When Seed-Sowing Meets Prayer: Reflections on a Year of Gospel Proclamation
How do you measure a year’s worth of evangelism? By conversions? By opportunities? By seeds planted?
This past Sunday, our evangelist stood before our congregation and delivered something we don’t often see in churches today—a comprehensive evangelism report. Not a vague commitment to “sharing Jesus more.” Not a theoretical sermon about the importance of evangelism. But an actual account of what one church family accomplished when they took the Great Commission seriously for twelve months.
As I listened to Eric recount the tens of thousands of gospel tracts distributed, the $100,000+ invested in benevolence ministry, the countless conversations on street corners and college campuses, I found myself wrestling with a tension that runs through all faithful evangelistic work: the gap between extensive sowing and visible harvest. Eric preached from Ephesians 4:11-16, and in those verses, we see both the blueprint for how evangelism should function in the church and the reminder that fruit comes from God’s power, not merely our programs.
The Evangelist’s Job Description
Eric opened by explaining his role at Howell Bible Church, drawing directly from Ephesians 4:11-16. Paul lists various officers—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers—and then gives their purpose: “for the equipping of the saints, for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.”
This is crucial. The evangelist doesn’t do all the evangelism. The evangelist equips the saints to do evangelism. It’s the difference between hiring a missionary and becoming a missionary church. Eric emphasized this repeatedly: “We’ve done this together. This is not anything that I do by myself. It’s us doing it, not me.”
Eric referenced my book The Forgotten Officer, which explores why this office exists and how churches can recover it. That book, published in 2016, described much of the theological foundation for why we planted Howell Bible Church in 2014. From our founding, we’ve been committed to the conviction that Ephesians 4 presents a specific office within the church whose purpose is to equip the entire body for evangelistic work. This isn’t just semantics—it’s been part of our DNA from day one. Eric is our third evangelist, and he joined a church culture that already recognized and valued this office. The fruit we’re seeing this year isn’t the result of a new innovation—it’s what happens when this biblical model is lived out faithfully over time. It is Christ’s design for His church.
When Paul uses the body metaphor in Ephesians 4, he’s showing us that every part must work for the body to grow. The evangelist is one part in that body, but his effectiveness multiplies when he activates all the other parts. Eric’s year-and-four-months (so far) at HBC has continued to demonstrate this model in action. The office of evangelist isn’t about one person’s heroic efforts. It’s about systematic equipping that mobilizes an entire congregation. Together, we can do more.
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