Somewhere along the way, the Church outsourced its most important assignment.
We hired pastors to preach, elders to govern, and deacons to serve — all good and biblical things. But somewhere in the job descriptions, the Great Commission got quietly reassigned. Evangelism became the preacher’s responsibility. Reaching the lost became a line item in the outreach budget. And the average person in the pew was effectively excused from the mission field.
I want to challenge that.
Not because pastors should do less. They should do more — more equipping, more training, more releasing. But the New Testament picture of the Church is not a building full of spectators watching a professional represent them before God. It is an army of ordinary people who carry the presence and message of Jesus into every corner of their ordinary lives.
Your neighbor does not need to come to your church to hear the Gospel. They need you to have a conversation.
I travel to churches across the country, and one of the things I do is evangelism training. Not four-hour seminars with twenty-step frameworks. I mean practical, simple, back-to-basics work on how to have a real conversation about Jesus with a real person in your real life.
What I find, almost without exception, is that people are not unwilling. They are undertrained and under-encouraged. They have never been told that they are qualified. They have been intimidated into silence by the ghost of a performance standard that was never in the Bible.
You do not need a seminary degree to tell someone what God has done in your life. You do not need to win every argument. You need a story, a willingness, and a Holy Spirit who goes before you.
The Church that reaches its city is not the one with the biggest platform. It is the one where every person understands that they are the platform.
— Mike