Go therefore… but who to?

I spend a lot of time travelling the country and encouraging people to be great commissionaries. That is, I urge people to obey Jesus and to prayerfully go and make disciples of all nations.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked in these interactive workshops is, “Who can I go to?”

This simple and easy to understand 4 x 4 matrix is designed to answer that question.



There are 4 columns. Each column represents different categories of people in our lives:

Geography: your street, suburb, shopping centre

Stage of Life: I am a 43 year old father, therefore I interact with a lot of the people who are at the same “stage of life”, e.g. school dads.

Ethnicity: I was born in Australia (the son of New Zealand migrants) so I feel like an Aussie. I get Australians and therefore a lot of my outreach is focussed around Australian culture. I always watch the AFL Grand Final, and so I always make that an event to invite friends to. (Interestingly some of my Chinese friends love to come over too. They enjoy being part of this Aussie cultural experience.)

Hobbies: I ride a mountain bike. On Saturday mornings at 6:30am a group of us go riding. We are old, fat, and slow (our shared “stage of life”), but we all enjoy the same hobby.

There are 4 rows. Each row represents different ways of interacting with the different types of people we know:

Literary / Social Media: some people don’t want to discuss issues face to face. The gift of a book, or the recommendation of a good YouTube URL can be a great way to engage. That way they feel like they are disagreeing with a resource, not a person—you!

Personal: this is usually one to one. I read the Bible with a bloke who became a Christian 2 years ago.

Group: you and a group of Christian friends may work as a team to share Christ with others.

Public: your Christian Community (church, CBD ministry, or university group) may decide run a public event to proclaim Christ.

This 4 x 4 matrix is a tool to help people take action. When you’ve understood how the columns and the rows work, you can aim to simply fill in 2 or 3 boxes and implement them over the next 6 months.

So you might decide to aim to:

• read the Bible with the bloke who lives next door (a personal approach with someone in your geography).


• Get together with a group of blokes from Church and run a “Life of Jesus” course for the soccer club dads you know (a group approach around a shared hobby).

If each of us had 2 or 3 boxes “on the go” every 6 months, imagine the impact. We’d all be praying fervently, we’d all be working as a team together and better than all that, we’d be seeing people, God willing, hear about Jesus, follow Jesus and Glorify Jesus.

Why don’t you print off the picture, and take it to your mid-week Bible study group. You could spend:

• 10 minutes talking about the 4 x 4 grid, and


• 10 minutes brainstorming a group activity you could work on together.

Imagine the kingdom impact.