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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses designing evangelism strategies that truly connect with and meet the needs of specific communities. Drawing on personal experiences and practical insights, he emphasizes letting those who are lost set the agenda, addressing their felt needs, and choosing methods that resonate with their unique contexts to share the gospel effectively.
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Welcome to the lead on podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. That's what we do on this podcast. We talk about the ins and outs and ups and downs of ministry, the daily grind of getting it done in churches and ministry organizations. Today, I wanna talk about designing evangelism strategies to reach particular communities.
Jeff Iorg:Designing evangelism strategies to reach particular communities. Now, when I was in a doctoral seminar a long time ago, the phrase target group evangelism was popular. Now, that language may not communicate today. People are not a target. But the idea was that you would have some specificity, if you will, in trying to reach people by tailoring your methodology to fit a strategy that was aimed at a particular target, if you will, or a particular group of people.
Jeff Iorg:So I wanna talk today about some things to remember in designing an evangelism strategy that reaches a particular community with the gospel. The first thing
Jeff Iorg:and most overarching principle is that evangelism strategies must be designed to meet the needs of the community of lost people you are trying to reach. Now, everyone says, well, of course, we want to design our strategies to meet the needs of the lost people in the community that we're trying to reach. Of course, we do. So then I ask you, when do
Jeff Iorg:you ask those lost people what their needs are, and how serious are you about letting them dictate your approach? Now this came home to me very clearly when we moved to Portland, Oregon to plant the church in 1989. Now go back with me to 1989. Telemarketing was a useful tool at that time. It had not yet become so pervasive that it was annoying.
Jeff Iorg:So telemarketing, calling people on the phone and asking them survey questions, was still a viable tool, not only for companies, but also for ministries. So when we moved to Portland in 1989, it was made possible for us by a small grant of funds to do a telemarketing, project in our community as a part of helping us get our church started. And I designed the questions to find out specifically from unchurched and, we presumed, lost people some specific information that we could then use to shape our strategies. So for example, we call these thousand houses, and we ask the first question. Are you currently involved in in in a meaningful way with a church in our community?
Jeff Iorg:And if the person said yes, we said, thank you. We're calling to talk with people who are not meaningfully involved in a church, so goodbye. And then if they said, no, not really, we would say, we represent a group that's starting a new church in your community. Would you have five minutes or ten minutes, whatever it was, to answer five to seven questions about this new church start? And we called until we got a thousand households that were not meaningfully involved in a church that would give us the time to answer the questions.
Jeff Iorg:The company that did this for us worked that all out and then reported the results back to us. One of the questions we asked was this.
Jeff Iorg:If you were to attend a sun a worship service, what day of the week would you most likely go? A second question.
Jeff Iorg:If you were to attend a worship service, what time of day would be most convenient for you? And we heard very clearly that Sunday was the day that most people would go to a worship service. That didn't really surprise us, but the second part did. 9AM in the morning was the time that most lost people who were not meaningfully involved in any church told us they would like to go to church.
Jeff Iorg:Well, that was a surprise to us because we assumed that people that didn't go to
Jeff Iorg:church would wanna sleep in and show up later in the day or something like that. But when asked why if why so early or what would be the reason for that, it was because there's other things we want to go on and do during the day. And if we're gonna go to church, we'd wanna go early. So when we planted our church in 1989, we had our main worship service at 09:00 in the morning, followed at 10:30 by a a bible study or Sunday school experience afterwards. 09:00
Jeff Iorg:worship service. And people
Jeff Iorg:from the community came to our service. And the starkness of this as a strategy was revealed a few months into it when a couple came to our church for the first time. And they said, we've recently come to the area. We looked you up and discovered that you have a that you're a Baptist church in our community and your service is at 09:00, and
Jeff Iorg:so we've come. But why don't you guys have an 11:00 service? And I said, well, because and
Jeff Iorg:I explained to this person what I just explained to you. And she said, well, when you start an 11:00 service, give us a call. Otherwise, we're just gonna need to go to
Jeff Iorg:some other church. It's just too early to come at nine. And I said, well, thank you. There are a lot of
Jeff Iorg:good churches at 11:00, and
Jeff Iorg:I hope you find one. It really surprised her that we were designing our church to reach lost people and that we were prioritizing their schedule over our schedule. Now
Jeff Iorg:this is off the subject just a bit, but we also asked those same thousand people who don't go to any church, what's your feeling about any of these church names? Positive, negative, it was a continuum that they could give, like, a a number answer, you know, five for the high, one for the low, that kind of thing. And we went down the line. Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Latter day Saint. You know, we went down the line of about 10 different church names.
Jeff Iorg:Do you know that Baptist rated pretty highly on their list?
Jeff Iorg:In fact, it was clearly not pejorative in their minds. So we opened our church with Baptist in our name because the lost community didn't have a negative view of us. They either had a positive or somewhat positive view, and that surprised us as well. Now back to the the main point. We designed our worship time to connect with people who were not yet Christians so that they would more likely come and participate in our church on their terms.
Jeff Iorg:That's what I mean when I say let lost people set the agenda. Let lost people set the schedule. Let lost people determine the methodology. Let people who've not yet come to Christ influence your evangelism strategies. Second, I would say is in designing a strategy to meet the needs of the lost community, let them set the agenda, the schedule, the the approach.
Jeff Iorg:But second, let the presenting needs of lost people direct your plans. Now Christians like to get into these arguments over real needs and felt needs. Well, what a person really needs is the gospel. Well, I believe that. I know that you believe that.
Jeff Iorg:We know that's their real need.
Jeff Iorg:But what's their felt need? Their felt need is peace of mind. It's food on the table. It's clothes on their back. It's that their kids can learn how to read, get it through make it through third grade.
Jeff Iorg:It's that they that they don't fight all the time about money. These are the felt needs that people have. And when you design an evangelism strategy, you're more likely to get a hearing if you address the felt needs of a person so that you then have the privilege of sharing what will meet their real needs. A few weeks ago, I was preaching in Mississippi.
Jeff Iorg:I met a number of pastors just so encouraging the work they're doing in reaching the communities with the gospel. This one pastor was pointed out to me by a friend, and he said, this guy is just reaching people in remarkable ways and, in and so encouraging and so inspiring. So I made my way over to this brother and I said, hey, listen. I've been told that you're really reaching people in your community. And he said, well, you know, we we are reaching a few.
Jeff Iorg:And I said, well, tell me about it. How are you doing that? And he kind of looked down and said, well, you know, doctor Orge, it's just really not it's just not you know, I
Jeff Iorg:don't even know what to say. It's not really all that dramatic or he said, we just we just live in a really poor community, really poor. And food scarcity is a real problem. And so our church decided to launch a pretty substantial feeding ministry. And so we have worked hard to build a network of pipeline, if
Jeff Iorg:you will, of food that we can that comes into our church from various sources in various places. And our church members, developed some pretty simple ways of sorting and stacking and packaging that up. And, two, sometimes three days a week, we open our food distribution center, we give away food. And he said, word's gotten around that we're the church that cares. And when people come, we've trained people to engage them in conversation and to find out about their families and to learn about their situations and their needs and and to share the gospel with them and to invite them to come to church and to not only invite them to come to church, but to come as their guest.
Jeff Iorg:And I'll sit with you. I like to be with you when you come. I'll meet you on the parking lot and help you find your way.
Jeff Iorg:And he said, so, you know, every month we have
Jeff Iorg:six, eight people, something like that, that are coming to faith in Jesus through the feeding ministry. And then from those, we meet their friends and their family members, and then more come to faith in Jesus through that. I wanted to hug him.
Jeff Iorg:It's not that complicated, is it? Here's a man who said the felt need in our community's hunger. We're in
Jeff Iorg:a poor place. We gotta do something about this. So he went to local food banks and other suppliers and places where food can be obtained and put that together and organized his church to distribute it and started doing so and trained some people to talk to people on the parking lots and while they're waiting in the lines for their food. And
Jeff Iorg:in the process of doing that, just steadily leading people to faith in Jesus.
Jeff Iorg:That's what I mean by meeting felt needs. I know you would say, but their real need is Jesus, and I agree with that. I agree with that.
Jeff Iorg:But when people are hungry or their families are broken or they don't have a job or they don't have clothes to wear, when when they when they don't have peace of mind, when when there's a need that is just overwhelming,
Jeff Iorg:they can't think about anything else but getting that need met. So don't be afraid to meet felt needs that will then give you the opportunity, the privilege, the avenue, the means by which, the vehicle, if you will, to meet a person's real needs. So in designing strategies to reach lost people and meeting their needs, let lost people set the agenda and let their presenting needs direct your plans. And then make sure that you choose methods that really connect with and communicate with lost people in the actual community you're trying to reach. Now when I first moved to Oregon, you know, I had a degree in evangelism at that time and a doctoral degree in evangelism.
Jeff Iorg:I mean, I still have that, but I I just earned it and I was very vibrant about evangelism. And when I moved there, I was, you know, made planted the church and started meeting pastors, and they're asking me about my past. And, you know, word gets around. The new church planters, a degree in evangelism, cares about evangelism, passionate about evangelism. So I'd only been there in the town for, you know, a few weeks, and
Jeff Iorg:and two or
Jeff Iorg:three local pastors asked me out to lunch. And these were guys that were in, you know, smaller churches, but, they had one thing in common. They had all moved there at different times from the South. And they had made the move and established themselves, and some of them had been there two, three, four, five years, and that was great. They said, listen, we understand you're passionate about evangelism.
Jeff Iorg:I said, am. They said, well, we have an idea that we've been kicking around and we wanna talk to you about it. We're gonna do it together and we wanna see if you wanna come in and help us. We wanna see if we can really reach into this community around here, into our communities around here more aggressively with the gospel. I'm like, I'm all ears.
Jeff Iorg:They said, well, what we wanna do is have
Jeff Iorg:a tent revival. We're gonna get a big tent. We're gonna
Jeff Iorg:bring in some hay bales and stuff and really create a great atmosphere, like a tent revival. And we're gonna have great southern gospel music and we're gonna have a preacher that we got, he's a good friend of ours, gonna come up from Southern State that really is a great, you know, evangelist. And
Jeff Iorg:I just sat there thinking, this is fantastic.
Jeff Iorg:If you live in Alabama or Mississippi or even
Jeff Iorg:Louisiana, this is great. But this is a suburb of Portland, Oregon. They don't go out in tents. It rains here all the time.
Jeff Iorg:They don't wanna sit on hay bales. I'm not sure anybody in Portland, Oregon's ever seen a bale of hay. I don't think I've heard one southern gospel song on any radio station that services Portland, Oregon. And I'm not sure that someone with a southern accent is the best preacher to bring in to reach these people.
Jeff Iorg:And so I said to the brothers, look, I don't wanna discourage you guys if this is something you really believe you're supposed to do, but our church isn't gonna be a part of this. We're we're not going to join up. They were first disappointed and then a bit upset. And when I tried to explain to them why I was reluctant, they understood, but they weren't really happy about it. Now let me rush on to say, I have absolutely no problem with the tent revival.
Jeff Iorg:Set it up on Hail Bay hay bales if you want. Bring in a southern gospel quartet and a preacher from the South. If that's what the lost people in your community will respond to, go ahead and do it. But listen, there's a lot of places in this country where
Jeff Iorg:that would not be an appealing
Jeff Iorg:option for people who do not yet know Christ.
Jeff Iorg:So as you're choosing methodology, choose methods that really do connect with lost people. Not just what Christians want to do that will make them feel good about reaching out to lost people, but things that will
Jeff Iorg:really focus on lost people and connect with them on their terms. Then finally, this section, as you're designing strategy, let lost people set the agenda, appeal to felt needs, choose methods that really connect, and finally, do simple things. Focus more on actionable plans than grandiose ideas. Focus on actually doing something that actually gets the gospel to someone rather than theorizing or theologizing about it. Focus on doing simple things.
Jeff Iorg:Now, having that all in mind, how do you go about selecting the community that you're trying to reach?
Jeff Iorg:How do you go about selecting the specific people and designing the strategies as I've been outlining? How do you go about doing that? Well, let me give
Jeff Iorg:you four thoughts. First, start with location. Start with location. Now, this is not always the only determinant, and I'm gonna give
Jeff Iorg:you an illustration in just a moment of when it was not the determinant. But for many churches, the best place to start is location. What's right around us? Who's right around us? And how can we reach the people that are in that particular area or that particular environment?
Jeff Iorg:I'll give you a couple of examples. One is a church in Oklahoma
Jeff Iorg:that drew a one mile square around their church building and discovered that there were 800 houses in that one mile square. And the pastor simply said, we're going to go to every one of these houses and ask a couple of simple questions. Number one, how can our church serve you? And number two, what can we pray with you about related to your family or your needs? And he said, let's go ask people how can we serve you and how can we pray for you, And then let's see where the conversations go.
Jeff Iorg:Now, that's a very specific strategy designed
Jeff Iorg:to go to lost people, letting them set the agenda, what are the needs and what are the prayers. It's
Jeff Iorg:opportunity to connect with their felt needs in their context, their home. It it's a simple method that focuses on an actionable plan. It's just designed around location more than anything else. Around location. Now, that's one way to do it.
Jeff Iorg:Another way to do it is to look at your location and to say, based on the location where we are and the demographic data we're able
Jeff Iorg:to gather around this location, what kind of ministries should we design? So for example, if you did the demographic data on the
Jeff Iorg:high rise building that I live in here
Jeff Iorg:in Nashville if you don't know this, my wife and I have a one bedroom apartment in Downtown Nashville, And we live in a building where the average person is 28 years old, single, has a dog. We are the old people on the Second Floor. Now, we're beautiful people. We live
Jeff Iorg:in the cool part of town. You can't see my face right now, but that's sarcasm. Okay? If you did the demographic data where we live, you would not need to open a church preschool.
Jeff Iorg:Okay. That is not needed. You'd need
Jeff Iorg:to design a strategy that was based on the people who actually live in the location nearby the church where you serve. And in our case, that's what it would look like. So as you look at the data around the location where you are, you may see a high population of young adults, a high population of children. There may be two or three grade schools in your immediate area, which tells you there's a lot of children
Jeff Iorg:living close by. Might be just the opposite.
Jeff Iorg:You might be around an area that has retirement centers. You might be in an area that has middle income and upper income families that that live in larger homes that are spread far apart, not as dense of a population. You're gonna have
Jeff Iorg:be reached in a different way. You get the idea. Location.
Jeff Iorg:So one way to determine the people that you're going to target, if you will, or the specific community you're gonna try to reach is by going out and asking them in a defined area around your church. Or number two, to do an analysis of the demographic around that same area and make decisions based on the majority of what you discover in that area. Now, location is one way to determine your group that you're going to reach. But the second way is affinity. Affinity.
Jeff Iorg:Now this may mean that location is not your primary factor, and this is certainly what I experienced when I moved to California, Southern California. When we arrived in Southern California, the Southern Baptist Church that was closest to our home was actually a predominantly African American church. And so we went over to visit there, and I fell in love with the preaching of doctor Brian Kennedy who, when he has a Bible in his hand, it's an exquisite pleasure to hear the word of God taught. Man. I went over to hear doctor Kennedy, and we fell in love with the church and with the preaching and with the ministry and with all that they were doing.
Jeff Iorg:And then it became very apparent
Jeff Iorg:to me that this predominantly African American church was a bit of an anomaly because it was not in a black community. Ontario,
Jeff Iorg:California has about a 100,000 people, roughly, as a population, Less than 2%
Jeff Iorg:African American. Predominantly Hispanic, some Asian, the rest Anglo.
Jeff Iorg:So how did a church grow to an attendance at that time that we joined of about 800? How did a church grow to that size that was predominantly African American in a community that was not by affinity. When doctor Kennedy came there as pastor, church was small, about 30 people. He started reaching the family and friends of that group of people. And then he reached their families and their friends.
Jeff Iorg:And pretty soon, he has a relational connection and a network of an affinity, if you will, that had nothing to do with the location of the church, but everything with the affinity, the connect points of the families that were involved. Now there's another aspect of this particular church I wanna highlight, and that is it became a church that reached African American professionals. And that's not only only the people that they reached, but there were many people in this particular church that are that are professional people, school administrators, business owners, you know, attorneys, and people like this. And that became an affinity, if you will. The the the black professional community, The networking of that became a means by which you could reach lost people with the gospel.
Jeff Iorg:Now this is just one example of a church that's more affinity based than it is location based. It recognized we're really able to reach through the networks that we have and the relationships that we have an affinity of people who connect with each other in some way other than geography or location. This is really not that uncommon. When people connect socioeconomically, when they connect ethnically or or racially, when when they connect in in these ways, there is oftentimes a capacity to build a network of outreach that's not really geographically located or location centered, but really connects in different ways. Now, there's nothing wrong with this.
Jeff Iorg:It's just a different way of looking at the location of a church and deciding what group that we're best able to reach may not be always determined by our location, but sometimes more by affinity. A third way to think about this, though, in selecting the particular community or group that you're going to try to reach with the gospel is passion. It is who are you passionate about reaching with the gospel. And this may be a combination of location and affinity where you then come to say, there's a particular group of people that we're passionate about reaching. I know one church, for example, and one woman who leads a ministry in that church to women in crisis pregnancies.
Jeff Iorg:And their church has launched a crisis pregnancy center, crisis pregnancy counseling, job training, and other kinds of help for women that are single and that are pregnant and that are in crisis. This church has launched this ministry because there are people in this church who have passion for this particular lost community and people who need the gospel who find themselves with this particular felt need. And so passion is another indicator. You're in a location or you have an affinity. Yes.
Jeff Iorg:But even within the location or the affinity, there are going to be pockets of people that groups of people in your church have a particular passion for reaching. Go after them with the gospel. And then finally, you also select not only by location or affinity, by passion, but also by effectiveness. It's interesting how God gives certain groups of people within a church or certain churches within communities the capacity to reach certain kinds of people with the gospel. You're effective at reaching them, and so capitalize on or maximize that effectiveness.
Jeff Iorg:I know a particular church, for example, that has a larger number than you might think normal of educators in the church, school teachers, principals, others who are involved in the education world because their church has a particular effectiveness in reaching and ministering to people from that community. They didn't necessarily set out to do that. They had some people with a passion for it. That passion, launched them into this area of ministry, and the next thing you knew, they developed some expertise in that and the ways of meeting some particular needs of people in those communities. And then there was an effectiveness that just rose up about it.
Jeff Iorg:And now the church says, well, that's just our thing. We're we're we just do that. We're good at that. God has helped us
Jeff Iorg:to become effective at that particular thing. So when you're selecting your community, who are we going to
Jeff Iorg:go after with the gospel? Location, affinity, passion, effectiveness. Think through those that checklist, if you will, or that matrix of decision making to help you make the the final call. Now let me close with just a couple of thoughts. I do think it's strategic to aim for a particular strategic group of people that you're trying to reach with the gospel.
Jeff Iorg:I think it's better to have a specific idea or goal or plan or strategy in place to try to reach particular people rather than just the, well, we're just trying to reach everybody. I think you need to be a lot more defined than that. But second, I also think that you need to depend on God to give the increase. And just because you aim at or even target a particular community or group, that doesn't mean that you're not open to anyone that God may wanna bring you to reach with the gospel. And as a part of that, depend on the sowing and reaping principle rather than the one on one correlation principle
Jeff Iorg:to measure your success. Let's go back
Jeff Iorg:to that church in Oklahoma that mapped out those 800 houses. I heard about this strategy. I waited for a while. I contacted the pastor and said, how's it going? He said, well, we're up to about 300 houses that we've been to.
Jeff Iorg:We've asked them, what are your needs and how can we pray with you? And then we share the gospel in many places. I said, well, I noticed your church is growing. I I see baptisms have been going up in your church and you're reaching more and more people. He said, yeah, we are.
Jeff Iorg:I said, well, how has that come directly from the project? And he said, no, not exactly. I said, excuse me? He said, well, not not exactly. He said, doctor Orge, it's it's not a one to one correlation.
Jeff Iorg:But he said, we've gone into our community with the gospel and a few people have responded. But God is bringing us people that we didn't even reach out to, who are coming to us because of our intentionality about going to our community. God is giving us people, not always the ones whose doors we knocked on this week, but God is giving us people who are coming to Christ through our church because we're intentional about trying to reach our community with the gospel. That's what I mean by the law of sowing and reaping. When you sow the gospel into a community, you will reap gospel results, but don't turn this into a one on one correlation or some kind of an assembly line process.
Jeff Iorg:God's work is too spiritually motivated and too spiritually dependent for that that kind of conclusion. Well, today on the podcast, I've challenged you to design strategies to reach specific communities of lost people with the gospel. I want you to think through how you can do this most effectively so that you can have a focused effort going on all the time at reaching lost people with the gospel of Jesus Christ and then trusting that God will use that obedience to bring about the, results that he desires. Do it today as you lead on.