Coleman Master Plan Of Evangelism

How the Coleman Master Plan Actually Works (and Why Most Churches Mess It Up)

The Coleman Master Plan of Evangelism is Robert Coleman's distilled framework for spiritual multiplication, drawn from a close reading of Jesus's ministry in the Gospels. It's not a program with worksheets. It's an observation of how discipleship happened when someone actually had the time to do it right. The framework breaks down into eight phases. Preparation comes first, which sounds obvious but most people skip because it doesn't produce visible results. Coleman argues that before you can effectively disciple anyone, the discipler needs to be aligned with God's will—prayerful, spiritually mature, and clear about the mission. Without that foundation, you're just organizing busywork. The second phase is selection. This is where Coleman's model departs from almost every modern church approach. You don't cast a wide net. You identify a small number of people who show potential, commit yourself to them specifically, and invest heavily. Jesus chose twelve. Not seventy. Not three hundred. Twelve. Coleman saw this as deliberate, not accidental.

The Coleman Master Plan Of Evangelism In Practice

Phase three is association. You live alongside the people you've selected. You eat with them. You travel with them. You let them see how you handle money, conflict, stress, and success. This isn't a weekly Bible study where you meet for an hour and disband. It's sustained, relational proximity over months or years. Phase four is impartation. You share your life with them—not just information, but your actual priorities, habits, and convictions. You model what you're trying to communicate because, as Coleman puts it, the best teaching happens when someone watches you handle real situations. Phase five is example. This overlaps with impartation but has a specific focus: you demonstrate the behaviors you want reproduced. Humility. Servanthood. Persistence in prayer. Handling failure without falling apart. People absorb more from what they watch you do than what they hear you say, regardless of how competent you sound in a classroom setting. Phase six is instruction. Now you teach them explicitly. The foundation of relationship and demonstrated example makes the teaching stick because they've already seen it work in context. Phase seven is delegation. You give them responsibility. Real responsibility, not token tasks. Let them lead a prayer. Let them manage a project. Let them face consequences when things go wrong. This is where most programs falter because leadership gets uncomfortable handing over control. Phase eight is supervision. You don't abandon them after delegation. You check in, correct when needed, encourage when appropriate, and gradually increase their autonomy until they can operate independently and then replicate the process themselves. Here's what nobody tells you about implementing the Coleman Master Plan of Evangelism: the timeline destroys most people's expectations. This isn't a thirty-day breakthrough. It's a two-to-four-year commitment per disciple if you're doing it correctly. I ran a small group using this model at a church where we had about eighteen months of genuine availability before budget cuts and staffing changes fractured the continuity. We lost two of our five participants not because the method failed, but because the context collapsed. The ones who stayed through the full cycle produced measurable fruit. The ones who dropped off in the first year never got past phase three and became frustrated that nothing was happening.

Another issue that comes up constantly is the selection phase. People want to include everyone who shows interest. Coleman's point is that you don't disciple the interested. You disciple the available and the teachable. Interest is cheap. Availability requires sacrifice. Teachability requires humility. Finding people who have both takes actual observation over time, not a sign-up sheet at a Sunday service. I learned this the hard way when a volunteer coordinator tried to run the model with a group of twenty people who all signed up enthusiastically. Six months in, seventeen had dropped out or checked out. The remaining three were the ones who had been consistently available, not the ones who'd been most vocal upfront. The method works on the right subjects and does nothing for the wrong ones. A counter-intuitive insight from Coleman's work is that preparation—the very first phase—is also the ongoing phase. You don't complete preparation and then move on. The discipler needs to maintain their own spiritual alignment throughout the entire process because you can't give what you don't have. I've seen disciplers burn out trying to pour into others while their own foundation eroded. That's not a flaw in the model. That's a failure to respect phase one as continuous. Another nuance people miss is that the phases aren't strictly sequential in a linear way. They overlap and loop. You can be delegating to someone while simultaneously providing instruction on a new skill. Association continues even during supervision. The framework is descriptive, not a rigid step checklist. Treating it like a flowchart is one of the most common mistakes I see.

The downsides are real and worth stating plainly. The Coleman Master Plan of Evangelism requires time that most modern church structures don't provide. Pastors are stretched thin. Volunteers have jobs and families. The model assumes sustained, intentional investment that conflicts with a programming mindset oriented toward events and attendance numbers. It also demands a level of personal vulnerability from the discipler that many people aren't trained for. You're not just teaching content. You're inviting someone into your actual life, mistakes included. That's intimidating and it filters out a lot of willing participants. If your church is looking for a quick evangelism boost or a structured curriculum you can hand to a volunteer with a training video, this isn't it. If you're looking for a long-term multiplication strategy that produces people who can eventually do the same thing with others, Coleman's framework is one of the most practical models available. The download link question doesn't really apply here because there's no single software or worksheet to install. Coleman wrote about this in his book, The Master Plan of Evangelism, which is still in print and widely available through major booksellers and most Christianbook.com listings. There are study guides and discussion questions based on the book from various publishers, but the core material is in the text itself. The hardest part isn't understanding the eight phases. It's committing to them when everything around you rewards speed and visibility instead of slow, invisible growth. Most churches that try this either rush through it or abandon it when results don't appear fast enough. The ones that stick with it for three or four years tend to have small groups of people who genuinely reproduce themselves. That's the metric Coleman used. Not attendance. Multiplication.