Eleven Effective Ways to Win Souls
Evangelist Tim Downs

The following list will provide 11 effective ways of winning souls that have been working for years in our ministry and in our personal soul winning efforts. Each of the ones I will list here are not just ideas, but proven effective ways to win the lost. We trust you will be able to use these methods to grow your church and increase the efforts to reach the lost in your community! We do not believe we have all of the answers or the only answers; we truly just want to share what works for us and what has been being used in hundreds of other churches to reach the lost.

You can also always go to our web site for more detailed information about each of the programs listed. I will start with the most effective way we have learned to win souls and go from there. The Heaven or Hell method has been an amazing tool that has made winning the lost very easy. People have used it all across the nation and in many foreign countries as well.

1) Heaven or Hell:

Heaven or Hell is a method of personal evangelism that we have been given from God to reach the multitudes. This form of evangelism produces souls more effectively than any other method I have known. You can watch a video of how it works on our web site www.gowinsouls.com click on the picture of the African American man with his hands in the air and the box says Do You Want To Go To Heaven Or Hell.

You can also download the Heaven or Hell Dialogue document on our web site by clicking the Download Resources Button and then Outreach Material and then the Heaven or Hell Dialogue.doc This will give you a word for word document that you can use to remember what we say.

We recommend also using this method in your church services, many of the churches that are seeing such amazing growth are using this tool in the pews during the altar call they will have trained leaders go ask the Heaven or Hell question to the guest that do not come to the altar. The amazing thing is that the records show that almost 95% of the people asked during the altar call get up and repent and are baptized after being asked this question.

2) Backslider or Prodigal Program

This is a program designed to reach out to all of the backsliders in your area. Basically we are getting together a list of all the people who have left our churches and sending them the first month a CD with music and a card and each month after you will be sending them a card. With the list of backsliders you will want to distribute this to all the saints to use for a prayer guide. We will want to pray for each person on our list daily. It is important for the Pastor to remind the church regularly about the need for backslider’s information.

3) Sunday School Seed Program
This program reaches into the homes of our Sunday School children through a packet that is created to send home as a seed. Basically we make up folders that have the following information in them and send them home to each family of the children who come to our Sunday Schools. This program is very effective and is a great way to reach the parents of our children! Here is what we suggest putting in these folders. You can get the folders at any office store; they have the pockets on the inside.

* Music CDBible Study (Tim’s Bible Study is free and effective)Letter from PastorChurch Bulletin if you have one each weekChurch Schedule of Services or Events calendarMcDonald’s gift cards if affordable

4) Court House Program

This program is very effective. You want to have a couple of people working in this program. You will want to find out the schedule at the court house for all of the court sessions i.e. Criminal, Divorce, Bankruptcy and Traffic. One thing you can be sure of when people are going through any type of situation that brings them to court they are in need of prayer and willing to receive it!

If you have people who can stand outside of the court room with a name badge from your church and possibly a nice sign that says “Prayer Request Taken” they can greet people and have a nice little book to record the prayer request of the people. In most court situations you have the person going to court and also their families, this is a great way to serve your community and show your church loves people and is willing to pray for them. The person who does this should make sure to dress nice and be very friendly and compassionate. Be sure to have plenty of church cards to offer people.

5) Free Cooking Class

This is a program that your older or younger ladies can do. If you have ladies auxiliary they can head this class up. Many times the elderly ladies do not feel there is a program for them to reach souls, here is one they can use! You will want several women to get together and have recipe cards of simple things they can prepare. Make up flyers that are exciting and tell people your church is offering free cooking classes!

Take these flyers to all of the battered women’s shelters, wick offices, welfare offices or anywhere single and hurting mothers will be found. In the class you will just basically have one person per week show how to prepare one recipe. You will want to show the women how to make it and then sit down with them and fellowship and eat it. The first thing you will want to do is teach them to pray before their meals! Also you will not want to preach to them, use this as a fellowship tool, have some soft Christian music playing in the background and just show your self friendly! Each week other women from your church can teach her recipe.

6) Learn the English Language free!

This program will be very helpful in the next few months. We are seeing more and more Hispanic families in our communities and we can reach them with this type of ministry. Basically you will need someone who knows Spanish. They do not have to be a teacher or professor just someone who can speak and write Spanish and English. The person will want to teach 10-15 words per week. You can advertise to every Hispanic person in your area with flyers and news print. Once you have a group of people coming make sure to love them and let them know about your church services.

7) Sunday School Give Away Program

This is a very effective program to build you Sunday school. You will want to have a give away at your church and make flyers that list the items you will be giving away. Make this exciting, do not use words like Acts 2:38 and One God and all the other religious terms, just advertise Blessing Our Community through Giving. You can give away a couple of hundred dollars worth of prized and reach many souls! We have a sample flyer on our web site that you can use. (www.gowinsouls.com) you will want to hand out these flyers all across your community.

Apartment complexes, stores, schools where ever you see people. One of the best gifts to give is a free bicycle. If you have 25 families in your church who will commit to giving a donation of $100.00 through a period of one year you can have a bike give away each week and be known as the church that gives away bicycles! It will not take long for the community of children to hear about that! Door hangers are very effective in this program and others to be effective in reaching tons of families! You will want to choose several apartment complexes that you can basically adopt.

You will want to visit there each week, take fruit snacks or some type of free candy each week and a flyer. Stay in contact with the children! You can purchase boxes of fruit snacks from Sam’s Club for $7.85 per box each box has 72 packages of fruit snacks in them and are very effective in giving to people and opening up the door to talk to them.

8) Witnessing in Restaurants

This is an instruction sheet helping people understand how important it is to act appropriate in restaurants. Each person needs to have a copy of this! The Apostolics are not the only church that act crazy in restaurants however we look different than any other Christian so attention is drawn to us and the separation from the world is a way that people know who we are. We have to be very careful how we act in public and also use this time to be an effective witness. You can down load this at www.gowinsouls.com.

9) Youth Outreach Program

Each week we end up giving our kids 15-20 bucks to go out with their friends after church to eat. If you have 10 young people they can take $5.00 per person put it in a can and now they have $50.00. Take the $50.00 to Little Caesars Pizza, get 5 large pizzas for a total of $25.00 this is plenty of pizza for like 25-30 people then you buy 2-3 12 packs of Coke and Mountain Dew that will cost you another $15.00 you have $10.00 left to go to wal-mart and buy a cheap basketball.

Now you have pizza, soft drinks and a basketball, take it to a park where there are a bunch of people playing ball and announce you are having a free pizza party and also going to give away a Basketball! You will meet tons of new friends, eat pizza with them and witness! Be sure you take church guest registration cards with you and church cards and flyers. You will use the guest cards to get information, you tell the people it’s for the basketball give away.

Once everyone signs up and you eat have one of the guest draw the guest card for the winner. Now, you have all the information from the people who were glad to give it to you so they could win a ball, your youth have had fun and ate pizza and witnessed and it only cost them $5.00!
Of course if you have more youth or chip in $10.00 per person you can obviously have a bigger party this keeps your youth busy reaching souls and not going to local restaurants complaining and talking about how terrible life is!

10) Sticky Notes

You can purchase sticky notes in bright yellow and have your church info printed on it for less than .1 cent per sticky note. You will want to make sure that the top line of text is in large letters and says “invitation”. You will want to list the church service times, phone number, web address if you have one and any other info, it is not recommended that you put a bunch of church words like revival, acts 2:38, one God, Jesus name stuff yes we believe that to be the message however someone who reads your sticky note for the first time out of the world will not know what any of that means. You can use these sticky notes all over! Pass out stacks of 100 to each family and have them start sticking them everywhere! Here is one web site that carries these: http://www.bizforms.com/postit.htm

11) Hospital Ministry

You will need to purchase at least 100 small gift bags; you can find them on most any search engine by typing in wholesale gift bags. Once you have them you will need to purchase travel size Scope Mouth Wash, Chap Stick, and Lotions. You will also want to order some precut prayer clothes, or have someone from your church cut them you can buy them from the internet with your church name address and phone number on them which I suggest.

Place all of these items in the bags along with a church card and a card with your service times; take them to the local hospital. You just go to every room where someone is staying and hand them the gift bag and tell them you will be praying for them.

God Bless,

Evangelist Tim Downs

The article “Eleven Effective Ways to Win Souls” written by Evangelist Tim Downs was excerpted from www.Gowinsouls.com web site, May 2009.

This article may be copyrighted and may be used for study and research purposes.