According to recent research, only 25% of Christians think it’s their job to share their faith. Do you struggle to tell the gospel to the neighborhoods you drive through on your way to church programs? What are the timeless principles of evangelism found in the book of Acts?

In this Q&A—in time for the International Day for the Unreached (June 4, 2017)—Peyton Jones (@PeytonJonesPunk) talks about his book, Reaching the Unreached: Becoming Raiders of the Lost Art (Zondervan, 2017).

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There’s a not-so-subtle allusion to Indiana Jones in the subtitle of your book and in the cover. Explain what you find inspiring about Indiana Jones.

Peyton Jones: Indiana has an unassuming day job. Glasses, bow ties, archeology (before it was cool). Nobody expects that he has an inner adventurer that’d rather be out in the jungle on some adventure. I think that every believer has this hidden, yet reluctant adventurer inside of them in the form of the Holy Spirit, who was deposited in us for, among other things, mission. We settle for the classroom, but the adventure is out there.

You were once close to becoming the senior pastor at a megachurch, but your life took a very different turn. Describe your story of ministry.

Peyton Jones: I thought I wanted to be the next Spurgeon or Lloyd-Jones as a young man. Those guys are still among my heroes, but my goals to be like them really stemmed from wanting people to hear me talk. The worst part about that was that in the life I pictured for myself, I was the center of attention who only expected people to listen. I have new heroes now. Wesley, William Booth, and others who got out on the streets, and brought people with them. They activated others, and turned them loose in the power of the Spirit to transform society around them.

You turn to the book of Acts throughout your book. What can we learn from Acts about what the church should look like and do?

Peyton Jones: We live in the age of webinars and online courses that promise the silver bullet solutions. The problem is they don’t deliver. Yet Jesus promised power; real power to the apostles if they waited on him. Peter said the promise was for them and their children, and as many as God would call. It’s a perpetual promise. It’s our unwillingness to maintain the tension between going and waiting that creates most of impotence today.

Power was promised in connection with mission. That’s why the missionaries have all the great stories. They’ve been called to go, and they’ve went. As a result of putting themselves in situations where they’re out of their depth, the Holy Spirit turns up as promised. Why? Because they’re doing things that require his assistance. They actually NEED him for what they’re doing. Placing ourselves in missional postures today will create the same results as we obey by both going and waiting.

You say, “The church has substituted fun instead of adventure.” As someone who has spent a lot of time overseas doing church planting, what do you think of the state of the American church?

Peyton Jones: Not to sound like a fuddy duddy here but I think that if you’ve been around for a few decades, it’s easy to see that our churches have largely turned to entertainment as a means of keeping butts in the pews. But keeping butts in the pews was never the point. Weren’t we supposed to be turning them out of them? Proliferating? Spreading?

The problem with entertainment as worship, or spiritual sustenance is that it’s like cotton candy. It’s eating, but it’s not providing substance or nutrition. Mission does that.

Think back to when you’ve ever gone on a short term mission trip. Isn’t that where your faith came alive? Anyone who’s come back from the field can’t go back to business as usual. I believe that many of our young people have left the church because they haven’t seen it in action. They’ve seen it in entertainment and it leaves them empty. Mission will reverse that trend. Young people get Christianity when they see it in action. They respect it then.

What happens to Christians if they don’t follow God’s call to make disciples? What is the role that the Holy Spirit plays in all of this, and how can we experience the power of the Holy Spirit?

Peyton Jones: When a believer doesn’t follow the call to make disciples, their spiritual gifts atrophy. When Paul said “stir up the gift of God in you” it was an admonition to not let the passion die out.

Our gifts lie very close to our passions. That’s why when you use your gifts, you feel alive! When you don’t, you feel bored. The thrill of feeling your gifts come alive is really the thrill of the Holy Spirit channeling through you to show the world what Jesus looks like. It’s him with a “you suit” on. He wears you like the yellow Bruce Lee suit, and you start doing some spiritual kung-fu…and kicking some butt for the kingdom (can I say that?).

In your book you describe “gift-driven ministry.” What does that look like?

Peyton Jones: Gift-driven ministry comes from not wanting to be the central figure in a church. My first book Church Zero was about team ministry, which is the first step in a leader not taking charge, but allowing Jesus to lead through a team. I took that from Ephesians 4, when Paul mentions the 5 roles of leadership, but the point of the verse was this: “to equip the saints for the work of the ministry.” That means that church and Christianity are participatory sports, whereas we’ve made them spectator sports. Our churches are interactive because of this. Interaction means that people’s gifts become used. That’s why we sit in small groups on Sundays in our service, the chairs organized into semi-circles throughout the room. It says, “You’re a part of this. You’re going to be interacting here.” Sitting in rows staring at the backs of people’s heads says, “You’re going to be an audience. Sit down, shut up, and just listen.”

You write that your natural inclination has actually been to hate people! How has being a Christian affected your compassion for people?

Peyton Jones: I think all of our natural inclinations is to hate people! I think I’m just honest about it in this book. What I argue is that love, forgiveness, and all of the fruit of the Spirit is a supernatural experience. It’s not something that we work up. But when we’re on mission to see people saved, those things flow through us more readily. It’s because we’ve adopted the missionary posture of Jesus who came not to be served, but to serve.

You point out that the entire book of Acts “practically takes place outside.” Why is it important to be witnessing in public spaces?

Peyton Jones: Buildings are helpful in that they serve as a gathering hub, but the people of God gathered outside too. Crowds are kind of a thing in the New Testament, but the crowds gathered outside of the four walls, not behind them. Public space is where it’s at. When we planted in urban Long Beach, we had 20-30 people every week standing around the edges of our meetings. They would listen, and in a non-commital fashion, they would listen to the preaching. One of those people is on our leadership team now. He heard me mentioning Anthony Kiedis (singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) and Jesus in the same sentence and had to stop to see what they had in common. If we’d been inside, we would have never reached that guy!

Give some examples of getting creative to reach unreached groups of people.

Peyton Jones: I think it should be things that are natural to you. For example, hospitality is such a big thing in the New Testament because it was natural. It was something that you already did. Right now, the buzz is to invite people over to dinner, but that’s not very creative. We’ve done everything from college student video game tournaments that alternate every other week with a Bible study, to Film Critic’s Club, or reading groups. I actually started a church in a Starbucks after hosting a “Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code” book club night. It was only supposed to go one night, but became an ongoing thing with 50 people showing up. This was in Europe where 0.3 percent of the population believes the Bible is the Word of God. That’s one third of a percent, and people were spiritually hungry. I believe that if you enter the streams of life that you’d normally be in, and get creative, you’ll find that the gospel touches on every aspect of life.

You write churches have often held that, to belong to the church community, you must—in this order—believe, behave, and then you can belong. You say that in church planting, the equation must be reordered to be: belonging, believing, then behaving. Explain how this has worked in churches you’ve planted.

Peyton Jones: This is the part of Reaching the Unreached where I talk about being witnesses in Samaria. It starts with Jerusalem, our own neighborhoods; like Cheers where everybody knows your name. Judea is where we learn to do church outside of our buildings (like when they were driven out of Jerusalem—their comfort zone), but the real litmus test of reaching the unreached comes when we begin to reach the marginalized.

Jesus had a soft spot for people that nobody else did. Lepers, Samaritans, prostitutes, tax-collectors. How we treat our modern day Samaritans tells them a lot about what kind of gospel we truly believe. The community of the church in the New Testament was welcoming to outsiders. It wasn’t exclusive and there wasn’t a metal detector at the door keeping certain sins out. If the transvestite comes to your church, is acting loving toward them compromising the gospel or fulfilling it? These are some of the questions that I tease out as I unpack why we saw so many from the LGBT, gang, and homeless population come to faith and transformed.

Bio: Peyton Jones has been on the front lines of ministry for over ten years. In 1999, at the age of 25, he moved to Europe, and served as the evangelist at Lloyd-Jones’s legendary Sandfields church, Aberavon. An accidental church planter, Jones planted in a Starbucks before returning to America, and planting in inner city Long Beach. To reach those nobody is reaching, Jones has worked as a firefighter, factory worker, barista, and psychiatric nurse, bringing all these experiences to the table. Jones received his MA Theology: Pastoral Studies from Wales Evangelical School of Theology, and is the Regional Catalyst for NAMB. He is also the host of the Jump School Core Team Training Series, managing editor of Church Planter Magazine, co-host of the weekly Church Planter Podcast, and author of Church Zero: Raising 1st Century Churches out of the Ashes of the 21st Century Church.

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