Visit SeminaryNow.com for a free preview of the new course offerings. At checkout, receive a limited-time 15% discount with coupon code TAKE15. Or check out the group pricing for your staff and lay leaders. Check it out!

Our hope is that it will help you embrace the concept of revival for yourself, and start to hunger for something more in your personal life, community and in the world around you.

You can order it at Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

If you do end up using it, I’d love to hear feedback on the guide and how it was helpful or unhelpful to you!

If you buy Beyond Awkward this week, Beau is offering 4 free resources.

• A new Ebook: Breakthrough Evangelism
• Seminar Notes: Beyond Awkward Spiritual Conversations Training
• Evangelistic Bible study leader notes on Acts 8
• Case Study: A man’s transformation from jaded to bold in evangelism

Buy the book and get the bonuses here:

Also, check out a post he wrote on the tensions we face in evangelism — to be awkwardly silent, or awkwardly zealous. He wants to help us avoid the extremes and move beyond the awkward into authentic witness of Jesus.

For now, it’s at Vimeo, but will later be included into the free app in a future update. I hope it’s helpful!

We really believe, as we write, that “evangelism is the discipleship of skeptics and seekers,” and that if we’re serious about discipleship, we also need to be serious about being humble, faithful and winsome witnesses of the hope that we have. Here’s the blurb from the exponential website:

In this new FREE eBook, the authors help leaders understand two things: 1) Why every believer needs to be doing evangelism and leading people to faith: and 2) How you can create a culture of witness in your church or faith community. For too long we were pressuring people, and now we have become passive in evangelism. Crosetto and Choung say the time is now to seek a third and better way!

Let us know if the resource is helpful! And you find 14 other free eBooks from Exponential as well!

I don’t know if I covered all of the bases, but I’m excited about the role of listening prayer with people who have yet to follow Jesus. I have a hunch that God speaks to all people, not just to people who put the label “Christian” on their lives.

When I bought my green Honda Civic fifteen years ago, I started to notice all of the other Civics on the road. It’s like my eyes were opened to them, once I started noticing. In the same way, when I started looking for the role of listening prayer in a person’s coming to faith, I started seeing it everywhere. After making calls to faith and following up to hear someone’s story, it seemed that an experience with God was instrumental in their making a decision to trust Jesus with their lives.

That makes sense, doesn’t it?

In the age of modernity, truth — particularly propositional truth — had authority. But in postmodernity, experience carries the day.

So I started experimenting with teaching people to hear God’s voice and then inviting them to listen — regardless of their faith background — and to see if He says anything at all. Then, I’ll invite someone to follow Jesus afterward, and if they’ve heard from God, they’ll often give their lives to him.

I trained on that, sharing some of my stories.

Let me share an exciting outcome. A staff worker from Iowa, Rachel, went back to her campus the day after that conference ended. She was talking with a student, Chelsea. With the training in mind, she felt led to give some impromptu teaching on hearing God’s voice. They did some listening prayer, and Chelsea heard the phrase: “feeling like I don’t measure up.” She then looked up and said, “That’s exactly what I feel! I feel so guilty acting like a Christian when I have so many questions and doubts and know I am just acting. I have been looking at all these other religions lately and don’t know what to believe.”

So Rachel invited her to do listening prayer again to see if some of those doubts could be addressed, and they were. Then Rachel asked, “What would it look like to start something new with Jesus today? Would you be willing to follow him even if all your answers aren’t answered right away?”

And Chelsea said, “Yes!”

Sometimes I wonder if there are times we just need to get out of the way, and let God speak directly to people who don’t yet know him. In my experience, one word from God is worth a thousand sermons.

I spoke on the synergy of men and women in partnership, and was led to offer a history lesson.

My main question came from the subtitle of Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: how does the obscure, marginal Jesus movement become the dominant religious force in the Western world?

In his book, he takes a sociologist’s lens on Christian history, and says that without mass conversions or events, Christianity could achieve 5 to 7.5 million adherents by 300 AD just by having 40% growth each decade through relational evangelism.

Then, with each chapter, he unpacks a counter-intuitive reason why the Christian faith was growing. Christianity reached the middle and upper classes, and not just the poor. Their mission to Jewish people was rather successful, instead of unsuccessful. Christians offered basic care to the sick during plagues when their own pagan relatives left them for dead, increasing the chance of survival nine-fold instead of just relying on miracles. Christians were concentrated in urban areas where they could welcome the steady inflow from surrounding areas, and they could minister to the urban chaos and grind, due to the strength of their community. And during persecution, the way martyrs would face their death greatly impressed the Greco-Roman world.

But there was one more factor: women had an elevated standing within the Christian community.

“Christianity was unusually appealing,” writes Rodney Stark, “because within Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”

His reasons from a sociological perspective are interesting. In a Greco-Roman world where men vastly outnumbered the women, the women outnumbered the men in Christian circles. They were usually the primary converts, who would later lead their husbands to faith. And the Christian faith gave them incredible advantages: in a world where men were expected to be promiscuous, Christianity demanded fidelity for both men and women. In that way, women enjoyed higher security and equality in their marriages. In a time when women were often given over in marriage by age 12, Christian women married later and had more choice. And where the Greco-Roman world didn’t want many children, Christians were encouraged to be fruitful and multiply, and with their prohibitions against infanticide (which often targeted girls) and abortion, more female babies were allowed to live.

But in all of this, women were also leaders of the church. Many women were martyred, and those who were killed for their faith often held positions of authority in the church. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, they specified that deaconesses needed to be single and over 40. The very fact that they had qualifications for deaconesses must mean that, obviously, they existed.

“Nevertheless,” writes Stark, “there is a virtual consensus among historians of the early church as well as biblical scholars that women held positions of honor and authority within early Christianity.”

It seemed that Christian women enjoyed far more privileges and status than other women in the Greco-Roman world, which leads to a question:

Do Christian women today enjoy more privilege and status than women outside of our communities?

For if the answer isn’t in the positive, I wonder what that means for the health of the church. Because when women did, it helped a marginal sect become the dominant religious force in the Western world.

My question is: what happens when they don’t?