“It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service”…Ephesians 4:11-12

God gave His church these people and the Holy Spirit gifted them for the work that they would do to prepare God’s people. Jesus gave every Christian the command to be His witnesses, and for some people this is something they are compelled to do. They are anxious to share Jesus with their family, their friends, their co-workers and the people they meet. In the church we’ve described this by this word evangelism, but we also need to recognize the role of the evangelist.

Our district has piloted a program to train people who naturally love to share Jesus with us to become even better equipped to share the gospel and to reach out to their community in a more effective way. In their training we have helped them to practice their skills in evangelism.

The role of the evangelist will be to share their faith, engaging their neighbors and their community and leading a group of people in faith exploration. This is where we, as a suburban church, want to continue to grow. As an established church that is almost 30 years old, we know we have to be intentional about being missional in our own community.

We have three great people who took the Texas District Evangelist Training. They already had a love for sharing Jesus with other people. We believe that they will use this training to help us engage our neighbors and our community more effectively. One of our trainees is Dave Rudko, who is a great leader at our church plant called The EDGE. Dave is using his skills and training to gather new missional communities in this church plant. In addition to Dave, we have two ladies, Abby Lipperman and Vicki Mitchell, who will help our main campus engage our community. They both have been key leaders in our evangelism challenges this past year.

We are also starting our third church planting effort and we hope to train some of the core leaders of this church plant through the district’s evangelist training program to partner with our church planter, Travis Hartjen, in reaching people in the Argyle-Northlake area of the Metroplex.

Now that the pilot group has completed their training, we are exciting about bringing this training to other people who love to share Jesus.

By Pastor David R Jung
Crown of Live, Colleyville