Dave Jensen is a seasoned evangelist and Assistant Director of Evangelism & New Churches for the Sydney Anglican Diocese. Here he shares his wisdom on running an effective mission.

You work full-time helping churches to sharpen their evangelism to the lost. What’s one common mistake you’re seeing in churches?
One common mistake is for people to think that getting individual Christians to conduct solo personal evangelism is the most important factor in reaching people for Christ.
Yes, it’s a great thing we all want! But it doesn’t automatically guarantee an effective ministry that sees lots of people converted.
We need to have an eagle-eyed focus on where and how non-Christians are actually converted, and there’s three key shifts that it’s worth thinking about.
They’re shifts that need to take place in the hearts and minds of the different groups of people at all layers of evangelism: non-Christians, Christians and Christian leaders.
What are the three shifts?
Shift 1 | Shift 2 | Shift 3 |
Death to life | Disciple to disciple-maker | Distracted and discouraged to delighted |
The first shift that we’re aiming for is to see people moved from death to life: non-Christians becoming Christians.
How that happens is through the proclamation of the gospel, and people responding with repentance and faith. So, we want to have non-Christians engaged with the gospel.
Where does that happen? Over 2000 years of church history, we’ve seen that there’s almost always four things at play: The word, plus people, plus time, plus prayer. Of course, how those four principles are applied changes as time goes on.
70 years ago the Billy Graham crusades came to Australia, and thousands of people were converted. 50 years before that, it was something else. 100 years before that, it was different again.
So in our context today, the first step is to ask: where can we apply word, people, time, and prayer most effectively to see non-Christians converted?
So the first shift is for non-Christians: aiming to move them from dead to disciple. What’s the second one?
Shift 1 | Shift 2 | Shift 3 |
Death to life | Disciple to disciple-maker | Distracted and discouraged to delighted |
The second shift is from disciple to disciple-maker. For Christians to become actively involved in evangelism. We’re driven towards that for three reasons.
The first reason is for the glory of God. Christians glorify God whenever they proclaim the gospel.
The second reason is because we want to see Christians fulfilling the Great Commission. How can people become like Jesus if they’re not involved in evangelism? That doesn’t make any sense.
The third reason is because God has shown time and time again that he uses ordinary Christians in all kinds of ways in the process of seeing his people converted.
And when you think about it, that makes sense, as most people who become Christians have one thing in common: they know a Christian.
Now, that doesn’t always mean that the Christian friend is going to sit down to read the Bible with them one-to-one, and lead them to the Lord. We hope they would!
But we’re not going to depend on that; for two reasons. Firstly, one-to-one evangelism is not how everyone gets converted. It’s not how most people get converted! Secondly, most Christians indicate that as much as they know they should evangelise, they actually don’t do it.
So, as a church, we want to ensure we’ve established effective ways to engage outsiders with the gospel. What’s been most fruitful for churches right now have been gospel courses (e.g. The Discover Series or Christianity Explored).
Moreover, we want to work hard at growing the congregation in conviction about evangelism, building their confidence, and improving their competence.
What’s the third shift?
Shift 1 | Shift 2 | Shift 3 |
Death to life | Disciple to disciple-maker | Distracted and discouraged to delighted |
Shift three is of a Christian leaders moving from being distracted and discouraged to delighted.
Shifts one and two usually only happen in a church because a third shift has taken place, and it actually takes place well beforehand.
That shift is the conviction of the heart, the soul, and the minds of the church leaders.
It’s the conviction that Jesus has given us a role to seek and to save the lost.
It’s the conviction that we’re driven by the eternal realities of heaven and hell, and that as a part of our church life, we expect and work towards seeing people converted.
It’s shaping the mission and vision of our church from being focused on the barns (people already in our church) to the fields (the lost living around our church).

This third shift has huge implications for how we allocate resources to shift number one and shift number two. We should think carefully about how they interact.
How can this framework of the three shifts help churches?
There’s a few ways thinking think way about evangelism is helpful.
Firstly, it helps you focus on the different parts of evangelism appropriately. What often happens in evangelism is that because we want to see both non-Christians become Christians AND Christians involved in evangelism, we can end up thinking they’re actually the same thing.
In other words, it’s very common to end up thinking ‘if we simply get our Christians evangelising then we will just see non-Christians converted’. Yet that very rarely works; for a range of reasons. Primarily because individual solo evangelism is not how most people are converted.
So, taking your time to think about all three shifts separately, ascertaining what you’re hoping to achieve in each, before thinking how they interact with each other, gives you a helpful way of gaining clarity in your planning and hopefully helping you accomplish both shifts in the life of your church.
The final shift, for leaders, is critical. In all the time I’ve watched churches do evangelism, the most common pattern in churches seeing evangelistic fruit is a leader who is humbly persistent in prioritising the eternal needs of invisible people not yet among us in the life of church.
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Resources:
Mission by Dave Jensen: The nuts and bolts of how the programs and structures a church should put into place to get mission going in church.
Fire Up! is a new podcast to help everyday Christians get equipped to evangelise. Hosts Ling Shooter, Dave Jensen and Dan Baker speak about all things evangelism: the who, what, where, why and how. Find the answers to questions such as, what is the difference between evangelism and witnessing? What stops us from evangelising? How do we share our testimonies meaningfully?
Reach Australia’s National Conference 2025 focuses on mission. We’ll be looking at the three shifts in detail and its implications for churches. The theme is Urgent: The Necessary Task of Mission Before Christ Returns. Join hundreds of gospel workers 19-22 May 2025.