Engage the City: Evangelism | Church Planting Like a Missionary | Tony Merida, Chris Bell

(cheerful music) - The missionary task of church planters begins with engaging the city with the gospel, not a public church service or a launch, as we say. There is this slow burn reality to missionary work. Planters go out, they pray, they learn their context and evangelize their city with the gospel.

So, some questions for you, Chris. What are some ways planters can give everyone meaningful access to the gospel? - Yeah, well, one thing I really do believe is that we need to slow down a little bit.

I think when we plant churches, one of the things we kind of mistakenly do is we want to kind of happen to a city. It's almost like we're coming in, and we're gonna hit this city with everything we have. And I think that's a bad approach.

I love the language that we're using at the Send Network with serving a city first, but that feels slow. But what I learned a long time ago, I had a mentor in my life, a coach that used to tell us fast is slow and slow is fast. What he meant was, when you get in a hurry, you miss details and you think you're going faster, but you're gonna have to go back and correct all the mistakes you made, but slow feels slow, but actually you're getting where you're going much, much quicker because you're actually seeing the things you need to see.

I think that really applies to church planting. Our church that I pastor, we do a lot of planting, and we have seen that if we take the time, Tony, to get to know a city and not react to what we see, but slowly respond, we're getting to know the city. And that's where the true gospel engagement happens.

I think when you flip the script, and when you go from serving a city to the one-day worship event, rather than it beginning with an event, we're inviting everyone to it. You can slow the process down enough. It's not a lack of urgency, but it's slowing down enough to see the granular details of a city in a way we can respond to them.

- Yeah, there has to be proximity, right? - [Chris] Right. - To get involved, to get to know people, to listen to questions, to listen to their doubts, their fears.

And then we can provide clear gospel, you know, solution, clear gospel answers, proclamation to the people that we're getting to know. So what are some ways then, as we think about engaging a city, that a planter can cross-cultural barriers in order to faithfully evangelize a city? - Yeah, that's a great question.

I think that every city, every community, every town has its own set of, if you will, historical events, things that happen not only in the history of the area that has shaped it, but also ongoing, whether it's economic. We've planted in areas where one of the big economic drivers had recently shut down. It was a timber area, where timber was one of the economic drivers.

Well, if you're planting, which we did in that area, you need to know that. You need to know that a major part of the workforce, they're scared now. They're concerned about their wellbeing.

Little granular details like that are things that actually lead to gospel conversations, because if I understand that the people I'm talking to by and large in that instance are afraid, or if there's high crime in the area, or whatever it may be, you have to find that. And it takes time, but when you do, there's where the gospel conversation is waiting, because we all believe that the gospel not only takes care of eternity for us, it's a everyday gospel, right? And I think it's there where you meet people.

You meet them where they are with the gospel that is, of course, transcendent to whatever they're dealing with. - Yeah, that's really helpful categories for getting in the conversation. What also came to mind when we're talking about kind of crossing barriers is just the ministry of hospitality.

- Oh, I love it. - Of having people, something we emphasize a lot at our church. Sometimes when people will come to our church, and they've been there for a while, they'll ask question like, "Hey, how do I get plugged into the mission?

" - Right. - And I like to say, "Go eat with people. " - Yes.

- Come to our house. - The problem with that, Tony, is it's slow. - It's slow.

- It's slower, and again, I like to look at it. I think we're a microwave society. We're microwave leaders, often, but our work is more Crock-Pot.

- Yeah, right. - You know what I mean? It's more slow cooker.

- Yeah. - And we all know that nothing really delicious has ever come out of a microwave. - That's right.

- I'm not gonna invite you over and go, "Hey, I'm microwaving something great. " - [Tony] Exactly. - But we all know that you can throw almost anything in a Crock-Pot, and in 10 hours, it's delicious.

And so to me, when we go to a city, we've gotta let it simmer. We really do, and again, I'm using these analogies, but truly hospitality, getting to know people, their city, the history of it, those things. I would call it granular.

It's really getting down into the details. I think that's where a lot of the magic happens. - Yeah, yeah, 'cause sometimes it feels more like counseling than preaching when we're engaging people.

- Wow. Well said. And it's not, you know, I think we can, we have these dichotomies, Tony.

I think that often we feel like if we maximize one thing, it automatically minimizes the other. We're not minimizing preaching. We're also not minimizing the worship event.

Those things are incredibly important, but I think sequentially we are much more effective if we start here. I think it even makes the eventual event better when we know the people we're serving. - So it's not all on us as church planters to engage the city with the gospel.

We want to train our team. So let's think about that for a moment. What have you found helpful for planters when it comes to training and leading their team to evangelize the city?

- Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Number one, it's hard. It is actually hard to do it.

So people need to understand that it's gonna take a lot of intentionality. You really need to be able to talk to your team about these things and get them to buy in, because your team, I think often, we as leaders forget that we tend to think about things deeply for a long time. And then we drop that onto the teams that we're building around us, and expect them to already be where we are.

So I think we have to constantly remember that our teams need repetitive, continual vision put in front of them. And it's just like you're talking about, whether that's hospitality, because our teams are wanting, they're looking for the event just as much as we are. They can't wait, right, to have this big impact.

We have to almost disciple our teams in church planting in this process that we're going through to get 'em to understand that the meal today, the coffee at Starbucks today that takes 45 minutes, thousands of those over the next few months are gonna lead to this place of incredible engagement with this town. And so I think just continually putting that in front of our people really does help. - No, it's fantastic.

Yeah, I think it's often said, you know, things are better caught than taught, I think as we're taking our team out, like one of the ways we train them is just by going to do it. - [Chris] Wow. That's great.

- And they watch us interact with people. - Yes, modeling it. - Modeling it, and then something that we did early on, and we've continued to do this, is we formed this card.

We call it a network of evangelism card. - [Chris] Wow. - And I've identified, you know, five major networks.

Sometimes we call those domains or spheres, and then list the literal people in these domains, these networks in your life. And those become moments of prayer. You know, those become, who are you?

- Sure. - Who's in your geographical network? Who's in your commercial network?

- [Chris] Yes. - And just beginning to try to help people think about intentionality. - Yes.

- Right, of being deliberate with the people God has already brought in their path. - [Chris] Absolutely. - Because they're there.

- They're all around. - It's no accident that they're there. - Yeah, absolutely, and I think you just mentioned many of those pathways, whether it be the economic side, their jobs.

Schools, we find, are a really big deal. - [Tony] Absolutely. - One thing we wanna do everywhere we plant is we want to engage in the local schools, because in a local school, not only do you have all the kids, obviously, and their parents, but you have movers and shakers in any town at that school.

It's kind of, you know, we don't really have towns, you know, back in the day, 100, 150 years ago, the town square, everybody went to the town square. Well, where is that now? I think it's at our schools in many ways.

That's still where a community comes together. So we have found that to be a big deal, and we wanna find those places where influence is happening, where decisions are being made, and not go to kind of push our way in, go to figure out a way to serve them. Go to a city and ask, "How can we help?

" So we've painted a lot of school walls, you know, where they go, "Well, this is how. " We've redone a lot of flower beds in schools. And what that does is it begins, to your point, break down some of those barriers for the gospel, because if you start by fixing a flower bed, you may get to talk to a principal or teachers about the gospel.

But the problem is, that doesn't feel like an event yet. It feels like, you know, putting fertilizer and dirt into a flower bed. And what we don't realize is thousands of those little things are making a massive difference.

- Yeah, yeah. It's good. Speaking of fertilizers and dirt, when we think about sowing the gospel seed, it often falls on hard soil.

- [Chris] Yes. - And cities can be places where you encounter a lot of hard soil, and consequently, planters may grow discouraged in evangelism. What encouragement would you give them as they encounter these times of resistance, and when they don't see a lot of fruit?

- Yeah. Well, we all do encounter that, don't we? That is a part of this.

- [Tony] Yeah. - The thing that has helped me the most is that I am not responsible for the reception of the gospel. I am responsible for the proclamation of it.

And so I am to do everything I can do within my realm of ability, gifting, opportunities that God's given me and my team. But at the end of the day, we are to cast the seed. We are to do everything we can, and then we trust the Lord.

We really do trust the Lord. And there's been many times, I mean, we've had churches, church plants that just took far longer to set in than we thought it would, right? And we wonder, what are we doing wrong here?

And of course, you do ask those questions. You evaluate. Did we mess up?

Did we misread the community? Those sensitivities, I think, are very good, but at some point, I have to be able to put my head on the pillow at night, and know I trust a sovereign God. He told us to go here.

We're being faithful and we trust him with the outcomes. - Yeah, yeah. I'm with you 100%.

What's helped me and what we've tried to communicate sometimes is like, set real goals for your faithfulness, right? Because sometimes I feel like the temptation is to use faithfulness as an excuse. "You know, we're not seeing a lot of fruit.

" "Well, I'm being faithful. " "Well, are you? " You know.

That's the question. - That's the evaluation part. Yeah.

- Exactly, and so what is it? I want to hand out these three books this week. I want to talk to these, to five people this week, or one of these individuals in this network this week.

- Right. - And if you've done those things, and you have some accountability and some real goals, tangible goals, and I think at the end of the week, you should feel encouraged. - Absolutely.

- Because the goal is faithfulness. - Well, and it's interesting that you say that, because I think that sometimes we mix up. We think that those things you just described are less spiritual somehow.

- [Tony] Yeah, right. - The spiritual part is the faithfulness and all of these, what we would call pragmatics. And I just never look at it that way.

I don't put one on one side and one on the other. I think all things are spiritual, all things to the glory of God. So when we try to read a town or read a community, read what their needs are, what they're going through, we can miss that.

We're humans and we go, okay, we were shooting at a target that wasn't there. And that has often been the case. And I think that that is a very spiritual endeavor.

We ask the Lord to lead us in that, order our steps in that, and how to reach or meet the needs of this community. But I do think there comes a time sometimes where you go, "Wow, this is just not working. " And sometimes it's not, I think the bigger thing, Tony, is not that it ultimately doesn't work for some planters.

I think sometimes it just takes longer. - [Tony] Yeah. - And that can be discouraging, especially if you compare it to someone somewhere else that's going faster.

- [Tony] Yeah. - And I think the thing is, is to stay in your lane to know this is where God has me. This is the field I've been called to plow, so to speak, and just keep plowing.

- Man, that was really good. Thank you for your time, brother. - It was awesome.

- Thank you for your wisdom and your encouragement. Always a joy to be with you. Envious of your hair, but grateful for your ministry.

- Well. - And for your friendship. - Thank you so much, Tony.