Jesus speaks to a woman—half-breed Samaritan, outcast, exile and serial adulterer. He asks her for a drink of water.
Against walls of prejudice, Jesus begins to move her through the first two thresholds—from distrust to trust, from indifference to curiosity.
Researching the postmodern context, Schaupp ran across one survey that ranked “pastor” as the second most distrusted profession. The first was prostitute.
Interviews with 2,000 new believers and non-Christians revealed a pattern: Despite church distrust or a history of hurt, curiosity is piqued through loving relationship: “But then I met this person …”
Witness Communities
In working to apply the five thresholds of conversion into ministries, the authors defined three types of witness communities:
In a huddled community, witness is a concept, the presence of non-Christians rare, God moments few and conversions seldom.
In a witnessing community, witness is a value, non-Christians show up, God moments are expected and multiple conversions happen annually.
In a conversion community, witness shapes vision, non-Christians get involved, God moments become God movements and multiple conversions occur regularly—even monthly.
With collaborative help from Schaupp, Everts began the difficult work of moving Bonhomme Presbyterian from a huddled community to a conversion community. Printed stationery had proclaimed the church to be “a light on the hill.” Other than defining a geographical reality, Everts strained to see much truth in the slogan. In the 1980s, the church was the place to be seen. Anyone who was anyone in St. Louis attended: politicians, professional athletes and business giants. The list did not include effective evangelists.
It had a history. It needed a reimagining—a rebirth.
“On the whole, Bonhomme was a huddled church,” says Everts, “but we had some pockets of a witnessing community.”
Those pockets weren’t huge, but they were alive.
Seven years before his arrival, a woman named Suzy Gaddert had a heart for evangelism and introduced the “Alpha” course, a practical introduction to Christianity in the context of unhurried relationships. Over dinner, people were encouraged to sit with their neighbors and ask honest questions.
Another pocket of witness emerged with people who loved to tell stories and possessed the ability and equipment to do so. Everts came to see conversion stories as lifeblood for nourishing witness.
As Everts worked to equip leaders and resource momentum within witness pockets, he cast a wider vision from the pulpit. Hired to preach weekly messages and craft a vision for outreach, Everts raised the witness temperature by helping people see evangelism as the heartbeat of God throughout Scripture.
He also restructured programs to more effectively facilitate witness. For example, the leader of the church’s successful vacation Bible school moved to extend registration, re-insert Bring a Friend Day and switch the VBS celebration from Sunday morning to Thursday evening. Although these structural changes were inconvenient and required effort, more non-Christians began to attend.
But the biggest shift was one of perspective. “We tell our people they are carriers of the good news,” Everts says. “Rather than choose a megaphone, God has chosen to embed his good news in us, and we get the joy to share it with others.”
As he began to make strategic changes, God moments began to increase as people moved through thresholds of conversion. As an example, Everts tells the story of an Iranian couple who unexpectedly showed up at Bonhomme one Sunday.
In greeting the couple, Everts and “a couple of others who weren’t freaked out by having Muslims in the church” discovered that the husband had recently become a Christian and taken a job in the community. His wife, still a Muslim, had been the one to seek a church where they could meet Christians.
As they talked with both of them, Everts experienced a God moment by lingering in loving welcome. The couple felt at home. Curiosity built on trust, and, over time, the wife crossed the remaining thresholds and became a follower of Jesus.
God’s Business: Hear, Respond, Debrief
When the woman at the well expresses curiosity about living water, Jesus abruptly moves her to the next threshold: change.
He said, “Go call your husband and then come back.”
“I have no husband,” she said.
“That’s nicely put: ‘I have no husband.’ You’ve had five husbands, and the man you’re living with now isn’t even your husband. You spoke the truth there, sure enough.”
In surgical fashion, Jesus reveals the self-destructive path of the woman at the well, which had led to exile from her community—and from her true self. Jesus invites her to quench a deeper thirst.
Through understanding the model and mindset of Jesus as central in moving people through critical transitions, Gordon began to collaborate with Schaupp to develop leadership tools to apply the five thresholds.
“Conversion is God’s business,” says Gordon. “The process is mysterious, organic and supernatural. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use leadership tools to facilitate movement.”
In collaboration with Schaupp and InterVarsity leaders, Gordon helped develop the cycles of discipleship and leadership to test and apply the five thresholds.
Hear-Respond-Debrief defines the cycle of discipleship. Based on Jesus’ parable of seed falling on different types of ground, leaders are encouraged to hear what God was saying, respond with strategy and then debrief together.
The cycle provided flexibility to experiment, align, nurture, test and discern. When she first began to apply the five thresholds, she found many people became stuck in the second threshold, curiosity. Through debriefing—consciously testing her assumptions in interaction with other leaders—she learned that she was confusing curiosity with seeking.
Curious means comparing Jesus to Buddha, for example. Seeking involves acknowledging the need for Jesus if personal change is to occur. The discipleship cycle allowed Gordon to better define the second threshold, correct her own misconceptions and develop a more appropriate strategy and structure.
Recalibrating Change
The cycle also allowed for failure. In 2009, Gordon helped lead a multistate movement to help ministries move from huddled communities to witnessing communities. While testing good ideas with the organization’s 100 senior leaders, many of the ministries struggled with implementation. In critique, they expressed frustration about the havoc the changes were creating.