Sean McGever
Most students aren’t waking up thinking, “How can I share Jesus today?” But they are thinking about their overwhelmed friends, their lonely classmates, and the chaos in the world around them. That’s the open door.
If we want students to care about evangelism, we need to stop training them like cold-callers and start forming them like everyday apprentices of Jesus. Evangelism doesn’t start with a script. It starts with compassion, with listening, with formation, and with story.
Here are five proven ways to train and motivate your students for evangelism—real, relational, Spirit-shaped evangelism that works.
- Share God’s heart for people
- Anchor your teaching in the gospel
- Help them learn to listen attentively
- Teach them the vocabulary of faith
- Promote evangelistic discipleship
1. Share God’s heart for people
“Are you motivated to evangelize?”
Ask most Christian teenagers this question, and you will discover two things: first, prior to being asked, no, they were not thinking about evangelism; and second, they likely would feel like they have to say, “Yes.”
But if you were to ask many Christian teenagers the questions below, the conversation would change:
- Do you or any of your friends feel: troubled, distressed, or overwhelmed? (Harassed)
- Do you or any of your friends feel: isolated, vulnerable, or lost? (Helpless)
These questions point to what stirred up Jesus’s compassion and command to his disciples to pray for “workers” for the harvest:
Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” (Matt 9:35–38; emphasis added)1
As New Testament scholar Leon Morris explains, the “harvest” here refers metaphorically to people; namely “people who are ripe for inclusion in the kingdom.”2 Jesus’s pre-evangelism instruction, in other words, was to pray and ask the Lord for workers to speak to people who are evangelistically ripe. And we learn from Matthew 10:5 that the answer to that prayer was the disciples themselves! “These twelve Jesus sent.”
Similarly, the right way to motivate teenagers for evangelism is to help them share God’s heart for people. Help teenagers recognize that people are harassed and helpless: troubled, distressed, and overwhelmed, and need Jesus. Help teenagers notice that many of their friends feel isolated, vulnerable, and lost. Help them notice the needs of their friends the way Jesus did. Ask them to pray for their friends and for wisdom concerning how to share Jesus with them. Then call them to be an answer to their own prayer.
2. Anchor your teaching in the gospel
Tim Keller taught what might be the simplest and most important way for students to know the gospel. Keller explained: “the gospel is a who.” And that “who” is Jesus Christ. Keller wrote, “The gospel centers on Jesus. It is about a person, not a concept; it is about him, not us. … It is a declaration about God’s Son, the man Jesus.”
Evangelism, then, is the good announcement that this Jesus is Lord. So if we want to shape students toward evangelism, we must continually re-center and re-anchor our teaching, training, and thinking on the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Years ago, I reviewed a hundred junior high discipleship plans and Bible studies. Ninety-nine of them I categorized as “behavior modification.” Only one of the plans I reviewed was centered on knowing Jesus Christ. It should not surprise us that we must confront moralistic therapeutic deism. Those of us who want to cultivate young people for evangelism must be constantly aware of the temptation of teaching the law rather than the gospel.
How do we teach students to share Jesus? We teach the story of Jesus. We must teach students:
- Who is Jesus?
- Why was Jesus born?
- What did Jesus teach?
- Why did Jesus do miracles?
- How did Jesus treat others?
- Why did Jesus die?
- Why did Jesus resurrect?
- Why did Jesus ascend to heaven?
- Why will Jesus return?
- What does Jesus’s life have to do with my life?
Returning to these questions over and over will immerse students in the gospel of Jesus.
When it comes to evangelism, some people may want to learn a straightforward gospel presentation similar to the Four Spiritual Laws, but that isn’t required. Faith comes to humans through hearing the word of God: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17 ESV). God manifests faith in Christians through the word of Christ.
The task of the evangelist is not to beg or pressure for faith because faith is not a resource their hearer can supply. The task of the evangelist is to deliver the word of (and about) Christ. Remember, as Keller explained, the gospel is a “who.” The most natural evangelistic question, then, is: “Do you know Jesus?”
3. Help them learn to listen attentively
Teaching students how to share the gospel begins with a surprising skill: listening.
When we think of “telling” and “sharing” the gospel, our first instinct is to open our mouth and start saying words. Don’t do that. Speaking is the second step in evangelism. The first step is to listen carefully.
As we saw above, in order to shape students for evangelism, we help students notice the unmet needs and longings of their friends and loved ones. Successful evangelism begins with our eyes and ears.
Listening is a powerful and immediately-available evangelistic skill for young people. Young people, by nature, may not have the life experience or education to explain and answer questions about the Bible, Jesus, and Christianity. But people of all ages can listen.
When I talk to young people (and older people, too) about evangelism, they often tell me, “I don’t know what to say.” The good news is that they don’t need to know much at all. What they must do is ask questions and listen.
Generic gospel presentations are good to have in the toolbelt, but the evangelistic presentations we find in the New Testament are never exactly the same, and often quite different depending on the audience. In the book of Acts, we see that early Christians shared the gospel in a highly contextualized and customized way aligned to the specific audience.
The end-point destination on the evangelistic-map is always the same: to announce that Jesus is Lord. But the starting point varies from person to person, so the route to the destination might vary considerably. Careful listening provides the young evangelist a customized roadmap to the destination: announcing that Jesus is Lord.
An easy way to teach students how to share the gospel is to ask them to pull out a smartphone, open the map application, and show them two essential details the app requires you to have: the “current location” and “destination.” In evangelism, the “current location” is found through using your eyes and ears. The “destination” is always Jesus. Ask students to describe the “current location” of a friend’s life, challenges, and faith. Then remind them that their friend was created to have a life oriented toward Jesus.
4. Teach them the vocabulary of faith
The landmark 2005 National Study on Youth and Religion revealed that the “vast majority” of US teenagers interviewed were “incredibly inarticulate about their faith, their religious beliefs and practices and its meaning or place in their lives.”3
Students who don’t learn to use words about their faith are more likely to be weak in their faith. Youth ministry professor Amanda Hontz Drury explains, “We are best able to thrive spiritually when we can articulate our narratives in a meaningful way.”4 What this means is that we need to provide ample opportunities for students to talk about their faith. And the ideal audience is their peers.
I have seen a significant rise in Christian clubs meeting at lunch in public schools in my community, and they are thriving. They all have one thing in common: student testimonies. Student testimonies create an evangelistic snowball effect.
The first step in helping students share their faith in Jesus is for them to notice and see God’s work in their lives. But, how?
It is common for small group discussions to begin with everyone answering an ice-breaker question, such as: “What was the high/low point [of your last week]?” By carefully adjusting this generic question, we can fine-tune questions to help students notice God’s work in their lives. Consider asking one of the following:
- Light/shadow: How did God shine his light in your life this week, and what felt like a dark or shadowy moment?
- Test/testimony: What tested you in your faith this week, and how did God help you?
- Battle/blessing: What spiritual battles did you experience this week, and how did God bless you?
- Storm/shelter: What storms did you experience in your life, and how did God provide you shelter?
Better questions improve the likelihood that students will learn to find their words about their faith. When we provide students opportunities to notice and talk about God’s work in their lives, it strengthens their faith and provides them an evangelistic narrative to testify about God.
5. Promote evangelistic discipleship
A persistent challenge when it comes to training young people for evangelism is the artificial division often imposed between evangelism and discipleship. We often separate these as two distinct steps: “first saved, then discipled.”
But what if that’s not always true, or even backwards?
Historically, catechesis often preceded baptism, with instruction and formation occurring before public commitment. Similarly, today many non-Christians begin to experience forms of discipleship—observation, imitation, and relational engagement—well before they profess faith. (Anyone familiar with youth ministry can attest to the importance of relational work.) As such, evangelism is not merely a presentation of doctrinal propositions but a relational and formational process oriented toward introducing others to life in Christ.
Consider the Alpha Course: Originally conceived as a discipleship curriculum for new believers, it proved highly effective in engaging over thirty million spiritually curious people.5 Its success suggests that formation in Christian belief and practice prior to faith is not only possible, but fruitful.
In youth ministry especially, evangelism can often be reframed as “pre-conversion discipleship.” When young people live transparently as followers of Jesus and invite others into their rhythms of life and community, they are engaging in evangelism. This approach demystifies the task for students. It also mirrors how people traveled alongside Jesus “as-is,” wherever they might have found themselves in their understanding of Jesus’s message.
Ultimately, evangelism and discipleship are not always experienced as clean sequential steps, but rather integrated movements within a single process: the Spirit-led formation of persons into communion with God through Jesus Christ.6
Here are steps leaders can take to embrace this approach:
- Redefine evangelism for your students: Teach them that evangelism is not a sales pitch or debate—it’s inviting someone to explore life with Jesus in the context of relationship.
- Call and commission “everyday evangelists”: Help students see that their normal friendships are mission fields and their faithful presence matters. Invite students to list three to five friends who are spiritually curious or struggling. Pray for these friends and encourage students to spend more time with them.
- Create opportunity for deeper conversation: In addition to events and large group meetings, insist on having groups where students can talk at length. Consider using tools like Alpha Youth, Christianity Explored, or frequent “Q&A nights.”
- Model patience and observe mileposts: Teach students that faith journeys often unfold slowly. But while practicing patience, do not hesitate to have regularly scheduled opportunities for students to take bold steps in their faith. This could mean quarterly baptism services or monthly public student testimonies.
Conclusion
If evangelism still feels intimidating to your students, that’s okay—it’s supposed to be more formational than formulaic. But here’s the good news: Your students are already evangelists. Every time they show up for a friend, share a testimony, ask a real question, or invite someone into their Jesus-shaped life, they are pointing to the king and his kingdom.
Help your students see what Jesus sees, speak what Jesus speaks, and live like Jesus lives. Train them to re-announce the good news, again and again, until it sounds like the most natural thing in the world. Because one day, it just might be.
McGever’s recommended resources on evangelism
Evangelism in the Early Church: Lessons from the First Christians for the Church Today (The Eerdmans Michael Green Collection)
Regular price: $45.99
Transforming Conversion: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation
Regular price: $23.99
Related articles
- What Evangelism Is & Why 3 Laws Are Better Than 4
- What’s on Sean McGever’s Bookshelf? 10 Top Picks on Evangelism
- Want to Open the Door to Revival? Open the Word of God.
- 9 Simple Ways to Engage Gen Z with the Bible
- How to Minister in a Disenchanted Age? 1 Peter and Re-Personalization
- All Scripture quotations are from the NIV, unless otherwise indicated.
- Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (InterVarsity Press, 1992), 239.
- Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), 131.
- Amanda Hontz Drury, Saying Is Believing: The Necessity of Testimony in Adolescent Spiritual Development (InterVarsity Press Academic, 2015), 86.
- Mark Ireland and Mike Booker, Making New Disciples: Exploring the Paradoxes of Evangelism (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015), 78.
- For a more in-depth exploration of an evangelistic theology of conversion, consider my book, Born Again: The Evangelical Theology of Conversion in John Wesley and George Whitefield (Lexham Press, 2020).
Steve Auld
Chris Bruno
Christy Chermak
Jim Wilson