“The Soul Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Community” by J.A. Medders and Doug Logan Jr. The Good Book Company, 2024.
I am probably the thousandth person by now to make a post like this about the “Soul-Winning Church,” but I have to say it. This book was fantastic. It was to my heart what kerosene is to a fire. Fuel!
I have lived and pastored for a long time now with an always increasing frustration and confusion as to why our churches aren’t making more disciples. Why are the baptismal waters so still? Why is so much church growth dependent on other church’s decline? What are we doing wrong or missing all together? What needs to change? I have walked around with these questions swirling around in my head, but not ever really being able to put them into words, let alone find their corresponding answers. And then this book showed up in the mail.
In only 164 pages (making it super accessible and easy to hand out to almost anyone) Medders and Logan do a massive job, and they do it well. They give hope to pastors like me that our little churches can be soul-winning churches; that evangelism can be ingrained in the culture of our churches and not just be another category of ministry, and that we can love the people that come from other places, without settling for transfer growth as the ultimate means of growth.
Medders and Logan identify in the book six key areas of focus for becoming a church that reaches the lost. Each key is just as convicting, convincing and compelling as the next, well at the same time being so obviously biblical. I am not lying when I tell you that I only made it through chapter one before stopping to spend the next week reflecting on the first key and laying out plans for walking through the chapter with my elders at our next meeting (which is exactly what we did).
I think if you’re a pastor you need to read this. I think if your plumber you need to read this. I think that this book needs to be read by home groups, men’s groups, women’s groups, youth groups, and by everyone else in the church that’s not in a group. At the end of the day, I don’t think that I am the only one feeling this perplexing frustration about the lack of souls being won. Something is missing, and Medders and Logan identify that missing piece. They remind readers how central soul-winning is to the mission of the church, and then they go to work on equipping the church for that mission.
We have got to be churches that are consumed with winning souls, because Christ is consumed with winning souls! And if there is a book that can play even the smallest part in further fueling that passion and preparing Christians to walk it out, then in my mind, that is a must read.
As Spurgeon writes (and as Medders and Logan quote him saying), “Soul-winning is the chief business of the Christian minister; indeed, it should be the main pursuit of every believer. We should each say with Simon peter, “I go afishing,” and with Paul our aim should be, “That I might by all means save some.”[1]
Grab it, read it, and lets go!
[1] C.H. Spurgeon, The Soul Winner: How to Lead Sinners to the Savio (Fleming H. Revell. 1895), p 9.