Evangelism and Training

Recently, I've been mulling over how to best encourage our church to excellence in welcoming newcomers and helping them become integrated to our church community. Obviously, evangelism is a closely related topic. I just stumbled across this pithy little quote from Phillip Jensen and Tony Payne, in their old Fellow Workers booklet:

"If you wish to promote evangelism as a high congregational priority, we need to include a strong evangelistic element in our public prayers." (45)

But how do you train for evangelism? Even though I run the formal in-house training platform at Crossroads (our ministrylab), I've been quick to point out it's limitations. So it was nice to read this quote, which affirmed me in my reservations ;)

"Training courses are asked to do too much. They are expected to motivate and teach people as well as train them for the task. This is a false expectation. Prayer and good teaching are the only things that will deliver motivation for evangelism. A training course harnesses that motivation and channels it in the right direction, but we must not expect the course to do it all." (46)

(PS. My copy of Fellow Workers is very old, so page numbers are likely different in newer editions).