community. Of course there was a lot more that could have been included, but here is how we described them.

Very busy young couple, in their 30’s
Lives in a start-up house in a compact subdivision
Their house costs between 2-5 million pesos
Not a single young professional
Beginning a family
College graduate
Tech-savvy
Send their kids to a private school and their kids speak English
Moms or house-helpers pick up kids after school
Guys love basketball and biking
Most commute and work in the city since not much work is available in Consolacion,
Roman Catholic
Spend free time in the only airconditioned mall in the city

Brainstorming interests and needs

After describing all we could about the target group, we did our brainstorming on ways we could connect with our community in the two areas of their interests and needs. We realized that if this is what Consolacion Chris is like, our efforts need to focus on what effectively connects to their world. See the chart below.

This is the process we followed:

We started with just listing all the ways the team could possibly connect with them. This list will depend on who is on the team.
We narrowed down the list to what we could realistically do.
Team members stated where they would like to be involved.
We determined what each one would actually start doing.
We determined what activities the team would do together.

A brainstorming example from a team retreat

After brainstorming on ways to connect with the people, we need to start looking for POP’s (Prepared Open People). These are people who are responsive to our friendship initiatives. We then need to have a plan to help them move on their journey toward Christ. We will look in our next blog at the subject of “Journeying toward Christ.”

This blog post was originally posted to the TEAM church planting blog at Connecting with the Lost – Entry Phase Tools. It is republished with permission by the author.

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