LeakeSpeak

In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I have explained how our church planting team began September focusing on making a lot of new friends. As we develop new friendships, we are making it a point to somehow bring up Jesus or talk about spiritual matters in the first 30 minutes of conversation with someone new.

One of the tools we developed to help us talk to a lot of people was a survey. I have usually not been a big fan of using surveys as an evangelistic tool, feeling them to be impersonal and a substitute for developing authentic relationships. In our case, though, it seemed to be a good idea. It’s important for us to be learners in our community, rather than coming in as people who have all the answers. We wanted to show people that we are here to listen and, as much as possible, to serve in the way that the locals feel is best.

We developed a survey about the needs of the community. Our team went around to houses and asked questions about what people see as the greatest needs and what role we could possibly play in meeting those needs. Doing the surveys provided a great opportunity to talk about Jesus. We introduced ourselves as members of a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to demonstrate the love of Christ while serving. We even asked people what they think is the best way someone could demonstrate Jesus’ love here. This prompted a lot of questions about God and opened up doors for good conversations. In one case, Pam and Ali (members of our team) have been able to return and study the Bible several times with a lady they met doing surveys and that lady’s friend.

The other benefit to the surveys is that we now have a lot of research to help us decide how to meet needs of the community. We are going to study the surveys and brainstorm ways to help. This will be a long-term process. We want anything we do to continue after we leave, which means that we need to encourage the involvement of the locals, instead of doing everything ourselves. Helping organize the locals to solve their own problems will require developing relationships and earning their trust over a period of time.

The surveys gave us a good start to meeting new people, sharing Jesus, and investigating the needs of the community and ways we can serve.

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