A study of the predictive power of identified principles of incarnational ministry on the evangelistic effectiveness of apartment missionaries

Problem. The problem of this study was to determine the relationship between evangelistic effectiveness of apartment missionaries in the Dallas metropolitan area and Houston metropolitan area (to obtain the required sample size, it was necessary to expand the population to all of Texas) and a set of predictor variables: distance from community, ministry hours, ethnic match, ministry tenure, site tenure, ministry goal, training hours, number of indigenous leaders, and ministry site rent per square foot. A second problem of this study was to determine the difference in evangelistic effectiveness of apartment missionaries who live on the property versus those who do not.;Procedures. A review of literature and interviews of apartment ministry experts revealed several principles of incarnational ministry commonly applied to ministry in apartment communities. A panel of experts aided in the development of a simple questionnaire designed to gather data necessary to measure the evangelistic effectiveness of apartment missionaries as related to incarnational ministry. Of the more than 500 apartment missionaries in Texas, over 200 viewed the survey and 108 usable surveys were returned. Initial evaluation and screening of the data led to the deletion of the rent per square foot variable and the training variable. The data was analyzed using standard multiple regression and t-tests for independent samples to determine which variables contribute the most to evangelistic effectiveness.;Findings and conclusion. Ministry goal (defined as planting a church on site or connecting people to an existing church) was the only variable contributing significantly to the evangelistic effectiveness of apartment missionaries, with those planting churches averaging over six more salvations during the surveyed time period. Surprisingly, there was no statistical difference in the number of salvations reported by those residing on their ministry site when compared to missionaries not residing on site. The difference in salvations recorded by church planting ministries is likely due to the greater focus on proclaiming the gospel and the use of indigenous leaders by such ministries.