Evangelism (eBook)

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A CULTURE OF EVANGELISM

In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul wrote:

I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. (Phil. 1:7–8)

I identify strongly with Paul’s affection for his friends in Philippi. For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with friends.

I brought friends home with me as a kid. My earliest memories are of our backyard filled with friends—to the delight of my outgoing mother.

In university, I rarely studied alone—well, okay, I rarely studied, but when I did, it was with a band of brothers and sisters.

I married my best friend.

On the job, I most enjoy work that puts me with people I admire and call friends.

I’ve taken friends with me to live on different continents around the world and made friends with the people who lived there, too.

There are struggles, of course. I’m struggling (unsuccessfully) to figure out how to write a book with friends, for instance. But despite the occasional required individual activity, my life’s desire, from the backyard to the far reaches of the world, is to be with friends. I have always had this desire; it’s how I’m wired.

So why does an extrovert, like me, think of evangelism only in individual terms? Maybe it’s because almost all instruction I’ve ever heard about evangelism has been about personal evangelism. Even the teaching I’ve done over the years has mostly been about personal evangelism. That’s odd to me, especially because evangelism is scary and I don’t like doing scary things by myself. I bet you don’t either.

Sure, there is that rare person who is uninhibited about sharing the faith. But if you ask most normal people what hinders their evangelism, the vast majority will tell you it’s fear: fear of rejection, of looking stupid, or of being lumped into weird stereotypes about evangelists. With apologies to G. K. Chesterton, it’s not that evangelism has been tried and found wanting, it’s that evangelism has been found difficult and left untried.

So why do something scary and difficult by yourself? Believers, band together! Evangelize with believing friends who will pull you along.

I appreciate personal evangelism, and we need to be equipped for it. But since I believe in the church as the engine of evangelism, we need to develop cultures of evangelism in our local churches, too. We want whole churches that speak of Jesus.

Think of the benefits of communal evangelism:

• We hold one another accountable.
• We strengthen our mutual resolve.
• We learn from one another.
• We rejoice together in success and cry together in failure.
• We bond through shared experiences in intense situations.

It just makes sense to share our faith alongside friends.

Actually, it doesn’t take much effort to convince most Christians that evangelism with community is the way to go. It’s not even hard to find people pulling together to accomplish an evangelistic task.

But usually when we think of evangelism in community, we think of evangelistic programs, which is not the same. By “program,” I mean the occasional big event with a well-known speaker or exciting topic. At some point during the event, there is a presentation of the gospel. Or maybe the program is low-key, geared for seekers, such as a service project or a sports program, with the hope that it might open a door for a spiritual conversation.

God can use programs. I know people who have come to faith at evangelistic events. For the record, I often promote and speak at evangelistic programs. But I don’t think programs are the most effective, or even the primary, way we should do evangelism.

AN EASTER PAGEANT PROGRAM

A church in my hometown decided to sponsor an Easter pageant. The idea was to take the amazing story of Easter and put it into a play that would call people to Christ. Passion plays are nothing new, but this church’s elders wanted the gospel to be clear in the performance. At the end, people would be given an opportunity to respond to the good news.

This goal required clever scripting to overcome the limitations of the stage. And, of course, the performance had to be entertaining. So there were songs and really good acting. Church members were called upon to build elaborate sets, and they worked tirelessly to meet a rigorous production schedule. Zoos and farms were emptied of animals and trainers. Camels, sheep, and cows walked the aisle to get to the stage, to the delight of the audience. Doves flew on cue, for the most part.

The pageant was presented annually, and as the years passed, its popularity soared beyond all expectations. As it became more popular, professional Hollywood producers were hired. Even the role of “Jesus” was played by a (non-Christian) Hollywood performer. Although the church had one of the biggest sanctuaries in the area, demand for seats outstripped supply. Free tickets were distributed for crowd control; there were weeks of performances, and command performances were added. People streamed in from outlying towns and from distant lands. The program took on a life of its own.

When it all came together, what a performance! No one slept through this telling of the gospel! The acting was superb, the singing professional. The animals enthralled the kids. The highlight, at least for my children, was when the white stallion reared up on stage as the centurion on horseback flashed his sword. (I never quite figured out how they got that scene from the Gospels.) After the crucifixion, done a bit more tastefully and “theatrically” than the real thing, “Jesus” was raised up to the rafters by means of a series of clever wires. It was all truly amazing!

There was just one problem: when the church looked at what had happened over the years, despite the program’s popularity, it found that virtually no one had come to Jesus.

For all the massive expenditures of money, all the time spent building sets, hiring people, and meeting strict city codes for hoisting people on wires, all the thousands and thousands of people who attended, and all the sweeping up of animal poop, people were not coming to Jesus—at least not in any more numbers than one would expect during the regular preaching of the Word. So the church elders, wisely, shut the pageant down.

I bet it was a hard call. People love programs—just look at the attendance at this pageant. But the church decided, in the end, that if members spent half the time they had spent on the production in friendly evangelistic conversations with neighbors, coworkers, or fellow students, they would see a better response to the gospel and reach even more people. If you think about it, there is no way you could ever fit into your church sanctuary all the non-Christians with whom the members of your church are in contact weekly—no matter how big the sanctuary.

The fact is, most people come to faith through the influence of family members, small-group Bible studies, or a conversation with a friend after a church service: Christians intentionally talking about the gospel.

But when you take a cold, hard look at programs, things just don’t add up. For one, there is an inverse economic bang for the buck: the more money spent on the programs, the less fruit from evangelism. So, for example, when people under twenty-one (when most people come to faith) were asked how they came to be born again, only 1 percent said it was through TV or other media, while a whopping 43 percent said they came to faith through a friend or family member.1 Just think of the cost comparison between a cup of coffee and TV programming. Or think of the effect: moms lead more people to Jesus than do programs.

Oddly, it seems evangelistic programs do other things better than evangelism: they produce community among Christians who take part in them, they encourage believers to take a stand for Christ, and they can enable churches to break into new places of ministry.

Yet we seem to have an insatiable hunger for programs to accomplish evangelism. Why? Programs are like sugar. It’s tasty, even addictive. However, it takes away a desire for more healthy food. Though it provides a quick burst of energy, over time it makes you flabby, and a steady diet will kill you.

A strict diet of evangelistic programs produces malnourished evangelism. Just as eating sugar can make us feel as if we’ve eaten when we haven’t, programs can often make us feel as if we’ve done evangelism when we haven’t. So we should have a healthy unease with programs. We should use them strategically but in moderation, remembering that God did not send an event, he sent his Son.

What should we do? We want to have evangelism in community. We long to have friends alongside us when we share our faith. But at the same time, we see the limits, even the dangers, of programs. Is there some alternative?

I would like to make a case for something completely different, something that is both communal and personal: a culture of evangelism.

WHAT IS A CULTURE OF EVANGELISM?

I have lived cross-culturally for a good portion of my life, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it is next to impossible to understand a culture, any culture, by simply reading a book. So it is with definitions and instructions on a “culture of evangelism.” Any explanation of it comes up short without real-world experiences to give it meaning.

Culture certainly has to do with...