4 Reflections
God has been doing a work of honing, pruning and reconsideration in my soul when it comes to evangelism. Let me sum up what I’m learning:
1. Street evangelism can be effective in making converts but is rarely effective in making disciples.
I believe that thousands of people have trusted in Christ over the years through our door-to-door outreaches at Dare 2 Share. But very few of these people have been integrated into local churches. This has not been due to a lack of trying, but a lack of relationship with them.
2. Evangelism should start with our immediate circle of influence, our friends, family, co-workers and neighbors.
I am guilty of sometimes using cold-turkey evangelism as a cheap substitute for the “meat and potatoes” of relational evangelism with my own neighbors. Don’t get me wrong. I have witnessed to many of my neighbors. But if I applied the same relentlessness I have with my street evangelism to my neighborhood, then I believe many more of those who live around me would not only know Christ by now, but be plugged into healthy, growing churches.
That changes today.
I choose to make my primary base of evangelistic operations my neighborhood and the Starbuck’s that I frequent. These are the lost people that I know. No longer will I use my spontaneous conversations with strangers as a salve for my hit-and-miss evangelism with my neighbors and barista buddies.
3. As God allows, we should share the gospel with the strangers we encounter and do our best to disciple them if they accept Christ.
Jesus was constantly sharing the good news with strangers, but He did this in the context of meeting their needs and engaging them at the deepest level. He never hesitated to turn a conversation from water to “The Living Water,” from bread to“The Bread of Life,” from the earthly to the heavenly. He was immensely relational and undeniably relentless.
With this in mind, I will still share Jesus on the plane, in the streets, anywhere and everywhere as God opens the door. But I will do my best to make sure others genuinely understand the message of Christianity. My goal is not for them to say “yes” with their mouths so I can feel good about my witnessing opportunity, but to genuinely say “yes” in their hearts. After all, Romans 10:9-10 reminds us, “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”
4. Our evangelistic efforts should be done relationally and relentlessly.
Whether we are sharing Christ with our friends, family, neighbors or strangers, we must depend on the Holy Spirit to give us balance. Some situations require more relentlessness and some a more relational approach.
As I read Kevin Roose’s article, my heart hurt. It hurt for this young man who was turned off by his Christian buddies’ blindness to the wake of resentment they left when they did cold-turkey evangelism in a sometimes cold-hearted way. And it hurt for the wakes that I have left as well. Have I alienated the very world that I have been seeking to reach in my quest to reach as many as possible as quickly as possible? Sure there have been genuine conversions, but there have been genuine aversions as well, not just to the gospel (an aversion I am glad to live with), but to my lack of sensitivity.
Just like Philip was relentless enough to run up to the Ethiopian eunuch’s chariot and relational enough to wait until he was invited in to talk, God can help us learn how to balance relational and relentless evangelism.
Let’s genuinely wrestle with the challenge of melding the relational and relentless aspects of evangelism as we share our faith with a world in desperate need of Jesus’ message.
