Archive: Advocate for Evangelism

Former attorney Frank Warden now uses his persuasive powers to proclaim the Gospel

by Ruth Snyder

Frank Warden was a partner in the biggest law firm in Arkansas. But at age 35, after 13 years of practice, he turned in his resignation.

“When I told my senior partner I was leaving the firm to go into fulltime ministry, he understood. ‘I admire you,’ he told me.”

Such is the testimony of Frank Warden, minister of evangelism at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, the second largest UMC in the nation. In 1968, when Frank left his Little Rock firm to enter Perkins School of Theology, he thought he would return to north Arkansas after graduation and be a local pastor. Instead, right out of seminary he was offered the evangelism berth at the gigantic Highland Park Church. That’s where he’s been ever since.

During the past 12 years Warden has been instrumental in dramatically increasing the church’s membership. Moreover, he has developed the Trinity Bible Study, now used around the world in thousands of churches.

Even back in Arkansas, Frank had always been active in his local United Methodist church. He had served as trustee, chairman of the board, Sunday school teacher, and choir director. But it wasn’t until March, 1967, that Frank and his wife, Dorothy, totally committed their lives to Christ while attending a Lay Witness Mission.

“To me that was the moment of truth in my life, but I didn’t have any call to the ministry,” says Warden. “So I continued my law practice and committed myself to reading a chapter of the Bible every day. I started to see miracles happen that convinced me of God’s calling on my life.”

Soon after his commitment, Warden’s many open law cases mysteriously began to settle, some of which were “non-settle-able.” As of January 1, 1969, his calendar was wiped clean. “God made it very clear to me that He wanted me to follow Him,” says Frank.

So Frank and Dorothy sold their home, their airplane, and their interest in the law firm, and launched out.

In 1973 when Warden accepted the assignment from Highland Park’s senior minister Leighton Farrell to set up a department of evangelism, the congregation had lost about 2,000 members. Enrollment had gone down below 8,000 after General Conference of 1968, from a peak of over 10,000.

Granted, that is still a huge membership. But the staff of Highland Park read the membership loss as a sign of a declining church. They wanted to see the trend reversed. But how does an attorney from Little Rock, Arkansas organize an evangelism department for such a job?

Should he evangelize through street ministry? Should he teach courses on Methodism or on prayer or spiritual formation? How could he make the church attractive to the unbeliever? Warden wasn’t sure.

He organized a “fishers group” to call on prospects throughout Dallas, thinking this might be the answer. “One night,” he recalls, “there were only three college kids and me (from a church of 10,000 members). I was in such despair. I said, ‘Surely there’s got to be something better than what we’re doing.‘”

There was. What Warden decided was that, for his church at least, going out to practice evangelism techniques was not the answer. “The church itself has to be the evangelism tool.”

He concluded that evangelism is the responsibility of the entire church. The education people teach about Christ, the preacher preaches about Christ, the choir sings about Christ. Evangelism cannot be departmentalized. This approach Warden calls “church evangelism.”

In fact, Frank says, “Unless the church is presenting Christ and showing people the Gospel in its music and preaching and Bible teaching, then it’s wrong to go out and use confrontation evangelism and talk about Jesus.” Without “church evangelism,” Warden believes, those coming into the church services by way of home evangelism would be surprised and let down. “Church services are conducted in a different language, a different style than confrontation evangelism.”

Studies have shown that only two percent of the people who make commitments outside the church end up being active members of a local church, says Warden. So he believes that the conversion, the commitment to Christ, ought to be made in the church.

Bringing in members

How does church evangelism at Highland Park work in bringing in new members?

Visitors. Every local church has visitors. “We have between 300-400 visitors every Sunday morning in our church,” says Frank. “If we harvested 20 percent of them, we would be the fastest-growing church in America.

“People are actively shopping. They don’t care about denominational labels. They just want to go where they can feel comfortable and where they can hear the Good News.”

Frank has made it the responsibility of the evangelism department to match visitors with compatible members of the church. Those members make phone calls to invite the newcomers into the church. Church members involved in the education department follow up with phone calls too, inviting children to Sunday school programs.

This strategy is what members of Highland Park UMC know as “telephone evangelism.” It makes visitors feel welcome and comfortable and, in effect, it keeps them coming. Also, it involves the active members of the church in an effective evangelism program.

Telephone evangelism isn’t a revolutionary idea; but it’s a practical solution to a big problem, and it’s working. Nearly 8,000 people have come into Highland Park UMC since 1973—more new members than any other UMC in the nation. Membership has increased to 11,600 a net gain of almost 4,000.

The end, however, is not to receive people into the church, but to bring them into a personal relationship with Christ. According to Warden the lack of this emphasis has cost the denomination dearly.

“There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that, if we had followed the principles of Biblical Christianity and emphasis on the basics which Good News espouses, the United Methodist Church would not be apologizing for membership loss, but would be growing constantly,” Frank says. “When Christ is there, the church is a mighty force; when He is not, then no human programs can be devised to take His place.”

But Warden acknowledges that bringing people into the church does not automatically bring them into a conversion experience. “We want to embrace and court those people and lead them to a growing relationship, and eventually a commitment to Christ.” Every service at Highland Park is an opportunity to make that commitment.

“I’m a radically church-centered evangelist,” Frank reiterates. “I believe the marriage [of commitment to Christ] should take place at the altar of the church.

“But the courtship should not die at that point of marriage. We have to keep the courtship going—caring, embracing, and teaching.” That, to Frank, is one of evangelism’s many vital functions.

Warden insists it is also necessary that a church make demands. “That’s what people want,” he says, “a church with definition and starch. So we’re straightforward. We tell our people, if you promise to give, remember to tithe. If you promise to pray, sign up for one hour a week. If you promise to give service, we list your name on the computer list and ask, ‘What service?’ And if you quit attending we ask ‘What’s wrong?’” Not everyone can direct evangelism at Highland Park UMC, but every member of the Body can use his gifts to help evangelize. That’s church evangelism.

Dramatic increase

And what is the result? At Highland Park there has been a dramatic increase in Sunday school attendance from 1,200 to over 2,000; by means of six Sunday services in a sanctuary and a chapel, an average of 2,200 worshippers attend each Sunday. Often there is standing room only. A large congregation in a small sanctuary is a problem requiring multiple services. But it is a much more pleasant problem to have than that of membership loss.

Yet Warden wants to make sure members have a personal relationship with Christ and not just assume they do. Frank admits that one of his biggest aggravations is Christian people who show very little evidence of their Christianity.

“My concern is whether we born-again Christians are visibly showing what we believe. We’re to emulate Jesus. Are we doing it? My biggest fear is that we have forever lost the distinction between Christians and non-Christians,” Frank says.

The problem is how to define Christianity in a way which produces an evident behavior difference in the lives of Christians. “I do this through Bible study,” says Frank, “because there’s not a lesson in the Bible that does not have a street-level application on how I am to behave.” The Bible gives Christianity definition, and that, says Frank, is what people want.

“I found that we were able to harvest, in the big city of Dallas, people who are floating around looking for those churches which would preach Christ and teach the Bible,” says Warden.

So he began teaching the Bible, but he found he wasn’t satisfied with the Bible studies available to pastors. “I thought, after praying about the matter, I would write something. I applied what I had discovered as a speaker and lawyer, about learning theory and memorizing and retaining things, and incorporated that into the Trinity Bible Studies.”[1]

Trinity Bible Studies

In 1978, Frank introduced his innovative Bible study to Highland Park. It was so well received that he decided other churches might benefit as well. Today, Trinity Bible Studies is used in over 3,000 churches, 520 of them in Korea. As recently as March, Frank was in Korea teaching Trinity to a class of 2,500. The series has been translated into four languages.

Why is it so popular? Frank suggests that “people are finding it is affirming, and very positive. … The evangelical denominations have been teaching the Bible all along, but it was always packaged with their doctrine,” says Frank. “In fact, many people don’t think you can teach Bible content without doctrine.” Trinity does just that, Warden asserts.

The name comes from a three-level approach to presenting the Bible: fact, meaning, and application. Students enroll in intense 10-week “semesters” which entail completing regular assignments, worksheets, and Bible readings. The students study to understand what the Bible says, what it meant at the time it was written, and how it applies to their lives today. Trinity affirms that the Bible is God’s Word to us, Warden says, rather than asking, “Is it true?”

The low cost of the material is the way in which Frank remedied the lack of an affordable Bible series for the local pastor. Frank has never viewed Trinity as a money-making project. “The mainstay of our support,” says Frank, “is selling materials at cost.”

As the Trinity Bible Studies series became increasingly popular, many people began using it on Sunday morning. But Trinity involves outside reading—homework. For that reason, Frank explained, “we don’t recommend it for Sunday school.” Youth, for example, don’t want to be saddled with more homework. “I know from a dozen years of teaching youth in church that if you can get them down off the walls and into the classroom, you’re lucky. Anyway, we want to embrace visitors during the Sunday school hour, not embarrass them because they haven’t done their assignments.”

The need for a Bible study for Sunday morning posed one more challenge. But Frank was hesitant to write his own material until one bishop assured him there was no rule restricting a Methodist preacher from writing Sunday school curriculum. So Frank wrote Choose Life; it’s “plain vanilla Bible study” for youth.

Choose Life

Choose Life is quarterly material, and includes clear guidelines on how to teach it. Throughout the study Frank directly instructs teachers, ” Prayerfully decide what you can affirm and then only teach what you can affirm. Do not disaffirm what you’re not sure of.” Also enclosed in the teacher’s edition of every course is a detailed explanation and cassette tapes that provide additional instruction for teaching each lesson.

Although Choose Life is still young, by next year it will exceed Trinity in sales. Warden’s Sunday school material is also used by Disciples, American Baptists, and Presbyterians. It has been adopted by prison systems in many different states, including Army prisons, and it is used both with women and men in the Dallas County Jail.

Frank wrote Trinity Bible Studies and Choose Life because he is convinced Biblical principles should guide the behavior of a Christian. And there are many cases in which these Bible studies have changed people’s lives.

Frank tells of 74-year-old Jake, who had been an oil field worker, and a “rough-neck in the truest sense of the word.” Frank was teaching on the Genesis account of Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden, and commented that the “rest of the Bible is an account of how God is seeking us to get back into fellowship with Him.”

Jake was present that day. He later told Frank, “It never occurred to me that God wanted an old reprobate like me.” Jake’s life changed as a result of understanding a Biblical principle.

“Now,” Frank says, “Jake is the most attractive Christian I’ve ever seen.”

Trinity Bible Studies is Warden’s answer to one of the problems he sees in the church. He also is disturbed that despite all the talk about evangelism and spiritual growth lately, something has been lost. “In all of our debates about evangelical versus non-evangelical or saved versus unsaved,” he fears, “we are losing forever in the United Methodist Church the basic concept that the converted life is different from, and with a different destiny than, the unconverted life.”

But Frank Warden isn’t discouraged and his ministry isn’t hampered by problems in the church. He is not the type to focus for long on problems. Furthermore, he says, “I’m not ready to turn in my badge as an evangelical Christian. I’m optimistic about the Church of Jesus Christ. The ministry is the world’s greatest calling, and I’m thankful to be part of it.”

[1] As of June 1, 1985 Frank Warden will be appointed full-time to Trinity Bible Studies. Address inquires to: Frank Warden, Box 25101, Dallas, TX 75225.