MEET DR. NELSON SEARCY

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2 MEET DR. NELSON SEARCY Nelson Searcy is an experienced church growth strategist, pastor, church planter and coach, serving in ministry for more than 25 years and consulting with churches around the world. As founder of Church Leader Insights and the Renegade Pastors Network, he has personally trained more than 50,000 church leaders in over 45 denominations through live events, seminars and monthly coaching, helping them break common growth barriers like 125, 250, 500, 1000 and beyond, all while maintaining personal life and ministry balance. For more accelerated growth, pastors also participate in Nelson s Senior Pastor, Evangelism, Stewardship, Assimilation and Advanced Coaching networks. Nelson is also the Founding and Lead Pastor of The Journey Church, with locations across New York City and in Boca Raton, FL. Nelson and his church routinely appear on lists such as The 50 Most Influential Churches and The 25 Most Innovative Leaders. He is the author of over 85 church growth resources and 15+ books, including The Renegade Pastor: Abandoning Average in Your Life and Ministry and The Difference Maker: Using Your Everyday Life for Eternal Impact. Nelson is the recipient of the prestigious Donald A. McGavran Award for Outstanding Leadership in Great Commission Research. His continued mission is to help church leaders around the world cooperate with God in creating healthy, thriving churches. He divides his time between NYC and South Florida. He and his wife, Kelley, have one son, Alexander. THE EIGHT SYSTEMS OF THE CHURCH: Assimilation Evangelism Leadership Ministry Small Groups Stewardship Strategy Worship Planning New release! Books by Dr. Nelson Searcy:

3 Nelson Searcy: What I d like to try to do is give you twelve ways to reach the unchurched and I m not going to spend a lot of time talking about who the unchurched are and what it means to be unchurched because it is a difficult term to define. Traditionally unchurched growth we ve defined the unchurched as someone who s eighteen years of age or over, so an adult who has been disconnected from church for six months. In other words they haven t been to church within six months except for a wedding or a funeral. More and more in our day as people are further and further away from the church that definition does not work. Well, the eighteen and over may still be appropriate, there are plenty of people who would be what we might call casual Christians or loosely connected members that for whatever reason at various times and in multiple ways find themselves disconnected from church for a six month period of time. The general idea is when we talk about reaching the unchurched we are talking about someone who is not actively engaged, does not have mental assent to membership and a desire to grow as a member in a local church. Furthermore I would say that most of these folks by definition do not have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Various theologies on that and different ways to approach it but more than likely they are spiritually lost and until they engage the Gospel that is presented to them and reconnect with that church and grow in Christ they will eternally be separated from God and be lost. I m not going to make too much distinction between the unchurched and the unchurched and some of that. We made a big deal about those kind of terms in the eighties when people had a Christian memory or did not have a Christian memory but more and more the vast majority of folks do not have a Christian memory or not growing up in church. If we could fast forward ten years from now it s even going to be greater. Without a clear definition of who the unchurched are but I think a general agreement and the fact that we re called to reach them and have an idea of who they are, I want to give you some specific ways to reach them. I m going to try to give you a dozen ways. We re going to start with something that may seem basic but yet it is probably the most spiritually profound way that you can connect with the unchurched and that is number one to Pray for the Unchurched. It really does begin and end in prayer. Prayer is a spiritual weapon that we have. Prayer makes a difference in the spiritual world. Many of these folks that we re talking about who grew up unchurched or are unchurched, they do not have anybody praying for them. Most of us have been Christians for so long that we forget what it s like to have no one who can pray for us or no one who is willing to pray for us. As you think about impacting those who have no religious affiliation or impact in the lost, impact in the unchurched, what would it look like for you to build systems, processes, even challenges into the life of your church for prayer? As we think about praying for the unchurched, you say well, where does it start? Well, it starts with you. It starts with you as the pastor or you as the leader that is here in this session now and you say well if nobody else in my church is going to pray for those who are not here, I m going to take responsibility for that. That means that you can make your prayer list of two or three people using maybe an invite card or some of the other tools that you ve heard me teach on before. It means that you carry around a prayer list of names. It means that perhaps you do some strategic mapping. By that I mean that if you live in an apartment building you map out maybe the apartments that are around you and you start filling in the blanks of names that you know. It means that you intentionally choose to get out of your cocoon and meet other people in the neighborhood. I forget how many years ago it was when a very popular futurist coined this phrase, cocoon. It is the idea that no longer people sit on their front porch, no longer people talk to their neighbors but instead they come home and they pull inside their garage, they close the garage, they pull down the blinds, they lock the doors, and they cocoon inside their house until the next morning when it s time to go to work and then they very quickly back out speeding out of their garage and pull into their office. More recently the lady Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 3

4 who introduced that phrase she added a qualifier to it. She now calls it armored cocoons because now we do all that but we but we turn on alarms and we hope nobody shows up. Some of us can remember as a kid when you were excited that somebody showed up at your house and you might even welcome them in and your mom had a special cake or food that she set aside for people who showed up as guests but not today. Not today. We have to call in advance and schedule and make an appointment and prepare and if we hear somebody knocking at our door we go and be quiet, maybe they ll go away. Of course now they sell like door bells and stuff like that that you can even see who it is when you re away from home and all that. We have to break out of our cocoon and figure out who these other folks are that are cocooning and that can be very tricky to do but if you make a point to do a map of your apartment building or a map of your neighborhood or a map of your or looking for those people that are most open to making connections with you. Such as new people moving in to the community and I ll say a little bit more about that when we get the point number four. But you have to make the prayer list and you really can t expect anybody else in the church to make the prayer list if you as the pastor or you as a key leader do not have your own prayer list. Then once you have your prayer list of people that you re praying for you can then begin to challenge leaders in your church to pray. You can do this as simply as using your chairpersonship power that at the deacon s meetings or at the elders meetings you share about the changes in culture, the number of people that are lost in your community, and you force them even if it s just by leadership to take a minute and pray but then hopefully you can eventually secure their prayer and their legitimate prayer and you can challenge your group leaders and challenge other leaders in your church to pray so that you create a culture. Related to that you can use the church seasons like the Lenten season leading up to Easter or the periods leading up to your Big Days to mobilize massive numbers of people in your church to pray for the unchurched and it really does start with prayer. One of the best ways I know to soften and turn up the heat on a cold church that has grown evangelistically frozen is to mobilize people to pray. The more people that are praying, the more people that are thinking about the unchurched, they ve become aware of the unchurched and then people move toward what they pray for. They move toward what we pray for so you re adding this evangelistic unchurched element to the prayer life of the church. I think that s really where it starts. Number two, a second way that you can reach the unchurched is to understand... And I m going to show you a diagram on this in an attempt to draw it out. Understand the Engel Scale. Now the Engel scale is a tool. It is a tool that was originally developed by Dr. James Engel who was the former director of the Billy Graham graduate program at Wheaton College. It was an attempt by him to represent the journey that a person might be on before they become a believer and then he also tried to lay out what might happen after they became a believer. The Engel scale I think is important not only because of what it is attempting to do but also for how it has changed since he originally put it together. You can do your own research and learn more about the history of it but I will show you one iteration of the Engel scale. The basic iteration of just the words. The way you read this and is that you look right here this is where someone crosses the line of faith. Everything below this line and I ll read it to you in case you can t see it. Everything below this line is their life before Christ. I see if I can move a bit up there just a little bit. He draws this back as negative one, so just before a person becomes a Christian they are at a negative one. I think most of us would agree that the final step before you experience the new birth is that you repent of your sins and you place your faith in Christ. Now these are his words. That s okay. These are his words and I don t know that I would personally use this Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 4

5 phrase of repentance and faith in Christ. I might talk about surrendering your life to Christ or repenting and surrendering to Christ, but the point is not his words, the point is the process that he s laid out. That some people are at negative one, then negative two is decision to act, number three... And again I wouldn t use these words these days but personal problem or recognition. The point that Dr. Engel was trying to lay out is that leading up to a decision to come to faith in Christ, there are a number of steps that a person must take. We at least agree on that. Another church growth phrase that I talked about in my A to Z workshop is sometimes called the Law of Seven Touches. It s the idea that someone has to have seven consequential touches with a Christian, with the gospel, with an understanding, with the Bible, with the church, or whatever before they come to faith in Christ. Now what s interesting about the Engel scale or why I wanted you to see it is for many years the way we understood ministry particularly in North America is we knew very very few people that were much beyond a negative four, a negative five, or a negative six. If you look at negative six it is really interesting because negative six is what he calls Awareness of Gospel Fundamentals, awareness of the fundamentals of the gospel. There was a time in culture where people were aware of the fundamentals of the gospel. They were aware of the basic things about God, the basic things about Jesus. They had a sense of Jesus parables, they had a sense that Jesus was born and we celebrate his birth on Christmas, that he performed miracles and walked on water and gave sight to the blind. They had a sense that he died on the cross. They had a sense that he had Apostles or disciples and that Easter was the day of the resurrection. There was a time statistically where large portions of the unchurched population had a general concept of these ideas. There were even TV shows. I think the only one that s left today is the Charlie Brown Christmas and a story about Easter. There were TV shows and there were movies that made this part of our culture. Today it s much smaller in the percentage. You see these stories on TV where someone goes out and says, Do you know what Easter means? Now it s eggs and bunny rabbits and sales at the at the mall or whatever. Very rarely it seems can the person get around to the basics of the gospel. What s happened is the Christian awareness in our culture has diminished. Whereas before most of the people that we were trying to reach with the gospel they were just a few steps away. Today they are much much further away. I m constantly reminding our teaching team and sometimes you and folks that if you re going to do a series that includes a reference to any major Bible story whether it s David and Goliath or Jonah and the whale you cannot assume that people know what that is. In our day if you do a series about a whale they re more likely to think it s Moby Dick than they are able to think it s Jonah. If you do a series about conquering the giants then more they re likely to think that has something to do with the Hobbit than it has something to do with David. There s this loss of general agreement and of course it s not just true with people that would still claim that we re a Christian nation or a claim that there s Christian principles or even embrace some of the Christian understandings of right and wrong, but it s very key. What things I find interesting is where Engel left off. He ended it at a negative seven which is an issue awareness of the Gospel or that was next to last the penultimate and then he ended it with negative eight, awareness of a supreme being. Well, today if we were to do this we would have to add a negative nine which is the agnostic perhaps, the negative ten which is the atheist, the negative eleven which is the hardcore atheist, the negative twelve which is the person sitting beside you in the room. The point is people have become further and further and further away from the Gospel. When we are reaching out to them it has to change our understanding because people are starting at different places. If you think about just from giving direction standpoint. If someone is asking directions on how do I get to Dallas and they re starting in Fort Worth, that s a whole different answer than if they re starting in New York City. The way you explain it if they re starting in New Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 5

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7 York City... And you can get them there, you can get them from New York City to Dallas. You can do that, but that s a whole different story than if you re getting from Fort Worth to Dallas. I ve done both of those and I think it takes about as long to get from Fort Worth to Dallas as it does to get to New York City, at least during certain hours of the day, but the point is we have to understand where people are. Unfortunately most of our current evangelism strategies or those that are most popular they were really aimed at people up here in the negative three, four, and five. More and more we have to develop strategies and awareness or strategies and initiatives that are working on people at the negative six, seven, eight, nine, and ten and I think we ve got to understand that because it impacts our strategy, it impacts our approach, it impacts the time length of how people come to faith in Christ and it even impacts our language. Because how we talk to people matters. Not just in sermon series but even in our Christian language. I imagine most of you were well beyond this but there are certain words that we use inside the church that are outside of the church with no awareness of the gospel, it s very very strange. When that comes to mind immediately is convicted. If you say I was convicted, well when did you get out? Did you spend five years? Well not only that I was convicted of this sin that I did. What do you mean by sin? So on down the line we could go. I will be the first to say that some of the critics or some of the more hyper postmodernist and things of that nature they ve taken it too far. They re saying that we ve totally lost and there is no general understanding, but a lot of times it is just a phrasing and the wording thing. It doesn t mean you can t preach on David and Goliath, it just means you ve got to take more time to explain what that is. Doesn t mean you can t use the word conviction but you ve got to explain what that is and on down the line. I don t want to get into that, other people have written on that and you can study that beyond. I think when you understand the Engel scale and there s been some more modern examples of that you can find and I have these in my A to Z. The great matrix being one of those. There is some other more modern expressions of that, but going back when you understand that we are reaching people who are further outside of awareness and they no longer grasp the implication of the gospel, I think that helps you when it comes to reaching the unchurched. Not necessarily good news, but it is reality and the first step is defining reality. Now we re moving from those to a third way to reach the unchurched and that is to Maximize Your Big Days. Most of you know the Big Day concept that we teach. Easter being the biggest day of all. If you think about reaching the unchurched and you look at it through the eyes of Easter, we re to start with that one. You can maximize Easter for the purpose of reaching the unchurched. People are more likely to pray for their unchurched friends and more likely to invite their unchurched friends in that season leading up to Easter. Going back to number one in my seasons that maybe it s hard sometimes to get people to pray year round for the unchurched, but you can get them to pray during the period of Lent. Many people are surprised that as contemporary as we are at The Journey that we do go through periods of time where we use the creeds, probably we should do that even more, but we also make a big deal about some of the seasons in the Christian calendar Lent being one of the major ones. We use it primarily for discipleship purposes and we do Lent and fasting and things of that nature mainly for our people but there s a strong thread throughout that Lent and focus praying for the unchurched. The closer we get to Easter, the more we pull on that thread. One of the ways to jump start your evangelism system and to refocus your church outwardly and on the unchurched is by maximizing those Big Days. If you ve gone through my Ignite seminar or you ve been in Senior Pastor Coaching, that big element of the Big Day is prayer. Our big element in the Big Day which I ll get to later in this talk is on personal evangelism. One of the most effective personal evangelism methods for our Big Day is the invite because you re inviting them to come to the Big Day. Then of course promotion and other things that you can study on your own. Your Big Day not only impacts Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 6

8 the people who come to the Big Day, but it also impacts your people as you prepare them for the Big Day. I started with Easter and here s what is still unique in our culture about Easter. Unchurched people, even those who might be at negative four, negative five, negative six, negative seven, if they re going to come to church on any day, they will come on Easter. Spiritually speaking I think it s because in spite of our changing culture and in spite of the fact that culture has declined, the power of the resurrection has not. The way I think about it sort of cosmically is that the same power that raised Christ from the dead is still reverberating and working in our society and drawing people to Jesus Christ. When you cooperate with God in maximizing your Easter Big Day, people who are a long way from God still and sometimes in ways they can t explain show up at your church and fill the need to go to church on Easter. Then of course if you re ready for them when it comes to Assimilation you re kicking off a teaching series that meets them where they are, you put out a spiritual challenge for them to connect or you realize that they came on Easter and then you have a good follow up system that gets them back again in a few months. Just parenthetically on that, don t be too concerned that when a radical unchurched person comes to your church and they don t come back the next week. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they feel like they kind of checked what I call the God box and they came on Easter so now they re not going come back maybe for another month which is why sometimes the Easter/Mother s Day combination can be so powerful or they may feel like they did their God duty if you will on Easter and they may not even come back till something you re doing in the fall. I ve been criticized a little bit for teaching sometimes that Easter is often an investment in your fall growth, not an investment in your spring growth because the more unchurched they are the more likely they are to come later. It s sort of a teaching that s bigger than our time right now but it is weird that the more and more unchurched the person is, the slower they will be to come to faith in Christ, but then at the same time paradoxically the faster sometimes they are. It s almost like with the unchurched person who s at a negative six, seven, or eight, they can go faster than you would think and they can also go slower than you can think. It s like there s no middle way that they go. I find that really fascinating and that s why we can t just make these blanket statements about who we have but you maximize your Big Day and Easter is the biggest day of all. You look to maximize the prayer and the promotion and the personal of Engels and training them up to Easter and then you want to be ready to maximize the preservation after Easter. The preservation after Easter. There s more Big Days than just Easter. Of course there s your February Big Day which for those of you that have been through Senior Pastor Coaching is what we call the hidden Big Day. February in most of the Western world it s a dark time. It s a time where there s relationship difficulties. It s a time where a lot of people they ve put off divorce or serious problems because they didn t want to deal with it over Christmas. Begin to face the reality of that and it s a real time for the church to minister to those who are going through those kind of difficulties. It s why we almost always at The Journey do a relationship series in February. We ve got that big holiday that the world spends millions of dollars marketing. If not billions of dollars marketing as well in February that ties into relationships. That may be enough to tip someone to try church. I don t mind people trying church as a last ditch effort. We are the best last ditch effort and so you want to maximize that. Then in the western world still there is something about the fall, going back to school, getting back to engaged and starting new habits in the fall and so I like doing the fall Big Day as well, what we call the Back to School Big Day. I don t know about you but every time the fall rolls around I want to go out and buy like trapper keepers and new notebooks and stuff like that. I don t even use those any more. There s something Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 7

9 when you re raised in that kind of Western school system it ll start something. It s not the Sunday that school starts by the way. People are too busy that week. They just want to crash that week as they finally got the kids in the school and all that, but two Sundays after that, three Sundays after that you can schedule a Big Day that connects with their passions and you can really maximize it. If you don t have the Ignite seminar, the seminar not the book you should go to look at that and then for those of you that have been through Senior Pastor Coaching I do two sessions on the preaching calendar and Big Days planning it and then literally implementing the Big Days. Now in reaching the unchurched, a part of the Big Day idea and part of the discussion that we ve had so far is number four which is to know the... And I m going to call it Three T s about the Unchurched. When you know the three T s about the unchurched it can help you with your prayer, it can help you with understanding how someone... who might be a negative four, five, or six on the Engel scale would be willing to come to your Big Days. The three T s are the answer to When are people most likely to come to church? If you ve got an unchurched person out there in your community they may just come to church on Easter and some will more than they need think. Generally speaking research has shown that people are most likely to come to church when they are, and here s the three T s; under tension, in transition, or in trouble. Under tension, in transition, or in trouble. That s the three T s; tension, transition, trouble. That s what I m going to call my spiritual biography. Tension, transition, and trouble. A really interesting exercise for you to go through is in our community and the people in the neighborhoods and in the lives of the people that we re trying to reach what are the tensions? If you want a real practical exercise to do when you get back home, put three big pieces of paper up on the board and put tensions at the top, transitions at the top of the other page and trouble on that third page and just start thinking about that. What are the tensions? Tensions a sort of a softer way of saying trouble. Tension precedes trouble. When you don t deal with the tension it becomes a trouble. You can have relational tension, we re having arguments, we re not getting along, it s not like it used to be, but then the trouble is like he or she walked out, we re going through a trial separation, we re going to be filing papers. Tension is we don t know how to deal with our kids as they get older, trouble is we just found out that our kids are going to be kicked out of school. It s a degree of difficulty but many people will be motivated by the tension and then if they re not motivated by that they re motivated by trouble. Unfortunately most people don t change when they feel the heat or see the light rather they only change when they feel the heat. I kind of messed up but you get the point. They don t change when they see the light, the trouble on the possibility, they only change when they feel the heat which is the trouble. We as a church have answers to their tensions and answers to their troubles and this is why I think we don t have to shy away from some of these things that we think sometimes Christians maybe don t need to hear again or don t want to hear again because there s tensions, troubles inside of our church just like there are on the unchurched. One point of connection that I found to be really interesting has been finances. When you teach on how to get out of debt or you teach on how to live on a budget or you teach on how to bring finances under control that some of the biggest tensions and troubles in the unchurched world. More and more particularly with the credit card debt being an all-time high and student loans being off the chart people are realizing the world s way isn t working and so they re more open to trying something new and something different. They re not going to say, Well I need to do it God s way. They just need a different way of doing it. We ve had some really Big Days by doing financial series. Maybe not necessarily on Easter but as a fall Big Day or as a February a Big Day. February Big Days on money are interesting because that s usually when they re getting the bills back from Christmas. The credit card Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 8

10 THE IGNITE SEMINAR Learn how to double your church in a day! Three-hour seminar + sample files and documents Energize and mobilize your church to reach their community with the Gospel. This three-hour seminar from Nelson Searcy will walk you through planning and executing a Big Day, a special event that draws people from your community in your church. Nelson has developed and honed the strategies in this resource to fuel growth at The Journey Church and in hundreds of coaching alumni churches. Now you can use these proven techniques to start and keep your church growing! Nelson has developed and honed the strategies in this resource to fuel growth at The Journey Church and in hundreds of coaching alumni churches. Now you can use these proven techniques to start - and keep - your church growing! You can expect to learn: How to DOUBLE your church in a day (it can be done!) How to immediately raise the evangelism effectiveness of your church How to mobilize your congregation to reach their friends How to spark growth in a stalled church How to keep momentum year after year in a growing church How to excite your people, even if they've not been motivated in the past How to influence your leaders to reach out to the community How to plan and implement a proven BIG DAY process And much more! RELATED RESOURCES FOR ADDITIONAL STUDY Includes: Complete seminar audio, listener s guide, sample documents and promotional items. Available: Fully downloadable $ CD set $ To Learn More or Secure Your Resource Visit:

11 statements start coming in the third week of January and they re getting your invites to your big February series that can be really interesting. But sit down and make a list of the ten most common tensions. Then deeper than that the troubles but I don t want to leave out that middle one which is the transition. One of the groups that s easier to reach is someone who just transitioned to your area. We used to talk about new movers and that circles back to number one which is praying and being aware of who s moving into your neighborhood. I ve known some churches and coaching and then some larger churches that I have some connections with that they have a whole new mover program and every Sunday they ve got a booth that you can swing by and you can pick up a new mover welcome kit. I don t know where the welcome wagon went but it s not in my neighborhood anymore. It s gone. The church can be the welcome wagon. They put together these really cool packets of things that are related to the community and things that are related to the neighborhood and they train their people to be on the lookout for moving vans and be on the lookout for new people moving in and we go over there and we make that connection. That s really interesting because when people move to a community their entire social support structure, their networks of people that they could call on, they ve left them behind and so they re going to begin to form new networks. Well why not make sure it s Christian that works its Christian connections. Plus people are usually a move implies some kind of fresh start and people start thinking about things that they want to do differently. You can connect with their kids, you can connect with their new habits and help them develop a new habit in the new neighborhood. There s other transitions as well. All kinds of ministries that can be done in the way of transition and I ve seen it done really well with incarceration. Churches that have ministries to people transitioning out of prison or transitioning back from being overseas in the military and things of that nature. There s all kinds of transitions from basic transitions between jobs and then we re having a baby, that s a very common transition for people that leads to tension in different things. There s all kinds of ways you can come out of it. If you re creative and you sat down and have this retreat you re going to be able to develop a lot of these then you can use those on your Big Days for your sermon series to attract people no matter where they are on the Engel scale. They may be looking for reasons to come to your church. What I d also like is to go back and tie this together with prayer. You can pray specifically for people who are going through those troubles. I m a big fan of prayer walking and if you re familiar with that you know exactly what I m talking about. If not it s a very very complicated definition. Prayer walking, it simply means praying while walking. I don t want that to confuse you. If you don t have a degree in theology you probably can t get it, but you keep your eyes open by the way. It s a lot more safe. It s more fun if you close your eyes but it s a lot more safe. If you prayer walk your neighborhood it does spiritually bring awareness, sometimes the things that you might miss. Even if you don t yet know your neighbors but they ve got a couple bikes standing up by the garage or they ve got a swing set out back, I think it s a pretty safe assumption that there s kids in that family. Now when you re walking by you re not just praying for that home in the corner, you re praying for that family with children on the corner. If you see a house that s up for sale and then suddenly the For Sale sign is gone and a moving truck is coming in and that s a new family in. You can start praying for that family who bought that house and pray for God to give you open doors for that new family when they show up. Being aware of these tensions, troubles, and transitions tied it into prayer, tied it into your Big Day that can all be very very powerful. To move to one really practical way to connect with the unchurched that not only works in your Big Days Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism 9

12 but is going to work with some other things I ll share. One of the tools that you have to get someone to a service or an event that you re doing, that I think is underutilized, is testimonies. Number five is to Add More Testimonies to whatever it is that you re doing. Now mainly I m talking about the Big Day aspect. When you do your Big Days you add testimonies but I m also going to talk about some other special ways that you might reach people and you can schedule in testimonies. One of the things you always hear about our society is we live in a relative society and I hear people say well nobody much believes the Bible anymore. In a world where the Bible is questioned, in a world where sometimes ideas about right or wrong that we think are black and white are tested, where everything is relative testimonies are still very real. It s hard to argue with somebody s story. You may disagree with their approach or may think they are a liar but it s hard to argue with that story. I think it s an underutilized aspect of our worship services and other things that we do so. Think about how you could add more testimonies even on your Big Day. You re kicking off that series on finances or you re kicking off that series on relationships or you re kicking off an Easter series on conquering the giants or whatever it might be. How could you incorporate in there testimonies? I ll just gave you some really practical tips on how to use testimonies. One is short testimonies. Testimonies don t have to be all that long. They can be a two minute testimony, they could be a three minute testimony. Sometimes people are more comfortable giving a short testimony. Testimonies don t always have to be a solo experience, sometimes you can interview the person and they re more... You can draw it out like you see the interviewer on the TV show and they re just more comfortable if you re there drawing it out. I would never allow someone to give a testimony without having previewed it before they get on stage. I have them write it out and then I might have them by the office or sit down in their home and we practice it and we rehearse. I would rather have someone read it and come across as if they are reading it and get it right than have them speak extemporaneously and kind of botch it, if you will. This is something you ve got to think through. That leads me to another idea on testimonies which is one of the things you can do is you can video the testimonies. Somewhere in your church and you can sit down with them and today you can do it with just your cell phone or some kind of really low end camera that the quality is really good. You can sit down and interview them or have them share a testimony. They might talk for five, seven, ten, minutes and then with just a little editing by someone who has even light weight skills they can put that into a very nice three to five minute testimony that you can share. Especially if you have multiple services it may be very hard for that person if it s an emotional testimony especially, it may be very hard for them to share it three, four, or five times. Now my little parenthetical on that is if you have someone who s giving a testimony by video when the lights come up and the video is over, have them standing on stage right there with you. That can be really cool because they just so him. Maybe they ve seen them around the church and know him but then here s the real person. You shake their hands or give them a hug and say let s give Joe a round of applause or let s give Susie a round of applause for sharing the testimonies. In addition to the shorter testimonies there are longer testimonies. I think as the culture is going this way it is more appropriate to use the longer testimony of a seven minute testimony or twelve minute testimony. One of the things that I m sure you ve experienced that we probably have thought we ought to do more of as a whole service of testimonies. This can be really powerful on certain holidays. On Father s Day to have a service of testimonies by fathers and grandfathers in the Church. You have the single father testimony, the married father testimony, the grandfather who s raising their kid s testimony. You can do that and you can almost serve like a talk show host sitting on stage with them and going back and forth and talking their testimonies. It requires some preparation but boy that can be really really powerful. Same thing with the ladies in the church. You can do that on special days or around special topics or you can Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

13 do couples in the church and even more so layering it on with the testimony. You can be very very creative in how you do this. Let me encourage you over the next year to work to add more and more personal or family testimonials into your church. That s just when it comes to connecting around the topic. I mean if you re not using testimonies to recruit people for baptism or membership or to be in groups, you re really missing out on that as well, but that s not what we re talking about. We re not talking about increasing your signups for groups we re talking about reaching the unchurched. We ve looked at five ways so far. Reaching the unchurched by praying for the unchurched, understanding the Engel scale, maximizing your Big Days, know the three T s for the unchurched in your community and then utilize or add, rather add more testimonies. Then number six is utilize, that s a U, Utilize Special Days. Now here by special days I m primarily talking about special days that you have on Sunday. Special days that I have already referenced like Mother s Day as being one. For a lot of churches Mother s Day can be the second highest attendance day in the first part of their year. I love the bounce back between Mother s Day and Easter. Most of the time that s a four week period or at most a six week period so people come on Easter and if you do it right you can get on the bounce back and come back again on Mother s Day. You can utilize that in regards to connecting with the unchurched. Again people may feel like well this is still a super time where I should go to church or I should honor my spouse or my mother and go to church or you can... This is really where I was going with this. The mothers that you do have in your church and the families that you do have encourage them to reach out to the extended family and make that a day to invite them to come to church. Especially of a certain generation if you still have a generation of mothers and fathers that are of a certain age they can still leverage a little bit of that guilt or maybe a little bit of the nagging and get family members there. Here s a little secret that I cautiously tell you. You don t have to preach on mothers, on Mother s Day. You can still honor mothers without having the three ways to be a great mother. You can honor them with testimonies and you certainly should focus on mothers on Mother s Day, but the sermon itself can be sermon that s connecting with the families that are there and I don t think you should layer on the guilt and nagging, let the people do that who invited their family members. You can connect with them and be a part of a series or you can set out what you re going to be doing that summer and utilize that as a way to continue to connect people in the church. I would put Father s Day up there too. Father s Day is much harder and so I m not going to write it on my sheet here but you can just parenthetically put it out there. It is much harder to get men to come to church for whatever reason than it is women and there s a lot of reasons but you can leverage Father s Day and you can do special things on Father s Day. I ve seen churches do everything with classic car days to... We did a thing recently called Wing Fest on Father s Day which was chicken wings just so you know. There s fifteen ways you could go over that. We ve done barbecues and things of that nature. In most of our campuses we do it sort of as men s days not so much just about Father s Day. More and more Mother s Day and Father s Day get tricky because of the broken families and the disconnections and so you kind of have to be aware of that. These can be days that you can utilize for people to use their natural relational connections. Having said that I ll just a couple that I think are maybe even a little better. What is a child dedication? Or whatever you might call it. We prefer to call it child dedication and I like that better than baby dedication because it s not just about babies. We will allow you to dedicate your child up until they re almost old enough to drive. If you if you want to and sometimes they want us to not just dedicate those thirteen year olds but cast out the demons from those thirteen years old. We re cautious about it, but it is it is something... More and more if you schedule a child dedication just right you can see extended family there. You can see grandparents who were there and it can be something that makes a big impact. Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

14 THE NEW BELIEVER SEMINAR Get a biblically-based blueprint to expand your leadership! Three-hour seminar + sample files and documents How are you helping the people who make the most important decision of their life? Do you have an effective process that helps people move forward from their decision to becoming a fully-devoted follower of Christ? In The New Believer Seminar, Nelson Searcy has developed a valuable system that will equip you to follow up with every new believer God brings to His church. In this comprehensive downloadable resource, you will learn: How you can increase the number of people who indicate their decision for Christ (Hint: you probably have more people coming to Christ than you realize...they're just not telling you) How to ensure that every person is discipled and that "No New Believer Gets Left Behind" What to do and NOT do in the first hour after someone becomes a Christian and the four opportunities you have to follow up with new believers, and the importance of each opportunity Why your preaching calendar is crucial to your new believer follow-up The one thing you MUST do in order to see new believers grow How to cultivate the connection between prayer and new believers Plus much more! This resource includes: Over two hours of Nelson teaching you the specific process to follow up with your new believers A listener's guide to follow along with Nelson A complete Leader's Guide so that you can teach your staff and church leadership The Journey's complete, editable New Believer follow-up strategy (NOTE: This one document alone - in which Nelson walks you through "why" and "how" to use and edit in the audio MP3's - has been described by many as being worth the investment in this resource.)...and much more! RELATED RESOURCES FOR ADDITIONAL STUDY Available: Fully downloadable $99.95 Three-CD set $ To Learn More or Secure Your Resource Visit:

15 I was trying to pull up something here. One of my mentors has started trying to use various different names for child dedication. Not just call it child dedication but one report that I got just recently they called it bless the children day. In a Catholic culture where they have bless the animal days and sort of that kind of stuff, they did a bless the children day and had over two hundred children from the community. They said bring your children on this particular day and we re going to bless the children and it worked out. You don t just have to do the traditional child dedication but when you do the child dedication, think of it as an opportunity for people in your church to extended invitation. Once they commit to dedicating their child then create some nice invitations that they could send out. We ve been able to do that in Catholic cultures because of when you do a christening of a baby, the godparents come and extended family come. That s not unusual, for us to dedicate one child and then there s mom and maybe the current person mom is with and then the dad is the strange down there and some of the dad s family and their grandparents that are there but then friends and relatives who support that. One child could lead to seven, eight, ten, people coming to church for the first time. Multiply that by three or by five or by ten, you can very quickly see that this is a way that brings people to church. They came for that so it s a problem. They came to see that child dedicated but as you do your connection card and what you might preach on that day that becomes important. The biggest mistake I think churches do in child dedication is they run the service so long and they don t schedule it enough and it actually turns people off from coming back. If you re going to do a child dedication you ve got to have to cut something. I don t want the child dedication to be rushed. We can sometimes do twelve to fifteen families at about twelve to fifteen minutes. By the time we do what we do during child dedications that means we might set up one song that day or I might have to cut the sermon to be shorter so I still want to write a sixty five minute service like we do because I want them to get a sense. I might even schedule that so that next week or in two weeks there s something special that they would want to come back to but I would follow up with them just like I would any other first time guest. Child dedication is one. The other one is baptism. Baptism can be an event where people invite their unchurched friends. I think this battle has already been won but a number of years ago there was a very large mega church who released a report and tried to make the argument that the longer you are a Christian the more likely you are to have connections with the unchurched. Which prior to that the general church growth thinking is the younger you are as a Christian the more likely you are to have connections to the unchurched. When I read that I just thought these people are... Self-deception or something or they asked the question wrong. I don t understand that because it makes no logical sense nor does it make any experiential sets that sometimes the longer you are a Christian the less unchurched friends that you have. Unless you re intentional like we re talking about here. Generally speaking it s the person who is new to the faith that has just come to faith in Christ that still has their entire network on the other side of their faith. If the candidate is willing people will come out to see their friend, to see their coworker, to see their family member baptized. On a related note, it is sometimes hard to get a previously hard core and church person to be baptized because they know once they make that step of baptism everybody s going to know it. Especially people who come from other world religions. Sometimes they will be disowned by their family member who s back in another country or even in our country but they are part of another world religion. It is something that sometimes you can t expect everyone to do but there s a certain percentage of people that, Yeah I want to invite all my friends to come to my baptism. We re going to have a keg party at my baptism. I m like, Oh no we re not going to quite go that far. Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

16 When you think about now how you structure the baptisms, you think about having a baptism that can impact the unchurched that may mean you do it a little bit differently. It may mean that you schedule it so it s more of an event or you schedule on a time that more people can come or you schedule it in conjunction with a worship service. We do the same thing with baptism as child dedication when once a candidate agrees to be baptized we give them invites that they can fill in their name and their date just like they would buy invitations to a graduation or to a wedding, we give them invitations so that they can send out. I ll even give them stamps that they can use to mail it if they want to and encourage them. That means you get have a little longer ramp up, a little better process leading up to baptism and I go into that in my maximizing baptism seminar in a lot more detail on how that might work. I m unaware when I schedule the baptism or scheduling it for maximum impact not only of those being baptized but the people they could invite. Then I structure the flow of the baptism itself so that I can move the ball forward if you will spiritually with those who were there watching. We do a thing where they take a picture before they go change because people like to have their picture taken when they re not wet in their street clothes. We baptize by immersion which even if you don t believe in that it makes a better video. We baptize by immersion so we ve got the baptism pool set up or we re at the beach or wherever. They want to get their picture taken while they re dry and so we do that well then what that creates is this little gap. Maybe ten to twelve minutes where they have to get change. I try to utilize that ten to twelve minutes to not only explain this weird thing that we re about to do because people don t always understand that but also plant the seeds of the gospel as much as I can with those who are listening and they re interested because they re thinking, What s my friend doing? What s this crazy church they ve got involved in? Is this a cult? We try to put stuff in their hands and we do better sometimes in others as I m Journey staff. We try to put stuff in their hands. We try to put a take home piece in that, We always video it by the way and then when we re going to show the video three weeks later or six weeks later we didn t tell the person that we re going to share your video on that day and maybe there was a friend who couldn t be at the baptism but will come that Sunday because their friend is going to be up on the big screen in the baptism video. Again some people aren t going to do it. They re introverted, they re quiet or whatever but it is a way that builds a bridge, a natural relational bridge into the community. Then connected to that as well is concerts. I keep switching colors on his sorry but concerts... Here primarily I m talking about concerts that are being held at the church. This is a way for people to invite their friends for something that s a little bit different. Let me circle back to number five and just say a word here about testimonies. There is a way to turn the testimonies into a special day. I mentioned one of those which is having multiple people in the church share their testimony and then those people connect with their loved ones or their coworkers and say, Hey I m going to be speaking at church on Sunday and they get excited about that and they have people come and support them and come and here them. If you got three or four people giving their testimony, two or three of those might invite a bunch of their friends to come and hear them speak. It s similar sometimes if you ask someone in your church and they ve got a special solo to perform or they ve got a special musical or a creative piece in the service. You can start layering on top of what I m talking about your own ideas. There s also an opportunity here to utilize what we might call and I use this in quotes celebrity testimonies. These are well known Christians that people might know or they might be well known celebrities in a local area and you have them in. Ones that we ve used in the past to great effect our local athletes that are celebrities and sometimes it s not so much that somebody knows them by name for per say, they might be on the second string but they play for the New York Yankees and so we say well we ve got a New York Yankee come in to give their testimony. Well, who is it? Well I don t know who it is but it s a Yankee and I have to Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

17 come. Obviously if you can get some name recognition out of that and we ve had professional golfers who have come and that attracts a certain kind of person that might be interested in that. We ve had various celebrities of different types that would come. We ve had business people that may not go to our church but they re actively involved in their church and they are in the news and they like to travel around and share their testimonies. We ve had former mobsters come to our church, somebody who has a salvation story. In fact we had a really interesting Sunday with a very famous former Christian, former mobster who became a Christian in prison that some of you may know. I won t say his name out loud but you may know who I m talking about and he was a mad man in New York City and he d been converted in prison and he d been giving his testimony around the country but he had never come to New York and he was afraid about giving his testimony in New York and I kept my distance and introduced him by video and just in case. I sat with my back against the wall like The Godfather, just being safe but it was a huge day and we ve had other celebrities. Sometimes you get a retired celebrity but if you pay attention out there and you look at other churches and you pay attention you begin to know who this is and if you find someone good I d love to know them and if I find someone good I ll let you know about it as well because if I m going to come to Journey if I get them to come to your church. Maybe you know someone who was... They just got promoted and now they re the head coach somewhere, now they just won something on TV or they were in the Olympics or whatever it might be but these things are of interest to people. If you ve never gone through my resource called Why People Leave Church, how many of you are familiar with that? It s one of my few resources that has a negative title to it; Why People Leave Church. I go through some reasons why people don t stick and I ll tell you one of them that I go into in great detail and that resource is sometimes people are just bored and so you ve got to add a little excitement. Have some testimonies, shake it up every once while. Have a concert. Do something on Sunday that, as they say give them something to talk about and it not only helps your people but it makes a difference in connecting to the church because your people got there and you say we ve got the CEO of so and so or we ve got the chairperson of so and we ve got this lady who was in the Olympics last time, really. I mean I go to church for a sermon but I saw her on TV and I better come and pay attention to that and there s national celebrities or local celebrities and I have a whole thing. We talked about before the dance coaching about how you can get in the vein of that. One little tip I ve got; if you re in an area that s got a morning show like on TV say on Saturday, sort of having the New York morning shows or you ve got a local morning show and you can actually build a connection with like the producer of that local morning show and you ll be amazed at who they bring in on Saturday sometimes for that local morning show or celebrities that then you could get to on Sunday. They re in town for whatever reason and you just start building that relationship and sometimes it s just local celebrities. Local people but a lot of times international people are in town for some various reason and I can t afford to bring in the number one professional golfer but if they re already in town doing something, in town golfing or in town opening up a big store or a new course or whatever and they re right there, maybe I get them and here s the other tip. Sometimes I haven t been able to get home on Sunday but I ve been able to sit down and video a testimony with them while they re in town on Tuesday. They come in to do a book signing at the local, well I don t know if bookstores still exists but when bookstores used to exist but now they still do. They come in to do Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

18 RELATED RESOURCES FOR ADDITIONAL STUDY THE MAXIMIZING BAPTISM SEMINAR A complete process from sign-up to celebration Three-hour seminar + sample files and documents Do you have a plan to help people decide to be baptized and move forward to celebration and discipleship? In this three-hour seminar, Nelson walks you through a proven five-step system that will equip you to PROMOTE, PREPARE, PREACH, PRESENT and PRESERVE every baptism in your church. Help people overcome their fear and uncertainty about baptism so they can take this step of obedience! In this comprehensive resource, you will learn: How you can increase the number of people who sign up to be baptized (you probably have more people interested than you realize...they're just not telling you) The reasons why people are saying "No" to being baptized (hint: it's not because they're not spiritually ready) The power of your preaching to mobilize people to sign up for baptism How to help people overcome their fear of being baptized (and what those fears are) The specific steps you can take to ensure that every candidate is prepared to be baptized All the details and logistics that will make your baptism celebrations run smoothly The secrets to transforming baptism into a church-wide celebration How to follow up with every person after their baptism so that they'll continue to grow in their relationship with Christ Specific steps to move people from baptism to membership in your church Plus much more! Includes: Complete seminar audio, fill-in-the-blank listener s guide, leader s notes, more than 45 sample documents, fully editable baptism checklist, promotional s and follow-up documents. Available: Fully downloadable $99.95 Three-CD set $ To Learn More or Secure Your Resource Visit:

19 something for a book or something for a charity; they d be more than willing to sit down with you for. If you see somebody speaking in your area and you re like, Oh I know they re Christian. I know they ve got a great testimony. Well, I bet you can get in for thirty minutes or before or after their event and sit down with them and you do the video. It s pretty you sat there right beside it and then you show that on Sunday. It s not going to be as big as if they were there live but there s a lot of ways you can do this as you get creative. Now, number seven; schedule and this is related to it but it s not on Sunday now. Schedule more and the SE stands for special evangelistic events. Most of what I ve talked about so far I ve primarily focused on Sunday but now what I m talking about is scheduling evangelistic events that are not on Sunday but they re designed to attract people on a non-sunday service with the idea that they would have a first experience with your church or begin to meet Christians in your church and begin to develop those relationships. Let me step back for just a moment and share with you some recent research that has been done and this may be impossible to see where you re sitting so I ll read it to you. The question is; if a friend of mine really values their faith I don t mind them talking about it. This was a survey that was done to unchurched Americans and it s a pie chart here and seventy nine percent agree with that. If a friend of mine really values their faith I don t mind them talking about it. Seventy nine percent of unchurched Americans said they don t mind. Only eighteen percent disagrees. Now this is totally unrelated to our general topic but I ll just give you the results and again I don t think you can see that but it says, If I were to die today do I know for sure that I would go to heaven. Now that s obviously tied into some of these classic of angles of approaches that many of us know so they ask unchurched Americans if I were to die today do I know for sure that I would go to heaven. Twenty percent said not sure. Ten percent said they think about it daily. Eight percent said they think about it weekly. Eleven percent said they think about it monthly. Eight percent said they said they think about it yearly but the vast number forty three percent said they never think about it and what does that mean. That means sometimes we re trying to answer questions that they re not asking but where I was going with the study and if you want this just me. If someone you know invited you to the following and these are activities sponsored by a local Christian church, how likely would you attend? There s no way you re going to see that. It s a bunch of bar charts here but just trust I m reading it right. Twenty nine percent said, If I was invited to a worship service I would be likely to attend. Almost a third said, If I was invited to a worship service I would be likely to attend. Again if you go back to the special days like on Big Days just automatically a third of unchurched people said, If a friend of mine invited me to come to a service at their church I m likely to attend. Now I think we can logically assess and add to this that if it was a not only a regular worship service but a special worship service like at Easter or like a series that connected with their attendance trouble and transition or like a series that might have some kind of special element in it like a Mother s Day or a child dedication or a concert or a testimony or it had some kind of special testimony inside of that then I think it would be logical to expect that that number would be even higher. The more reasons you could layer on to that invitation the better but here s what s really interesting; if you make it into some kind of event that they have at their church, some kind of special program is how this article does it and they separate it out and in two ways but they said now there are up to thirty six percent would be willing to come to something like that if it had a community service element to it or it had a neighborhood element to it. They were getting up closer to the forty seven percent. By these special evangelistic events, what I m talking about here are stepping stone events that you could utilize to give Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

20 people the first encounter with your church. This is well beyond the scope but the number one thing that unchurched people said they would come and attend at a local church would be something that would make the area safer. That s really interesting. Now you got to think about when the survey was done and what was going on in the news at that time so that might be sort of statistically... It might fluctuate statistically but I think that s something interesting and I m going to give you one more result from that report a little bit later but one thought is that maybe they won t come to a worship service but they would be willing to come to some kind of special evangelistic event. This could be as simple as a family day at your church. It could be as simple as some kind of special dinner at your church. It could be some kind of special entertainment that you have at your church and there was a day I remember when churches did more of this kind of stuff and they offered these kinds of things. We were talking earlier about bringing in a Christian juggler or a Christian magician. These are the kind of things that I think could be stepping stones and it gives people a reason to invite their friends. It gives them a reason to talk up their church and talk up the good things that are going on. Now, for a special evangelistic event to be effective there is sort of a playbook if you will for that to be effective because I will say that we are not in the event business. We re in the Gospel focus. I don t want to the Gospel business but ours is a gospel focus and so I think one of the reasons you may be in the ninety s or something that we quit doing all these events is they really weren t just events. They were really having evangelistic return and so if you re looking for a playbook for how to evaluate an event the best special evangelist to convince must have both an A, a B and a C and I once wrote a whole manual about this for a large denomination. I don t know if it was ever printed or not but the A means; if the event is to impact the end church there must be an attraction. You can do an event just for your people and there s a time and place to do that and there are certain things that you would promote that only Christians in your church would be interested in and there s a time and place for that but for it to be an evangelistic event it has to have an attraction that unchurched person would want to come to. That generally means there s a level of celebrity, there s a level of entertainment, there s a level of this is a cool kind of thing and yes it s at a church but I m going to go and see it. That s the meaning of attraction and then once you attract the end church person there has to be some kind of a bridge between why they came to that attraction and your church. You re not just hosting it because you have a building or you have a fellowship hall or you paid the rent or the parking space but there is some kind of bridge and that bridge may be as simple as having them sign in and take some kind of survey about an interest. It may be as simple as putting something in their hands or about an upcoming opportunity. It may mean that the attraction sort of a family night is a bridge to a family teaching series that you re going to do on Sunday but it can t be just disconnected. It can t just be an island of an event. There has to be a bridge from that event into the life of your church and generally there has to be some kind of call to action after the event. Now that could be a call to follow Christ at the event but again nothing wrong with that but I would try to do more than that. I might present the Gospel at the event. In fact more than likely I would but then I would also have some additional action steps that they would take maybe for those who do not respond and there s a lot of ways you could structure that but let s just say you have a Christian who has a very unique talent. You have a magic night and there s a Christian magician and you turn it into a big family night so they came for that Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

21 WHY PEOPLE LEAVE YOUR CHURCH Learn why people leave and what you can do about it Let's face it: it hurts when someone leaves your church. When it happens, we don't know what to do and what to not do. We're often left wondering if we did something wrong or if there was something we could have done differently. In Why People Leave Your Church, Nelson Searcy will coach you to lessen the number of people who leave your church and will equip you to be content with those who do. In this downloadable resource you will learn: The TOP SIX REASONS people leave your church, and what you can do about it How THREE of these reasons are impossible to correct after the fact? but you can prevent them before they happen How THREE of these reasons give you an opportunity for greater ministry How to reduce the impact of all SIX reasons people leave The BIGGEST MISTAKE you can make when someone leaves your church How to make sure you don't lose FOCUS when someone leaves What growing churches do differently when it comes to people leaving church What ONE THING will kill the chances of someone ever returning Why you should NEVER chase someone who leaves And much more! RELATED RESOURCES FOR ADDITIONAL STUDY Including a 30-minute Bonus UNSCRIPTED Q-and-A with Nelson on why people leave and how it has impacted his leadership. Bonus: A recording of a 30-minute Q-and-A with Nelson on why people leave and how it has impacted his leadership. Available: Fully downloadable $99.95 Three-CD set $ To Learn More or Secure Your Resource Visit:

22 but then you know that magician shares their testimony. You can let people know that you re having them there because this is the beginning of a four week family focus that you re going to be doing at your church and then you might have a call to action for those who want to follow Christ and have a connection card but then also information and other next steps that they can take and then you follow up on those over the next period of time. It is intensive but to just do an event is not what I m talking about. The way I define that is a special evangelistic event and if you just have sort of any one of these or any two of these it s not quite as powerful as it could be. A lot of churches have the attraction and they try to do some kind of call to action but then the food is lost because there was no bridge to the church. I have seen it botched in so many ways and I don t want to open up a can a rotten eggs right here but this is also one of my big problems with while like Easter egg hunts and I know I don t mind. I will die on that hill if I have to but most churches just totally botched the Easter egg hunt because they can t get an A B C inside of their Easter egg. How they got the Easter egg hunt is the attraction but they totally stink at the bridge and then there s almost virtually no call to action. In fact it s so bad I ve come to believe that there is a disproportion, no relationship between the size of your Easter egg hunt and the number of people who will attend on Sunday. I hear this all the time and again I m all excited here but I got to move on but I hear this all the time, We had two thousand people on our Easter egg hunt. Great, how many people did you have an Easter Sunday? Well we re down. We were down this year. Now the big problem with that is not just the A B C, it s also the amount of e that it takes to do it at Easter egg. You know what e is? Energy and effort and so the energy and effort that someone would use to invite their friends to come to Easter services is wasted and used on that Easter egg hunt and then you blow the A B C and it really smells like rotten eggs. In theory I guess I m not against Easter egg hunt. In reality it rarely becomes the special evangelistic event that we re talking about. I think considering not one a month or anything like that but some that might tie into your Big Day. Maybe go back and reconsider some of the things that are effective and I ve been amazed that things that I ve heard members of coaching do that sometimes seem kind of like old school special evangelistic events and I thought well that s going to be interesting but then they do it and they do it right and it just, it works phenomenal. I mean like a magician or juggler. I had to kind of repent and think I should do more of that and like those folks who come in and rip the phone books and do all that kind stuff. Well, maybe it wasn t that that was wrong it was the way that people were doing it that got out of hand and so I think if you can do it in the special evangelistic event way, just people are still fascinated by that kind of stuff. I mean these shows like America s Got Talent and the singing competitions. These are big phenomenons. I ve seen churches do things like that. Like it s not America s Got Talent, it s whatever like your county is that has got talent. They ve got something like that going on and I mean it s hard to do the bridge but if you can make it work you can get on church people there and then connected but don t just do events for events sake. It s got to have the A B C and then you can tie in some of these other things. Generally speaking, I prefer stuff that goes on on Sunday more but I have to be realistic that it is working. Now, given the choice between doing that or doing what I want to talk about next I would focus here on number eight which is to play in more SE and here that s our special evangelistic event. It is; Servant Evangelism. I think one of the most powerful outreaches that we can do that gets the attention of Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

23 unchurched people and then ties them back to our church is servant evangelism. Servant Evangelism is a way for you to go out and serve the community and get people s attention if you will through that act of service and then give them an invite to your church. I have defined in some of my books building on the work of my friend Steve Sjogren that servant evangelism is sharing the love and message of Jesus Christ through simple acts of service and kindness and then giving with that act of service and kindness an invitation, an intentional invitation to your church. It s a straightforward approach to sharing God s love and that can be as simple as taking some bottles of water and some invites to your church and going to way corner of a part and as people come walking by or running by you put a bottle of water out with an invite attached to it. You take the invite put it in the same hand as the bottle of water and you say, Would you like a free bottled water? Nine out of ten are going to take it. If the first few doesn t take it as soon as the first one does take it everybody after that will take it and I would encourage you to try some different servant evangelism projects. I have a little resource on servant evangelism and I ve shared with you here are examples of different servant evangelism and you can just be as creative as you want to be with this. We d like to do breakfast and we like to find an area where maybe there s a bunch of business people who are going into a business park and we stand out there with the granola bars or some kind of breakfast bar and we do the same thing and so here s your breakfast bar and then here s the invite to the church and would you like to take this in for a snack later. I like to take this in for breakfast and a lot of people are running to work in the morning and they don t have a chance to eat breakfast and that sounds like well when they take nutria-grain bar or take a granola bar or something of that nature. People will and you know you can tie that in with fruit and other things as well. We prefer the prepackaged stuff but there s all kinds of different ways to do it and what I d like to try to think about on servant evangelism is not just doing more projects which is implied in my plan more servant evangelism. If you only do it once a year try to do it three times a year. If you do it three times a year try to do it monthly and for years we did servant evangelism Saturday. We had one Saturday every month. We went out and did servant evangelism. We ve since moved it into our group semester system and now we mobilize hundreds of people and do thousands of touches during those servant evangelism focuses inside of our groups. Yes you may need to plan more because more opportunities, more people are going to be involved but then think about projects where you can touch more people and there s a high quality touch which you want to have but there s also high quantity touches that you want to have and sometimes you have to really think about that. Very basic servant evangelism project that still works as the free car wash and one of my favorite in more recent days that would have to talk about later is the gas by down. We go through the seasons were gas goes up really high and you work with the local gas station to buy down that gas and you get publicity that it s fifty cents cheaper than it is anywhere else and you go out there and pay for that fifty cent and pump their gas and do old fashion service to the gas. It s just incredible what could happen with that. You can be very creative. You can me for examples and I ve put some here for you in the notes and different things but I love servant evangelism. A little tip on servant evangelism. Just remember you don t always have to get permission to do it. I mean I suppose if we re going to show up at the Wal-Mart and start doing a car wash you probably need permission to do it but you know I ve done evangelism in Central Park and I we all hide in the bushes and wait for the guy to go around and you know just one guy. It s a big park and so we wait for him to go around and as soon Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

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25 as he goes out of site we all go over out there and we make some touches then we see him coming and we run back into the bushes and we wait for him to go around again and there was once when we get caught. I ve just put it up some welcome cards to give him that says if he s got problems with what I m doing he can take it up with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and I ve given them phone number. I figure if I can t take one for the kingdom I can at least take one away from the devil. Sometimes forgiveness is easier than permission. Number nine is: Invite the Unchurched. It will make sense in a minute. Invite the unchurched to join you in your community service ministries. This is the longest one I have. The survey I was sharing with you earlier about the twenty seven percent who said they would go to church if they are invited by friend, the number who said they would go to some kind of event at your church, neighborhood safer things like that. Forty three percent of the unchurched said that they would be likely to attend a community service project sponsored by a local Christian church and here s the thing. Many of you are already doing this. You go and feed the hungry at a local food bank or you go and feed or help the needy at some kind of shelter or you go and serve on Thanksgiving Day and give out free turkeys or you ve already got something like that going. Well, what was alerted me on this is the fact that this is an opportunity for people to connect with their unchurched friends and their unchurched friends would go with them. Now the way I first experienced this at The Journey was through one of those programs and just for the sake of how this may be used as a recording later. I won t go into the name but you re going to merely know who it is. Our church would go out and they would help build houses and every time I would call the organization to say we want to send a group out there to build houses they d be like, Great We ve got Church Day coming up the third Saturday and you can come be a part of that. I d be like, No I don t want to come on church day. The last thing I would do is spend my day with a bunch of other Christians and I even like those other people. I would say, What are the other Saturdays? They said, Well, you know we ve got all the bankers come in the previous Saturday. I m like, Great. I want to go with the bankers so just let me show up and work with the corporate people or the next weeks it s like Small Business Week and we re great. That s the weekend I want to go to that. This was a whole argument I had to have with this organization so that they wouldn t schedule our church group on church day but sort of like I at least was intellectually aware enough that if we re going to be out there rubbing shoulders and building houses. I don t want to just rub shoulders with people who already are Christians. I want to rub shoulders with these other people that at least have a chance not to be Christians. Now they might be. They might be all very dedicated Christians who just happen to be small business owners or whatever but that was like my thinking but then like as this progressed and I was around these and church people who were out there serving building houses, I began to realize that the part of your heart that has to be open enough for you to go build a house for the needy is the same part of your heart that has to be open for you to be responsive to the Gospel. Does that make sense? I began to realize if we now invited lost people and invited unchurched people and we said, Look our church is going to build a house or we re going to feed the hungry or we re going to give out turkeys on Thanksgiving or we re going to go down to the food kitchen then let s not just not keep that to ourselves. Let s tell the people who sign up to invite their family members to invite their friends. I found that people Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

26 really want to do that. That unchurched people who would necessarily think about coming to church for everything else would say, Your church is going down to feed the poor I want to go with you, and then they re rubbing shoulders with Christians in your church. They re building connections with people in your church and you train your people to be aware and say, Wait you came here on Saturday or you came here on Thanksgiving. I hope you ll join us on Sunday, or at least if nothing else it may not come that Sunday but the next time. Now they extend an invitation to the Big Day. They have a conception about our church that is against what their preconceived notion was and now let me tie these two together before we move on. The reason I think this works so well and I think servant evangelism works so well is that more and more unchurched people have a false preconceived notion about the church and they believe that we are selfish, inward focused and all only exist for what we can get from people. I think it started with the whole televangelist thing and people bringing money and abusing some of that but then I think also the devil has taken the very thing that we should be known for which is giving and generous and service oriented and try to flip it in the minds of people. If they knew about it, when s the last time you seen an evangelical Christian represented well in a movie or in a television show? There are some highlights out there that we could all meet only think of but many times they re the greedy person, they re the person who s in it for some kind of game. When you go out and you start giving to the community through servant evangelism, even if it s a simple bottle water. They can afford a bottle water in there but you give it to them, it puts down and lowers that wall that they have about the church. When they go out and see the people in your church serving and feeding the poor it changes their perception of church so that they are more likely to consider the Gospel and also the last thing I would say about these two before I move on is; even though I m talking in many ways about just moving people forward on the Engle Scale, taking a negative seven and moving them up to a negative six when it comes to servant evangelism or taking a negative five and helping them move out to a negative four by having a good experience with the church. I also wanted to be well aware that people can come to faith in Christ right on the spot in these various places. People can come to faith in Christ at a special evangelistic event and it is okay to have a call to action for people to follow Christ but at the same time realize that many won t say yes on the spot but you can move them forward spiritually. It is sort of evangelism. If you go out you make a thousand touches chances are somebody is going to have a conversation and very well could see someone come to faith in Christ right there on the spot. You re out building these houses or serving in these soup kitchens, it s very possible that someone could come to faith in Christ right there on the spot. I want to be clear about that and that takes us up to number ten which is somewhat related which is: Challenge Your People. Maybe even challenge and equip your people to share their faith. Challenge and then empathetically equip your people to share their faith and so when they are out at the community service project or out doing a servant evangelism or inviting their friends to the Big Day they also know how to share their faith and the most basic way that you can train them is one that we ve already talked about that may circle back to number five and that is train them to share their testimony. Train them to share the basics of the gospel and then train them when to ask for help which means that if they don t know the answer to it they have least know who to ask out there for it. I have a little book called The Difference Maker that will help you with that and I m sure you can think of other Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

27 SENIOR PASTORS ONLY: ARE YOU READY TO GO RENEGADE? Get a copy of Nelson Searcy s NEW book, The Renegade Pastor FOR ONLY $1.00! Being a Renegade Pastor is about abandoning average, to pursue God s best for your ministry! The average church in America is declining by 9% every year, behind on budget and unable to move forward with the kingdom plans God has in store. The average pastor is stressed out and struggling to maintain healthy relationships and life balance. But while the cycle of average is strong, there is a way to overcome its pull and step into a life of impact and excellence. Drawing from Nelson Searcy s decades of ministry experience, The Renegade Pastor is a relevant, step-by-step resource for church leaders who are ready to break out of the trap of average and step up in surrender to the pursuit of God s best for his or her life and work. Get your own hardcover edition today for just $1.00! $1No shipping costs! HURRY NEXT 50 SENIOR PASTORS ONLY! New Release! BONUS: TWO FREE MONTHS OF THE RENEGADE PASTORS NETWORK! PASTORS NETWORK Regal Books, 2013 Get two months of coaching with Nelson! He will help you achieve personal growth, find ministry-life balance, lead your church to growth and health, and accomplish great things for God s Kingdom! Upon joining, you will also immediately receive over $ in FREE BONUS resources available to you within hours after joining! Get your NEW book today: The Renegade Pastor shows church leaders how to move their life and ministry from average to awesome! In this book, Nelson Searcy will inspire church leaders to dream bigger than ever. It provides valuable advice and tools for overcoming mediocrity and truly becoming a renegade pastor. Steve Reynolds, Lead Pastor, Capital Baptist Church, Annandale, VA Author of Bod4God and Get Off the Coach Want to be more than just average? Then embed into your life the Seven Commitments of a Renegade Pastor that Nelson shares in this book. It could change your life. Bill Easum, President and Senior Consultant, 21st Century Strategies Nelson Searcy is the ultimate renegade pastor: he has a great passion to lead at his highest level and to be different when that s called for. He never settles for average. He s the perfect person to lead you out of the rut of mediocrity. Read this book and abandon average! Jimmy Britt, Lead Pastor, Rocky River Church, Charlotte, NC with NELSON SEARCY $19.95 retail Grab your copy here: You ll receive The Renegade Pastor for just $1.00, plus FREE shipping and handling, and a two-month FREE trial to the Renegade Pastors Network. NELSON SEARCY is the Founding and Lead Pastor of The Journey Church. Started in 2002 in New York City, this ground-breaking church sees the majority of its growth coming from new believers and currently meets in Manhattan, Queens, San Francisco and Boca Raton, FL. He is the author of over seventy-five church-growth resources and ten books. Nelson is also an experienced church planter, coach and church-growth strategist. He is also the founder of ChurchLeaderInsights.com, the Church Leader Training Ministry of Nelson Searcy and The Journey Church

28 WHEN AVERAGE ISN T GOOD ENOUGH ANYMORE... Get TWO FREE MONTHS in the Renegade Pastors Network with your $1 Renegade Pastor book and reclaim a life of impact and excellence! In addition to your Renegade Pastor Book ($19.95 value), you ll immediately receive $ in FREE BONUS resources (hand-picked by Nelson), including: Improve the Financial Fitness of Your Church ($99.95 value) The Strategy Seminar ($99.95 value) From Stress to Rest sermon series ($99.95 value) Forgiveness: The Real F Word sermon series ($99.95 value) Relationship Rescue sermon series ($99.95 value) Fasting For Spiritual Breakthrough ($29.95 value) Managing the Stress of Ministry ($29.95 value) Debt-Free Pastor ($29.95 value) The Thursday Midnight Rule ($19.95 value) What Gets Measured ($19.95 value) Personal Growth Tips ($19.95 value) The Power of a Combined Service ($19.95 value) The Decision Dilemma ($19.95 value) Maximizing Summer e-book ($23.95 value) Introduction to Church Systems webinar ($49.95 value) Improve the Financial Fitness of Your Church webinar ($49.95 value) Do the math: that s $ in bonuses! Only $1.00 Shipping included! Regal Books, 2013 $19.95 retail Also, as a member of the Renegade Pastors Network, you always have access to the best discounts on any new event or resources opportunity: You re the first to know about my new resources, and can grab them at an exclusive discount. My LIVE events always have special pricing just for Renegade Pastors, and we host regular Renegade Pastors Conferences always in a travel destination like Orlando or LA that are FREE for you to attend! You get a members-only 30% discount on all Church Leader Insights resources. Just a few of the benefits you ll receive: A monthly Leadership and Strategy Briefing LIVE conference call with me where you ll be challenged and guided to maximize your ministry each month. Each call is packed with content and gives you the opportunity to engage directly with me during a pastor to pastor Q-and-A section. You ll learn a fatal flaw in your church systems and several practical tips to better fulfill your calling. PLUS, if you can t make the live call, you ll receive MP3 and CD recordings of the complete conference call. A monthly Equipping Interview Call where I ll interview a leading author on their newest book. Past interviews include Gary McIntosh, Tim Stevens, Steve Stroope, Patrick Lencioni, Bill Easum and Larry Osborne. MP3 and CD recordings of both the briefing and interview calls. Don t worry if you can t make the live calls you won t miss a thing. FREE Church Growth Champions newsletter, featuring pioneers of church growth and evangelism to inspire you and your ministry. 30 FREE book summaries per year, provided through a partnership with the premiere executive book summary service available to pastors. FREE Growth Points Newsletter, written by church growth expert Dr. Gary McIntosh, Professor of Christian Ministry and Leadership at Talbot School of Theology. You ll be able to keep up with the latest research and learnings on church growth and church health. Members-only online hub, where you can access your files, resources and recordings at all times. Continually updated Renegade Pastors documents and directory. And much more! Are you ready to go Renegade? Get your NEW Renegade Pastor book, PLUS TWO FREE MONTHS of the Renegade Pastors Network for just ONE DOLLAR! Grab your copy here:

29 ways that would help you with that but sometimes you can do on the job training. As you re out there doing servant evangelism and sometimes I hear people say, Well I don t want to do servant evangelism because I don t know how to explain what it means to be a Christian. We say, Okay, you go out and do servant evangelism. If somebody wants to ask those kind of questions I m going to be right here. Send them over to me, and so you as the pastor or a church leader who is equipped you can answer that question. Same thing here on the community service project but you can also take a few minutes and explain that and funny enough if you re teaching someone how to share their faith before they go out and serve the poor, if you ve got a bunch of unchurched people there you re also sharing the gospel with them while you are sharing how to share your faith with your people and you have some of your people give their gospel testimonies at various places and various times but then you want to go beyond that and teach them how to share the basics of the Gospel. Let s not forget that five percent of Christians have the gift of evangelism. Now, in another seminar at another place I talked about the ninety five percent and that s why I love sort of evangelize on different things but you should fully equipped those five percent and maybe as part of your overall the evangelistic system you offer some more in-depth training from time to time. If you ve gone more than a year and you haven t offered some kind of in-depth of evangelism training like becoming a contagious Christian or being a difference maker or something like that, I would seriously look at that. This is where you get into those tools like diagnostic questions or the Romans road or answering the objections to Christianity and there s plenty of it in Engels in training out there available for that but this is part of reaching the unchurched, challenging and equipping your people. Now two more, only one that really requires much explanation. Number eleven is: Define and Refine Your New Believer Process. Define and refine your new believer process. You go and do all this stuff and you can probably think of other ways you can impact the end church beyond my ten that I ve given you but if you know you do all this and you actually start seeing end church people come to faith in Christ. You ve got to be ready for them. In fact I would argue that it s the exact opposite. I would argue that you get ready for them and then more and more God will bless you with the unchurched. Jesus said, According to your faith will it be done unto you. Those who are faithful with few with a little will be given more and so your new believer process of what happens when someone does surrender to Jesus at your Big Day. What happens when someone does get saved if you will out of the servant evangelism project or at a community service project? How are you going to record that decision, put new believer materials in their hand and move them down that path of discipleship? The new believer process is much bigger than just what we re talking about here but as you have that ready and as you have that prepared, it seems to me that the more you prepare the more God blesses you. I teach that, is what I call the Principle of Spiritual Readiness that your preparation proceeds God s blessing and so ride out your new believer process and refine your new believer process in light of the various things that we ve talked about and that takes us to our last one. Hold your applause. Number twelve. I have the theological degrees in the studies and the doctorates and all that and I just I don t know any way to write this one except in that kind of academic institutionalized insider language. I ll just write it up and you copy down then I ll explain it. I hope that is not theologically too difficult to understand and it s from the Greek and it means try something. Try something, that s what it is. Number twelve is: it s two words, Try Something. You say, Well Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

30 why should I try anything? Just don t keep doing what we ve been doing because we re not doing enough. We re not doing the right things. I ve had people come to me and say we re going to go do this and we re going to do that and we re going to reach tons of unchurched people and I m thinking that will never work and then they go do it and they do that and they reach tons of unchurched and what do I know? Try something. The faster you fail, if you fail forward, the more unchurched people that you re going to reach. Your first servant evangelic project it s going to stink. The first one always stinks. Everybody who did it for the first time did it wrong but you learn and you to do a better and you try it a little bit different. The first time you do a Big Day it s probably not going to do a whole lot. Church has been frozen for twenty years and you come out to a Big Day and they suddenly of age revival is going to break out. No but you re moving something in the spirit and you re learning so we can t keep doing what we ve always done because if we keep doing what we ve always done we re going to keep getting what we ve always got. I m not saying sin, I m not saying be unbiblical but anything short of sin and try it and it just might work and then when you do come to me and we ll record it together and make it into a seminar and tell everybody we knew what we were doing to start with. I mean think about when Steve Sjogren had this idea of servant evangelism. Let s get a bunch of toilet brushes and go and clean toilets. I said what. Yeah we re going to give a bunch invite cards to the church. Somebody somewhere had to try it. D James Kennedy said, I m going to go out and knock door to door and ask people if you were to die tonight do you know for certain that you d spend eternity in heaven? The first time he did that, he knocks and if you were to die tonight, door slams. Somebody somewhere, everything that s worked in the past somebody somewhere had to try it. There were a bunch people who sat around saying that it isn t going to work. Martin Luther he s got the ninety five pieces tucked under his arm walking to the castle door. No don t post that up. That isn t going to work. Look at that drunk monk over there or whatever but you got to try it. You got to try something and I mean I obviously... I hope you know my heart after the time we spent together but try something. Try anything because the cost of not doing something is incredible and so I hope this entire time has encouraged you and you want to try something and I ll be praying for you as you do and when you try something and it works you send to me and we ll go try it and we re always together. We re not in competition so I ll leave you with that. Nelson Searcy Reaching the Unchurched: What s Working Now for Local Church Evangelism

31 ACCELERATE YOUR GROWTH! A SPECIAL INVITATION FROM NELSON SEARCY Dear fellow Senior Pastor, I want to give you the best opportunity to make this the most impactful year yet for your ministry, so today I m inviting you to take the next step in your church growth by joining my Senior Pastor Coaching Network. The window is closing to get into the network at this special rate - there are only a few spots left. Once it's filled, that will be it. Senior Pastor Coaching helps you go in-depth with me on the Eight Systems of a Healthy Church through online, on-demand coaching modules that you can access anytime! The results? An average 25% increase in your attendance and a 20% increase in giving! There s never been a better time to join: You ll lock in a VIP RATE and save up to $1, a year! Thank you for considering this invitation! Your coach, Filling up act now before this network closes! Here are just a few examples of the typical results that pastors see as part of my Senior Pastor Coaching Network: NELSON SEARCY COACHING LADDER FOR CHURCH HEALTH AND GROWTH SENIOR PASTOR COACHING NETWORK Online, on-demand modules In-depth training on all 8 systems Direct access to Nelson and the CLI team Over $1, in FREE CLI resources RENEGADE PASTORS NETWORK Foundational network Joining the Senior Pastor Coaching Network will be a personal and ministry- impacting experience. It brings real clarity to what s required to lead a growing church. It will be an investment into yourself and your ministry. Jesse Giddens, Destiny Christian Center, Apple Valley, CA Being a part of this network has helped me to lead our church more effectively, reverse what had been a slow decline, mobilize greater numbers of our people in outreach and service, reach and retain more new people, and significantly raise the level of generosity in our church. Robert Haynes, New Life Community, Olive Branch, MS "Second only to my relationship with God is my family. In a growing church this can be a challenge. I am thankful for Nelson s coaching to keep my priorities God honoring. I have seen so many pastors struggle in their marriage and their kids end up resenting the church. The principles I have learned have helped me make my marriage better than ever and both my boys love the church. All the while having 6 years of steady growth the church is now 5 times larger than we started. It is possible." Michael Shreve, Mountain West Church, Stone Mountain, GA Yes Nelson, I want to join NOW! I m ready to join the NEW online Senior Pastor Coaching Network! Visit You can also call Scott Whitaker at ext. 5

32 SENIOR PASTOR COACHING NETWORK with Nelson Searcy NETWORK OVERVIEW Systems Overview Assimilation Stewardship Part 1 Evangelism Part 1 Evangelism Part 2 Small Groups Worship Planning Stewardship Part 2 Ministry Leadership and Staffing Personal Leadership Strategy PLUS, you ll receive a Coaching Blueprint that gives you specific next steps! As you prepare to join, please consider that: One new tither will pay for this network. The average increase in attendance is 25%. The average increase in giving is 20% of your overall budget. I ll be there step by step to help you implement. There s no other network like this! In just the first year of the Senior Pastor Coaching Network, you ll receive: Monthly online sessions: Hands-on coaching from Nelson on all eight systems. Over $1, in FREE resources from Church Leader Insights (including all eight systems seminars) in your first year, PLUS special discounts on any new resources. Regular group Q-and-A calls to ask your specific questions. Unlimited access to me and my entire CLI team. FREE attendance at CLI (live or web) training events during your network (up to $1, value). Add the online Senior Pastor Coaching Network to your membership now, and get immediate access to the Systems Overview as soon as you join! ON-DEMAND: Available now via a new on-demand, online module format, where you can participate at your convenience each month. Your experience will be identical, no matter when you log in. IN-DEPTH: Led by me, this network is based on the 8 Systems of a Healthy Church that I ve identified and taught to thousands of churches, through books, resources and live events. You ll receive online coaching sessions over the course of this network that you can fully participate in anytime. And unlike other networks, you ll receive both the audio and video. I want to grow in 2016! AFFORDABLE: Lock in the lowest monthly rate available now, saving up to $1,800 in the first year! Get FREE access to the Renegade Pastors Network, PLUS over $1, in new bonus resources, including all eight Systems Seminars! Yes Nelson, I want to join NOW! I m ready to join the NEW online Senior Pastor Coaching Network! Visit You can also call Scott Whitaker at ext. 5