While salvation is the first step of your ministry process, it’s important to make sure you’re ministering to those that you already have before you focus on outreach.
In a previous post I briefly introduced the general process of biblical discipleship:
- Salvation
- Growth
- Fruit
- Reproduction
When you set out to build your ministry’s plan for accomplishing those goals, it is tempting to start with number 1. However, unlike almost everything else in life (“Let’s start at the very beginning... a very good place to start...”), your best bet is to ensure that you’ve got number 2 nailed down before working on number 1.
There’s a few reasons for this.
First, outreach is only the entrance to the process of discipleship. It is the on-ramp to the proverbial highway. So if you don’t have a highway yet, you don’t need an on-ramp. You don’t want to go bringing people into your ministry only to have them leave because once they were in the door (figuratively, not literally) there needs weren’t being met.
Second, the biggest piece of reaching unsaved people with the gospel is when a believer that they know and trust builds the bridge. A pastor can call up a visitor and invite them to church but it’s much more effective if the guy’s golfing buddy invites him instead. This kind of organic outreach is crucial but it won’t happen if the people you are already ministering to are not growing.
Of course it goes without saying that if you’re ministry is already helping people grow effectively, you can start working on outreach right away.
In future posts, we’ll examine each of the 4 major phases of discipleship in detail.
