Over the years, I have encountered many Christians who do not feel comfortable with evangelism. Loosely, evangelism is the process in which Christians seek to convert or share the Gospel of Christ to others. When you say the word “evangelism” at a church meeting, thoughts of door knocking, Bible tracks, and street preaching come to mind.
Guy Kent at the Good Preacher/Homiletical Hot 
Tub blog, posted a funny telling of a Charlie Brown cartoon:
A Charlie Brown cartoon once had Lucy proclaiming to Charlie Brown, “I would make a good evangelist.”
Charlie Brown responds, “And why do you think that?”
“Well, I convinced the boy who sits behind me in school that my religion is better than his religion.”
Now Charlie Brown is intrigued. “How did you do that?”
Lucy tells him, “I hit him over the head with my lunch box!”
The “hit’em over the head” approach is often seen as the worst example of evangelism. These days, post modernity has made us shy about sharing our faith. Anyone who holds to an absolute truth is a nut or is too rigid. Isn’t there a better way?
In our lectionary text for Sunday (Luke 9), Jesus “sets his face towards” Jerusalem, meaning that he is on a mission. Jesus sends messengers ahead and they are not received. Jesus asks two people to follow Jesus and they give excuses. Jesus is batting 0-3 now. Jesus almost seems to be frustrated because he says to one of the men, “Let the dead bury their own.”
We share in this frustration too. We have a command to share the message of God and we 
are uncomfortable about sharing our faith. What is difficult about evangelism is the fact that we must transition from a place of comfort to a place of risk. Evangelism is risky because we could be rejected.
For every opportunity we have there is the possibility for someone to go from transition to transformation. These two men who spoke with Jesus were uncomfortable because Jesus wanted them to transition from their current lives and to be transformed into new lives. This is the task of evangelism and there is a little turmoil every time we, like Jesus, ask someone to church, invite them to a Bible study, or other church activity in order to get people to form a relationship with God.
Very few people have a heart for evangelism because it is hard. There is a high rejection rate and people have difficulty with low results. Perhaps, that is the problem with our perceptions of evangelism. We bring a numerical mind when we think about success of evangelism. However, we see that there is no command from the Bible for achieving a high numerical success rate.
Transition to transformation. It’s about process. Not about results. Let us do the process and let God worry about results. People do not save people. God saves people. May we be a people willing to invite people into the transition of acceptance of the Gospel and may we let God transform people.
5 Comments
Hi Alan,
over here in England not many churches train their people to share their faith, so what is hard anyway becomes doubly hard! As you know, businesses normally give their people training to do the job, but somehow the church doesn’t quite understand this and relies on self-motivation.
I created this website as one type of help:
WhatIs The Gospel?
Plus my website for new believers is here:
New Christian UK
Alan, love that you recognized that and created a solution! We’ve noticed in the USA that churches tend to rely heavily on programmatic evangelism, but our society is one in which Christians aren’t trusted and have to earn the right to be heard. Because of this most people aren’t accepting invitations to churches. As a result churches are finding it necessary to move from programmatic evangelism to relational evangelism- getting people to go out and have spiritual conversations with their friends.
We’ve created a resource for Christians to help them learn and get comfortable with this idea called The Arts of Spiritual Conversations. You can check it out here: http://www.qplace.com/start-a-q-place/the-arts-of-spiritual-conversations/
Numbers is the name of the 4th book of Moses but it is not the name of the game of evangelism. My hunch is that Christians have become so very detached from the Scriptures that crunching numbers has replaced spiritual discernment as a means of assessment.
While I certainly agree with most, I’m not sure I agree with all. I’m a Church Army Officer here in Australia. I personally don’t find evangelism hard. I do however find the evangelism my church does extremly hard. I feel sad at that and am trying currently to fix it.
I connect with people on a common level (Harley Davidson’s, Wargamers, Radio Control Planes). I so much look forward to rides with my friends. I also look forward to playing my fortnightly tabletop miniture game and spending time out on the flying field with my friends and their planes. I love my evangelism and simply don’t have time to visit all the friends I make. I have to focus in on a few.
I hate cold door knocking and such. Over the years God has given me the privilage of leading many to him. As far as rejection goes, its almost always easy to handle as these people are my friends who simply disagree with me on matters of God. Sad, as they will find out when Jesus comes. My heart goes out to my friends. I will still love them. I believe I am 100% successfull in evangelism when I accomplish only two things:
Through Prayer and Obedience, present the Good News of Jesus in such a way my friends can 1) Understand it and 2) can respond. Results are up to God, only the first two can I control. Sadly, I’m not sure the church really does these two well in Australia.
I believe we need to be strategic (through Prayer and Obedience) and give our best thought through, prayed through methodologies instead of doing something because ‘we did it last year’.
Please, if you can spare the time, could you comment on very similar issues I have expressed in my Blog at http://chocolateevangelism.com/
God Bless
Andrew, I think many picture evangelizing as knocking door to door or being pushy with their faith. However, there are other ways.