YPT Podcast Episode 44: Evangelism as the Care of Souls (Sean McGever)
Evangelism is something that’s commonly talked about, but little practiced. Evangelism isn’t an academic exercise, it’s an expression of the normal Christian life. So, how can we grow as evangelists while also empowering our students to be evangelists?
Discussion Includes:
Why did you write Evangelism: For the Care of Souls and what are you hoping people will take away from it?
What has your ministry as a YoungLife Director taught you about evangelism to teenagers?
When you’re training new youth workers or volunteers to practice evangelism to teenagers, what do you emphasize?
When you’re training teenagers to evangelize, what do you emphasize for them?
What do we mean by "conversion," and how does a youth worker’s theological understanding of conversion influence their evangelism?
Excerpt from the Conversation
Mike: When you're training new youth workers and volunteers to practice evangelism with teenagers, what are some things that you emphasize that could be helpful for our listeners?
Sean: Just on Sunday, I wrapped up a couple of weeks training. And so basically what we walked through and what I normally walk through, the first thing would be your own walk of Christ, obviously. So we go through, how are you, where are you at with your walk? How are you being watered? How are you being encouraged? How are you growing in your faith? Various things like that.
So we do some trainings and we have some homework assigned to that. We also emphasize the relationship with the church. So what church are you going to? How often do you go? How are you involved? We challenge that. We ask all the people who are interested in volunteering with us if they been baptized. If you haven't been baptized, have you considered it? Why wouldn't you be baptized? Things like that. So we spend most of our time with those things.
After that, then we want people to know the gospel. So we have a gospel training and a lot of it. It's not perfect, but we have a memorized Roman 6:23. We walk them through, you know, the bridge to life kind of thing. We don't use it. It's just one kind of tool in the tool belt. You know, I have a lot of thoughts about how we share the gospel and all that. Is it perfect? No. Is it reductionistic? A little bit, but it's still for younger people and they don't know, I think it gets some good work done. So we'll give them some tools about sharing the gospel. And then we also give some homework about sharing the gospel.
My typical homework assignment after we show them like the Bridge to Life kind of illustration is to share it with two people. One person who's really easy, maybe a fellow Christian, maybe their parent, maybe a leader, mentor, and then someone who it's a little bit more difficult. And then in our next meeting, they come back and report how that went. And we debrief that.
And then our big thing after that and kind of closing would be how to go to people, the term that we use is contact work, but it's just, you know, going to where people are at, how to be with people. Our central verse on that would be, uh, John 1:14, “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us. We've seen this glory, the glory of the one and only came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” So we talk about the incarnation.
We talk about what Christ did. We talk about how we want to follow in His footsteps to go to people. And also at the end of that, full of grace and truth. So we talk about what it means to engage with people, not only with grace and not only with truth, but with both of those things. And so what does it look like to engage with Christians, non-Christians with grace? And also what is it like to engage with Christians, non-Christians with truth?
More About the Episode
Sean McGever is area director for Young Life in Phoenix, Arizona, and an adjunct faculty at Grand Canyon University. He is the author of The Good News of Our Limits and Born Again: The Evangelical Theology of Conversion in John Wesley and George Whitefield. His latest book is the main topic of our conversation today, which is published by Lexham Press, Evangelism: For the Care of Souls. He speaks, teaches, and ministers across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
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YPT has published an ebook that's a free download for subscribers. Youth Ministry is Theological Ministry collects ten articles from the YPT archives to help new readers catch the heartbeat of Youth Pastor Theologian is written by six different contributors from across America, Mexico, and the UK.
