The Shepherds’ Strategy: Moving from Witness to Missionary
As we roll into December, many people lean into the sentimentality of the Christmas season. We see the manger, the star, the angels, and we feel warm fuzzies. That’s good, but here at Passion for Planting, we also want to focus on the execution—the why and the how behind the Incarnation. We need to look at the shepherds not just as characters in a nativity scene, but as the first documented evangelistic initiative that extended the peace and joy of Christ to the ends of the earth.
Look at Luke 2:8-17. These shepherds, the low-tech, low-profile guys on the fringe, receive the highest-stakes message possible: the Messiah is born! They didn’t have a marketing plan or a five-year strategy. They simply did two things: they witnessed the event, and then they immediately shared about it.
Luke 2:17 gets straight to the point: “When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child.” These blue-collar shepherds didn’t keep the good news to themselves; they executed the mission on the spot, turning their personal encounter into public testimony. They leveraged their proximity—their friends, their neighbors, their fellow workers in the fields—the entire “Bethlehem area” became their first mission field.
This type of evangelistic fervor must be ingrained in the DNA of every church plant. Even if you’re leading an established church, it’s your job to train your congregation to take the transformative experience of the Gospel and share it with others in a way that’s true, understandable, and contagious. This month, as usual, we’re not focusing on theory, but highlighting practical and tactical resources to help you develop disciple makers and church planters. We’ll explore key principles and practices for sharing the good news and mobilizing your congregation to view their daily environment as their primary mission field. It’s time to more than admire the story and live it out ourselves. Enjoy!
-Patrick Bradley, Director of Operations
December 2025 – Content
- Amplify Your Mission
- A Digital Toolbox For Spiritual Conversations
- Mobilizing Missionaries
- Leveraging Testimonies
Amplify Your Mission
Do you want your church to move from having a mission statement to living the mission every single day?
This month, we urge you to tune into the Everyday Missionaries Podcast—your tactical training ground for empowering your people. Just like the shepherds who immediately shared the good news in their community, this podcast equips your congregation to become witnesses right where they live, work, and play.
Each episode breaks down the barriers to personal evangelism, offering practical, reproducible tactics for sharing the Gospel with friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Start using this podcast to train your volunteers and leaders. It’s designed to help you create a church culture where everyone is confident and competent in sharing their faith, turning every member into an Everyday Missionary.
Listen today and multiply your mission: Everyday Missionaries Podcast.
A Digital Toolbox for Spiritual Conversations
The GodTools App by Cru removes the anxiety from sharing your faith and makes every conversation an opportunity. This free digital toolbox puts powerful evangelism strategies like the Four Spiritual Laws and Knowing God Personally right on your phone.
Whether you’re talking to a neighbor, a family member, or a total stranger, the app provides simple, guided outlines and visuals to communicate the Gospel clearly and confidently.
But the true game-changer is its global reach: GodTools supports over 100 languages, featuring a unique parallel language function. This allows you to present the Gospel in the native tongue of the person you’re speaking with, instantly breaking down language barriers and ensuring the good news is received in their heart language. Stop letting fear or language hold you back—download GodTools and equip yourself for every conversation, everywhere!
Mobilizing Missionaries
Want to equip everyone in your church to share the Gospel effectively and see immediate life change?
We highly recommend the videos at Movements.net. This page provides fast-paced, high-impact training designed to equip your people with a simple, memorable method for explaining the Gospel and inviting a response. These resources focus on reproducibility—ensuring anyone can learn and teach the method to others, multiplying your church’s missional capacity.
Use these short videos in your small groups or leadership training to move your members from passive hearers to active harvesters. This is the tactical blueprint for creating a congregation of everyday missionaries, just like the shepherds in Luke 2. Get the training that creates movements!
Leveraging Testimony
Sharing your faith often starts not with doctrine, but with a story. That’s why we highly recommend the resources at I Am Second, a powerful movement that uses unscripted, impactful video testimonies to share the Gospel.
Their famous white chair films, featuring celebrities, athletes, and everyday people, are a unique tool for evangelism. These short YouTube videos bypass debate and dive straight into the universal human search for hope and purpose, showing how a relationship with Jesus Christ changes everything.
Explore their video library with a story that you think would resonate with someone in your life who’s searching for hope this Christmas. Then send it to them and ask them what they think. Sometimes, the most powerful bridge to the Gospel is hearing how God is bringing healing and redemption to people’s lives today.