Your Church Needs to Reach the Most Receptive People

Pastor, you’re surrounded by dirt.

To be more precise, you’re surrounded by soil—all kinds of soil. In your community, you have people who are ready to respond to the gospel and people who aren’t. Your job is to identify the good soil and plant your seed there.

Jesus clearly taught this notion of spiritual receptivity in the Parable of the Sower and the Soils (Matthew 13:3-23). Like different kinds of soil respond differently to seeds being planted, people respond differently to the Good News. Everyone is not equally ready to receive Christ. Some people are very open to hearing the gospel, while others are closed. In the Parable of the Sower and the Soils, Jesus explained that there are hard hearts, shallow hearts, distracted hearts, and receptive hearts.
 
If you want your ministry to maximize its evangelism effectiveness, you need to focus your energy on the right soil. That’s the soil that will produce a hundredfold harvest. Take a cue from those who work with actual dirt. No farmer in his right mind would waste seed—a precious commodity—on infertile ground that won’t produce a crop. In the same way, careless, unplanned broadcasting of the gospel is poor stewardship. The message of Christ is too important to waste time, money, and energy on nonproductive methods and soil. We need to be strategic in reaching the world. We should focus our efforts where they will make the greatest difference.

If you look closely, you’ll see that even within your church’s target group, there are various pockets of receptivity. Spiritual receptivity comes and goes in people’s lives like an ocean tide. People are more open to spiritual truth at certain times than at others. Many factors determine spiritual receptivity. God uses a variety of tools to soften hearts and prepare people to be saved.

So, who are the most receptive people? I believe there are two broad categories: people in transition and people under tension. That’s because God uses both change and pain to get people’s attention and make them receptive to the gospel.

People in transition: Any time people experience major change, whether positive or negative, they develop a hunger for spiritual stability. This has occurred in America during the last few decades. The massive changes in our world have left us frightened and unsettled and have produced an enormous interest in spiritual matters. Writer Alvin Toffler said that people look for “islands of stability” when change becomes overwhelming. This is a wave the church needs to ride.

People are also more receptive to the gospel when they face changes like a new marriage, a new baby, a new home, a new job, or a new school. That’s why churches can generally grow faster in newer communities where new residents are continually moving in than they do in stable, older communities where the same people have lived for decades.

People under tension: God uses all kinds of emotional pain to get people’s attention—like the pain of divorce, death of a loved one, unemployment, financial problems, marriage and family difficulties, loneliness, resentment, guilt, and other stresses. When people are fearful or anxious, they often look for something greater than themselves to ease the pain and fill the void they feel. 

Based on my many years of pastoring, I offer the following list of what I believe were the 10 most receptive groups of people that we reached out to over the years at Saddleback:

• Second-time visitors to your church (unbelievers who come, regardless of the reason)
• Close friends and relatives of new converts
• People going through a divorce
• Those who feel their need for a recovery program (any type: alcohol, drugs, sexual addiction, etc.)
• First-time parents
• Terminal illness of self or family member
• Couples with major marriage problems
• Parents having difficulty with their children
• Recently unemployed/major financial problem
• New residents in the community

A great benefit of focusing on receptive people is that you don’t have to pressure them to receive Christ. I used to tell my staff: “If the fruit is ripe, you don’t have to yank it!”

Your church might make a goal of developing a specific program or outreach to each of the most receptive people groups in your community. Of course, if you begin to do this, someone will likely say, “Pastor, I think that before we try to reach all these new people, we should try to reactivate all the old members that have stopped coming.” This is a guaranteed strategy for church decline! It doesn’t work. 

It usually takes about five times more energy to reactivate a disgruntled or carnal member than it does to win a receptive unbeliever. I believe God has called pastors to catch fish and feed sheep—not to corral goats! The truth is that some of your inactive members probably need to join somewhere else for a number of reasons. 

Growing churches focus on reaching receptive people. Non-growing churches focus on re-enlisting inactive people.

Once you know who your target is, who you are most likely to reach, and who are the most receptive people in your target group, then you’re ready to establish an evangelism strategy for your church. So my suggestion to you is this: Start checking the soil.

This article is adapted fromThe Purpose Driven Churchby Rick Warren.