Dear Fellow Pastor,
Let me say something plainly, because I wish someone had pressed it into me earlier: Don’t hire an evangelist. Become one.
I understand the instinct. You feel the drag of expectations, the weight of teaching, administration, care, and the thousand unseen burdens of shepherding people. You look at your own wiring and think, “I’m more of a teacher… maybe even a pastor’s pastor. Evangelism isn’t really my lane.” So the solution seems obvious—bring someone in who is wired that way.
But here’s the quiet truth so many of us miss on our journeys to growth: you can only outsource so much before you outsource the very thing that gives your church life.
The calling was never meant to be divided up like a pie chart. You may be a teacher or you may lead as a shepherd. But the apostolic vision God planted in you—that original fire—was always meant to reach beyond the walls. Not as a department. As a way of life.
Your people will not become what you hire. They will become what you embody. If outreach lives on the staff page of your website, it will die in the congregation. If it lives in you, it will spread like oxygen.
Years ago, I told a pastor something simple—almost too simple. I had forgotten about it until he reminded me recently. He said it shaped the trajectory of his church over the last 15–20 years.
Two things:
First—become the evangelist. Yes. You —become — the — evangelist. Decide your way into it. Not because it feels natural, but because it is necessary. What you do, your people will do. What you avoid, they will quietly excuse.
Second—plant seeds. Galore. Daily. He remembered it as ten seeds of kindness a day. Not as a program. Not as pressure. But as a rhythm. Small, real, Spirit-led expressions of God’s kindness breaking into ordinary moments.
And he did it. Day after day after day.
No hype. No platform. No clever campaign.
Just a pastor who decided to live outwardly.
Today, he leads a thriving, healthy, momentum-filled church in a place where, by most standards, that shouldn’t have been easy.
This hasn’t been a strategy. It’s been a pattern.
Momentum doesn’t come from better staffing.
It comes from a shifted center.
You don’t need to become someone else. You don’t need to force a personality that isn’t yours. But you do need to step into the full shape of your calling—and that includes engaging the people who are not yet in the room.
Most of your community isn’t in your church, yet.
And they won’t be reached by someone you hire.
They will be reached when the shepherd smells like the street. When the leader models what it looks like to notice, to serve, to risk small moments of kindness that carry the weight of heaven.
Start small. Start today.
- Notice what others pass by.
- Offer a prayer of just ten seconds.
- Pay for someone’s coffee.
- Look people in the eye.
- Tip the next drive-thru window person.
You don’t have to feel “called” in the emotional sense. You decide your way into the calling—and the feeling often follows.
Don’t wait for momentum to come.
Live in such a way that momentum has no choice but to follow you.
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