Breaking the Huddle: How Your Community Can Grow Its Witness

15th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year―Evangelism

Most Christians are stuck in the huddle.

Even though we believe in outreach, most communities tend to focus on our own needs. That turns us into insular groups without many relationships with outsiders. So evangelism is occasional and conversions are rare. How do we change?

In their groundbreaking book I Once Was Lost, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp identified five thresholds that individuals cross when they shift from being skeptics to followers. Now they and Val Gordon show how huddled communities can become witnessing communities and then conversion communities, where evangelistic growth becomes the new normal. The authors have studied the growth of congregations, what enhances and limits them, and have gathered best practices for transformation.

Our churches and fellowships can become places where evangelism is not done by a just few people, but where the whole community itself becomes a winsome, thriving witness to those around it.

Break out of the huddle. Find out how.

Don Everts is the senior pastor at First and Calvary Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Missouri, and has been serving in ministry for over thirty years―on campus with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and in the local church with the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. He is also an award-winning author who has published over twenty books including Jesus with Dirty Feet, I Once Was Lost, and The Spiritually Vibrant Home. An avid reader, frequenter of rocking chairs, and amateur chicken farmer, Don and his wife, Wendy, have three adult children and live in a home solidly built in 1887.

Doug Schaupp is associate director of evangelism for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He is based in Los Angeles and is the coauthor of Being White and I Once Was Lost.

Val Gordon is the owner of Gearshift Consulting, a firm specializing in assisting mission-driven organizations to overcome their obstacles to growth. She is also a consultant with the learning and talent department of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and she previously served InterVarsity as associate regional director of New England. She lives with her family in Mystic, Connecticut.