Good Evangelism

I’ve written before about relational evangelism. And I posted yesterday about what I thought was bad evangelism. I didn’t think I would be hitting on such a touchy subject. So instead of defending myself and others from caricatures about not knowing anything about evangelism or not taking the initiative to evangelize, I thought I would try to be a little more proactive by writing about what I think evangelism should look like and not just what it shouldn’t look like.

Let me say that I am for evangelism. One can’t read the book of Acts without seeing the apostles proclaiming the message of Jesus. In the first part of Acts 17–before the notorious speech on the Areopagus–Paul is seen talking with anyone who would listen. Jesus Himself commanded us to go out into the world with His message. At the time of Origen, we see evangelism being important. In his work Contra Celsus, Origen writes of women going to the marketplace and talking about the way Jesus had affected their lives. These types of things show the importance of evangelism scripturally and historically. Logically, how could the message get anywhere if we didn’t evangelize? The need and importance of evangelism cannot be overstated.

However, it can be poorly done. And that is the problem I had in my post on Bad Evangelism. I have come to the conviction that evangelism should look less like a sales pitch for Rainbow Vacuums, and more like a changed life that is simply exploding. Evangelism needs to move past our Christian presuppositions and deal with the deep issues holding people back from faith. And I have become convinced that this will take more than most of our modern techniques.

When I became a Christian at age 14, I was told that I needed to share my faith. How? The “best and easiest” way, I was told, was the Romans Road. You just flip around in the book of Romans to a handful of scattered verses and people will hear the gospel. I took the time to memorize the order of the verse, and gave it a couple of tries. But I remember coming to the conclusion that the book of Romans must have been written out of order. Why didn’t they put all these verses in order? I was shocked to learn later that God divinely inspired these out of order Scriptures, and yet God was a God of order. I also began to wonder what Christians did before they had the book of Romans.

Then I was introduced to tracts. “How to get to Heaven from Mobile, Alabama” was my favorite. Here is an example for those who haven’t been lucky enough to see one of these tracts. I spent one afternoon passing these out in front of two local grocery stores, and for some reason was surprised to find a majority of them littering the parking lot after we were done.

Later, as a senior in high school, I learned the F.I.R.E. (Family, Interests, Religion, Evangelize) method of evangelization. I learned Sharing Jesus Without Fear–which is basically the Romans Road on crack–and later went on a summer project with Campus Crusade for Christ, where we memorized and used the 4 Spiritual Laws (which is now called “Would You Like to Know God Personally?”).

You would think with all of these options one would always be applicable. But the problem is that these are canned, impersonal approaches to sharing the gospel, and they rarely get the full gospel picture. I think in some ways it simply makes things easier for us without worrying about the consequences. We simply give a presentation that someone else thought up. We never really have to get our hands dirty and we never have to be vulnerable or think about the gospel.

My understanding of evangelism changed when I heard Donald Miller speak about a few paradigm shifts Christians need to embrace in light of our “postmodern” culture. One of these paradigm shifts was to stop giving prepackaged, impersonal and partial presentations of the gospel. Instead of having to have a program and making plans and all that goes into it, we should be able to relax and just talk about Jesus. If Jesus is the center of our lives and we are loving him with all of our hearts, there should be a natural overflow. If Jesus is the center of our lives, there is no way to keep him from coming up in conversations. When we discuss Christ, we are presenting the love of our lives, not some impersonal, abstract concept.

Then I read Brian McLaren’s book More Ready than You Realize, where he talked about how most of our evangelism has been designed to get people to consent to what they already believe. A tract full of Bible verses only convinces people who believe in the Bible. We must do something more than that.

While I certainly don’t agree with everything either of these authors have to say, they make very important points. Why was my 4 Spiritual Laws and How to Get to Heaven from Mobile, AL evangelism almost never sufficient? Why did the Romans Road rarely elicit anything more than a “that’s interesting….I guess” from people? Because it is only a partial presentation of the gospel, it presupposes things that an unbeliever doesn’t, and it’s an incredibly impersonal way to share the gospel about the personal God of the universe. And as several people have already noted, it ends with the infamous “sinner’s prayer,” never really getting concerned with discipleship. As one commenter said, in all the sinner’s prayers prayed and even baptisms, there were rarely any lives actually affected.

So we take the gospel and share it in a personal way. The people in our lives–friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, people who go to our gym or library or bookstore or coffee shop or wherever–they are in our lives for a reason. We simply need to love them and share our lives with them, and the gospel will go to them. Then, we are right there to help disciple them. Of course, in the context of a relationship the discipleship process will likely already have begun. This is more real, as we allow people to see what the gospel really looks like in our lives. The struggles of a relationship with Christ are evident. There are no pretenses, no quoting of random, out of context Bible verses.

This still works in when you go to the grocery store and meet someone in the dairy section. Again, if the gospel is entirely central in our lives, even our shopping is affected. I don’t have to accost a random stranger who will be freaked out immediately. I simply need to converse with a new friend, whom I am called to love, and the gospel comes up. To do this all we have to do is open our eyes and actually see people around us. Whenever I end up talking with someone I don’t know, the only two things I’m looking for is getting to know them and talking about that which is most important to–the gospel.

The reality is that if we live a life of evangelism, we will affect and reach many more people than occasionally going out with handful of tracts. The beauty of relational evangelism is that the pressure is off. Sharing the gospel is not as difficult and technical as we would like to make it. We talk about sharing our faith as being simple, but we make it so incredibly complicated. We call the gospel and our God personal, but we depersonalize it. We want to follow the commands of Jesus, but we focus on a moment of salvation and completely neglect discipleship. We believe in the Incarnation, but we don’t really want to get our hands dirty. We are called to love people, but we ignore the people right around us.