Greg Stier has spent over 30 years teaching teenagers how to share their faith, and he says most of us get one thing backwards: we think the goal of a gospel conversation is to win the argument. It isn't. "The goal is to win the soul," he says — and those are very different skills. In this episode of Missions Pulse, Greg, founder of Dare 2 Share Ministries and author of *Radical Like Jesus* and *Unlikely Fighter*, joins us for a conversation about what it actually looks like to share your faith well, not just often.
His framework is disarmingly simple: ask, admire, admit. Ask good questions and actually find out what someone believes. Admire whatever common ground you can find, the way Paul did with the men of Athens. Then admit — tell your own story of needing a savior before you tell God's. Underneath that framework sits a posture Greg borrows from George Whitfield's old prayer for "the mixture of the lion and the lamb": start with the lamb, because a lion's roar scares people off before you ever get there. Only once trust is built does the truth-telling — sin, judgment, the real cost of the gospel — get to do its work.
That posture runs against two temptations Greg spends real time dismantling. The first is treating evangelism as something you live but never say out loud — the well-meaning idea that a good example is enough. Greg calls that flying a plane with one wing. The second is treating faith itself as a ladder to climb, whether it's the five pillars of Islam, the eightfold path, or ten commandments kept well enough. Christianity, he argues, is the only chair in the room — you don't climb it, you rest your full weight on what's already finished. It's a distinction he's watched land in Buddhist villages and American driveways alike.
The most memorable moment in the episode isn't a principle at all — it's his five-year-old son, mid-errand at a grocery store, noticing a grieving stranger Greg himself was trying to hurry past. The boy's unscripted gospel presentation, using nothing but his own hand as a visual, is what finally breaks the woman open. Greg keeps returning to that story not for its drama but for what it exposes: how often the moment to say something is right in front of us, and how often we're too busy to see it. It's the same instinct behind his "prayer, care, and share" model of compassion — help is good, but withholding the actual cure, he says, is like fluffing a dying friend's pillow and leaving the room.
That same conviction scales up into how Greg thinks about discipleship generally, whether raising his own kids or building a ministry now active in over a hundred countries. He'd rather aim for health than numbers, on the theory that a healthy church or family produces growth as a byproduct, not a target. And he's blunt about what happens when that formation is skipped: teaching kids sound theology without ever asking them to open their mouths is, in his words, "pouring milk into a sponge and leaving it there."
This episode is a reminder that sharing your faith isn't a personality trait some people have and others don't — it's a posture that can be built, practiced, and passed down, one conversation at a time.