One of my summer reads was a great new book from Jeff Medders and Doug Logan: The Soul Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Culture.

The Keys are Praying for Conversions, the Posture of Your Converts, Preparing for Conversions, Personal Evangelism, Preaching for Conversions, and a Process for New Converts.

Some great thinking on these essential elements of an evangelistic culture. The book could be a great tool to help build or to revitalize these areas of your church. It even offers an evaluation tool to score your church’s effectiveness in these six areas. It’s here:

I scored my church at 31 out of 60, so it’s given me some good leadership challenges to work on this Fall.

Here are some favorite quotes and highlights from the book:

• Lost people can’t make themselves “unlost.”
• Most church growth is actually transfer growth.
• Jesus calls us to make disciples, not move them.
• “Effective Evangelism begins with seeking the Effector of the evangel.”
• “Diminished prayer reveals elevated levels of confidence in our natural abilities.”
• Great section on How to Revive your prayer meetings: Pray more + Vary the voices + Try a different time + Start Small + Lead + Celebrate Answers to Prayer + Clarify Expectations
• Are we forming the kind of people who evangelize? Is our discipleship forming the kind of believers in whom evangelism bubbles up as a natural part of their lives?
• Excellent chapter on eight Postures that give rise to evangelistic people: Holiness, Gentleness, Patience and Dependence, Eternal, Boldness, Hospitable, Christ-excited, Ambitious
• Good works prepare the hearer and gives a platform to the teller.
• On Good Works – Two Dangers to Avoid: Treating mercy ministries as equal to evangelism. Treating mercy ministries as optional to evangelism.
• We cannot be evangelistic churches without a culture of every member personal evangelism.
• The problem is not that people reject our witness so much as we do not witness in the first place.

Find some case studies of churches applying these six keys well and other resources at http://www.thegoodbook.com/soul-winning.