had a great talk yesterday with a youth pastor from a city that is close to us. he just called out of the blue without much connection before our phone call. we had a great talk about evangelism. big events, and large outreaches were the center of our discussion. how do you cover follow-up? do you present opportunities for salvation just once during that night? how do you equip students to be the one that is leading them to christ as opposed to one speaker up front?
my heart was stirred once again with a passion to reach out to students. but as we talked i was more convinced that no one should ever be at an altar alone. the purpose is not to get a student to an altar, but into a relationship with Jesus. i want our students to be a part of seeing their friends coming to christ. i think that also helps with disciplining those students. they already have a connection to come back, and someone that can talk with them about what it means to be a christian. what are thoughts you have on bringing people to christ? would love more voices in this conversations.
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one of the coolest things about Converge a couple years ago organized by Jeff Schwartentraub and Bill Allison, was the way they trained all the young people to lead someone to Christ and to be praying for the 5 in their RSI (relational sphere of influence) and then to be up front at the altar when the call came and then they got to be part of it … 60-70 kids accepted Christ or reommitted from MTHS alone … and we had about 200 for the four training sessions prior to the conference. the students involved in that totally owned it and were so excited they wanted and planned a bigMINI for MTHS the next spring where we had 400 students come and another 100 recommit and give their lives to Christ (they wanted Jeff to speak at that, too). that was awesome!
However, having said that, follow-up was way too brief … several of us called each person who signed a form and gave encouragement to get plugged in to a church or bible study but we really didn’t get them all plugged in for certain and discipleship did not happen as effectively as it needed to for long term growth … as is evidenced by what the christian environment looks like at school today. it is one of the areas i pray about the most and actually have some ideas germinating … who knows? but i do know that we need laborers for the harvest and discipleship is key, as you said, as is getting church kids who have been at this awhile, to really get and own that they need to come alongside these baby christians rather than point the finger and turn their backs, calling them hypocrites, when they mess up as they invariably do.