How to Share Your Faith Through Your Own Story, Even If You Freeze Up
Most Christians I know can tell you exactly why they don’t share their faith. They might get asked a question they can’t answer. It feels confrontational. What if they say the wrong thing. I’ve watched capable, God-loving people go silent the second the conversation turns spiritual. So when Miles McPherson told me he had built a framework that gets a believer sharing the gospel through their own testimony in 60 seconds, I wanted to understand the mechanics. Not the inspiration. The mechanics. What follows is the actual structure he teaches, the objections it answers, and why he believes the church has been catching this instead of teaching it for far too long.
Why don’t more Christians share their faith?
Because the barriers are almost never theological. They’re psychological, and Miles argues they’re spiritual warfare dressed up as reasonable caution.
When I asked Miles why so few believers ever open their mouth, he named the specific lies: *I’m not gifted. I might get asked a question I can’t answer. It’s confrontational. What if they get mad. I’ll just live it and they’ll see it.* Then he said the thing that stopped me. “No one’s going to see your life and go, I’m a sinner, Jesus died for my sin and rose from the dead. That’s just not going to happen.”
He went further. The enemy, he said, does not mind you going to church, reading your Bible, or worshiping, as long as you never talk about Jesus. He told me about a school across the street from The Rock. The past headmaster once said to him, almost verbatim: “You keep your Christians over there, and we’ll keep our heathens over here.” Miles thinks the church has quietly accepted that arrangement.
What’s the 60-second gospel story framework?
It’s three phrases you complete in your own words. Before Jesus, I was. Then Jesus. Since then.
That’s the whole spine. Miles teaches it in pairs, 30 seconds each person, so both people practice out loud in a minute. His own version, unscripted: “Before Jesus, I was addicted to cocaine. Then Jesus forgave me, and one night I was laying on the couch. Since then, I’ve been walking with God.” Ten seconds. Every claim is his. Nobody can argue it.
Then he layers in what he calls the ABCs of salvation, so the person you’re talking to has a clear next step. Admit you’re a sinner and the penalty of sin is death. Believe Jesus died and rose from the dead. Confess him as your Savior. He picked ABC on purpose. Who can’t remember ABC.
The full unit is testimony plus gospel plus ABCs plus a prayer. He calls that combination the gospel story. The tool his team built at lovejustone.com turns your phone into a teleprompter so you can film it and post it, or just rehearse it until it’s yours.
*The full conversation with Miles covers his cocaine-to-conversion story on April 12, 1984, his years being discipled by Sherman Smith inside NFL locker rooms, and the specific moment Rice Brooks challenged him to build this training. Worth the 35 minutes if you want the backstory the article doesn’t hold.*
What do you say when someone pushes back or asks a question you can’t answer?
You don’t argue. You respond. Miles is emphatic that these are two different things, and confusing them is why most believers shut down mid-conversation.
He teaches what he calls a fire drill response: calm, curious, courageous. You don’t need to win. You don’t need to be right. You need to keep the conversation open and state the truth. When someone throws the hypocrite charge at him, he asks if they’ve ever heard someone try to sing like Whitney Houston. It never works out. If we can’t perfectly imitate her, how are we going to perfectly imitate Jesus. It isn’t a dodge. It concedes the point and reframes it.
His deeper conviction is that the gospel does the work, not your eloquence. “You are not going to convince anybody by being eloquent, being funny, being articulate. That’s not going to change anybody’s heart. It’s the gospel.” He used a boxing image from his brother’s career. Sometimes you knock a fighter out but he leans on you, and you keep wrestling because you don’t realize he’s already down. If you’d just stepped back, he would have fallen. Miles thinks we do that with people. We keep swinging when the Holy Spirit has already done the work. Say it and shut up. All they can do is say no.
Does this actually work for regular people, not pastors?
Yes, and the story he told me is the one I keep thinking about.
A young woman at The Rock used the tool. She had roughly 1,000 followers on Instagram. She posted one video, a minute and fifty seconds long, using the three-phrase framework. As of a couple months before we spoke, that single post had over 100,000 views and 160 people had written to say they’d accepted Christ. One post. Not an influencer. Her first one.
Miles is careful about batting averages and admitted no one had ever asked him his own. He guessed, reluctantly, that in one-on-one conversations more than half the people he shares with pray to receive Christ. Definitely over fifty percent, maybe seventy-five. He also said something honest about generational differences. Older adults have more to consider: spouses, kids, jobs, what changes on Monday morning. Younger people carry less of that weight, which tracks with what our research at OneHope keeps finding, that the overwhelming majority of people who come to Christ do so before eighteen.
What is Miles building, and why did he start now at 66?
Just One is a training system and a five-week discipleship challenge for one person you’re praying for. The name comes from Luke 15:7.
“There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than 99 just people,” Miles paraphrased, then added his own gloss. Ninety-nine believers inside, one outside. Heaven celebrates louder over the one. That’s the whole premise.
When you sign up for the Just One Challenge, you give them the name of the person you’re trying to reach. For five weeks you get SMS prompts to pray for them, love them, invite them, and eventually share. The goal is to keep that person top of mind so your heart stays broken for them long enough to do something about it.
He told me he was standing in his office two or three years ago when he sensed God say it was time to go back to evangelism. He assumed that meant crusades again, which he admitted were hard and not particularly fun. Then Rice Brooks challenged him to build a training instead. Something clicked. He said it plainly, and I don’t think he was performing regret: “One of my many regrets of being a pastor is I wish I would have done that decades ago.”
What has to change inside a local church for this to take root?
Every Sunday at The Rock, someone at every campus shares a two-minute testimony using this framework. That’s the shift.
Miles described the moment a congregant shared recently and the room gave him a standing ovation. Miles preaches for forty minutes every week and never gets one. So he told the church why. “The most powerful message you’ll ever hear from this pulpit is a testimony of God’s transformation.” Then he sat down with that. He’d built a healthy church for 26 years on an invite culture, trusting that if people brought their friends, he could close from the stage. It worked. But he now believes he should have been equipping people to do it themselves the whole time.
He also anchors the theology in Revelation 12:11. We overcome the enemy by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. Those two things are in the same sentence. Your testimony is proof that the blood has covered your life. In 42 years, Miles said, no one has ever told him his story was wrong. They can’t. It’s his.
