Five-Fold Ministry: Role of Evangelist

Another five-fold ministry role in Ephesians 4 is that of an evangelist. An evangelist is a person with a God-given gift for winning people to Jesus Christ. Evangelists tend to be able to engage in conversations with total strangers easily and find natural in-roads to preaching the gospel.

Evangelists typically move around all the time. They usually travel, meet people, and lead them to the Lord everywhere. This is a blessing and also presents a problem at the same time. These people are very gifted at leading people to the Lord, but are not as gifted at discipleship and follow-up.

Many people tell the evangelist that they should disciple the people they lead to the Lord, but actually an evangelist should partner with someone who is pastoral and have them oversee the discipleship aspect. We should not put an unnecessary weight on the evangelist to thoroughly disciple people, but we should teach them how to properly incorporate new believers into the body.

If someone with a gift of evangelism leads people to the Lord in the midst of their work or school, then they should disciple them out of relationship. However, if that person is an evangelist and leads people to the Lord everywhere, they need to plug them in with people who are gifted at discipleship and follow-up. This is where the evangelistic person teams up with those who are pastoral.

An apostolic person sees the evangelistic gifting on a person and sees the need for a church to be established because of new converts. Then, the apostolic person also identifies those who have a pastoral calling and plugs the new believers into discipleship groups led by the pastoral-type people. The evangelist should keep evangelizing and utilize team ministry for the discipleship process.

Evangelists—along with apostolic people—have a tendency to get busy doing too many different things at once, and constantly have a need to focus and not become overly committed in too many areas. They are constantly seeing new horizons and new people to lead to the Lord—this is both a wonderful gift in one respect, and an area that needs to constantly be called back to focus on the other hand. Many evangelists will have many ideas of how to mobilize mass works of evangelism.

Although an evangelist's primary role is to evangelize, they should also call the body of Christ as a whole into the task of evangelism. An evangelist must exhort, train, and teach others in the body to evangelize—even those who are not gifted in that area. Also, they should equip and encourage the body to receive the new believers and disciple them.

Furthermore, an evangelist who lives a life of prayer and weeping for the lost will not only equip others in evangelism, but can also impart a burden of intercession for lost souls and bringing in the harvest. It is necessary for an evangelist to have a life of prayer, not only to impart burdens for souls, but also to release an open atmosphere over those who are being evangelized.

 

Also, once the seed is planted, the evangelist should pray for that seed to not be robbed, but to grow and bear fruit. An evangelist who has a life of prayer will be able to stayed focused on God’s heart and do only what he sees the Father doing rather than being scattered in many different directions.