A Brief Analysis of Practical Evangelism

There is a great body of work on the subject of Christian witness, ranging from simple “how to” guides to deep, insightful exegesis of scriptural evangelistic verses. However I thought that I would also take a stab at the same topic from a hopefully practical and personable level. I think there will always be room for works on this level simply because the world in which we live is always changing. Therefore we will always need to analyze and reconsider our approach. Furthermore a personable approach should be the norm because of the nature of the work. I know of very few people who were swayed to Christianity by the means of philosophical arguments or abstract reasoning. I do know of people, many people, who became Christian through a relationship with a believer. That is not to say that there is no place for critical thought within the parameters of a Christian worldview, nor that we ought to ignore the intellect and intelligentsias as the fundamentalists did in the early twentieth century. The proper reaction to Enlightenment criticism should have been to combat the intellectuals intellectually but also to live the Christian life. In light of Marx’s claims concerning how religion served merely as a tool for oppression, and Nietzsche’s claims to choose either the life of passion or the life of reason and death (and also Christianity, I am sure), I can’t help but wonder if the Enlightenment criticism would have softened under a stronger Christian witness of practicing what we preach. Living the faith is perhaps the strongest witness to the truth of the Gospel. The question then arises: how are we to do this?

As in all things, we should come to the Lord in prayer before, during and after we witness to someone. The Apostle Paul calls us to do this in his letter to the Colossians when he writes:

Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone (Col 4:2-6).

The first thing that Paul calls us to do is to pray for God to take the initiative which should first and foremost remind us of God’s sovereignty. Since it is God who opens the doors for the message of the Gospel (Pollard, p. 18), we can be free of trying to make opportunities ourselves that lead to contrived and occasionally ridiculous conversations with friends such as my father telling me about how his car needs a tune-up to clear the gunk out of the engine and I reply with some quip about how sin is our spiritual gunk and we need regular tune-ups with God every day (Pollard, p. 21). Secondly, as God opens the door we are to proclaim the Gospel message of Christ’s triumph over sin and death. It is up to God to take the spiritual initiative, and up to us to be faithful to His call. This does not mean that we may not strike up conversations with people, but it does mean that we shouldn’t twist every conversation with our friends and acquaintances into one about Jesus. He exhorts us to be wise and to make every opportunity count for all that it can. As Polland notes, we are to think and consider how to answer questions concerning the Bible and Christian faith and we may also rejoice that we only need to step up to the opportunities, not to make them ourselves (Pollard, p. 18-19). When we converse with people we are to do so in a Godly way. We are not only to talk a certain way but we are to live a life that is in keeping with our professed belief. “It’s (evangelism) about being a certain person and living in a certain way. The heart of the gospel is love, and love must be the center of our hearts as we seek to communicate this gospel to others (Pollard, p. 23).” I have heard people say that while Ghandi liked Christ, he did not like Christians. I have also heard that Nietzsche claimed he would “believe in Christ once the Christians seemed to be saved.” I don’t know how reputable such quotations are but they do point towards a discrepancy between how we act and what we say. For better or for worse, the former speaks much louder than the latter although both are necessary.

We have the Biblical model of how we are to witness to people from Paul’s letter, but what about a methodology? We are very good at constructing systems for getting Christians to witness to people. We have tracts, seminars and rallies to encourage believers to get out there and share their faith.

But what is worse is this: while the first century Christians succeeded marvelously in evangelism without ever having had the advantage of a Four Spiritual Laws or books like Evangelism Explosion, our success, even with our shelves lined with such helps, has been next to nothing (McPhee, p. 30).

Francis of Assissi, shortly after founding the Franciscan Order, discovered that he needed a rule of life with which to govern and from which to orient the order. Yet, according to one biographer, St. Francis had but one simple rule: “Was there not the Gospel? To take the counsels of the Gospel in their full literal sense seemed to him quite enough in order to be a Friar Minor (Gemelli, p. 39).” St. Francis did not create a vast method or intricate set of laws and rules, rather he relied almost solely upon the Gospel. A man who taught me much about how we are to understand the Gospel in our lives once told me that we are always making ourselves complex and forcing God to be simple in our lives. Rather, it should be the other way around: we should be simple so that God may be complex within us. Such was Saint Francis’ approach to ministry and monastic rule. Such was also the early Church’s approach to witnessing and to their personal lives. We ought to do likewise.

If we turn to the Gospels ourselves then, we see that Jesus has no established system. The nature of the Messiah, and the salvation of the Samaritan woman occur not because of some four-step program or a vicious philosophical assault but because Jesus loved and guided her (John 4). Jesus did not hide his identity from her, but neither did he deny it; he presented it lovingly. “Take it (your Christian faith) with you to college. Practice it on the job. Display it in department stores. Let people see your good works. When a Christian does good, that believer points people to a God who is even better (Moyer, p. 86).” Our faith is not something to hide away or forget about but rather something that ought to be lived. We often hear the rejoinder that we should practice what we preach, and that actions speak louder than words. But let us not also go so far as to forget to use our mouths to testify to God’s greatness. “We are to evangelize. We must share the gospel at every opportunity, publicly to the masses and privately one on one. Acts 5:42 tells us, ’Daily in the temple, and in every house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ (Moyer, p. 86).’” We are to live the very conversations we seek to have with people in order to serve God as the vehicles of His Gospel. In so living we are also to share the Word with those we encounter. Therefore, while we do not have a formal system of how we ought to evangelize we are given the two-fold pattern of living the true, Gospel-centered Christian life and of witnessing to Jesus Christ through our conversations.

Let us first examine how we are to converse with people about the Gospel. Very often we encounter apologists and clergy who mean well when they tell us that we must be ready to “defend the faith.” Certainly in our age when God is no longer considered the fundamental, absolute truth upon which we construct reality, when there is indeed no fundamental truth except personal preference, we very often do have to defend the faith. Not only the faith, but also some of the basic presuppositions of our faith, for example that there are such things as absolute truth and morality, and that truth can be known. Yet we very often seem to forget that we are not only to defend, but we are also to declare. We should do our utmost to understand the questions that are posed to us, but there is no need for us to be totally defensive either. Rather we should also assert, or declare, the truth of Jesus Christ and the Good News. We can safely look to Paul as the Biblical example of doing just this.

But when Paul entered the city (Corinth), the first thing he told the Corinthians was the good news of the gospel. He preached ‘Christ and Him crucified.’ He didn’t enter the city defending what he believed. He entered declaring what he believed… He believed that God wanted him to declare Christ rather than defend Him (Moyer, p. 51).

Paul did not automatically assume a defensive posture but rather boldly asserted the great Christian truth of the triumphant and risen Christ. However, that does not mean that he ignored the objections of those who questioned him. Indeed, Paul spends a significant amount of time trying to answer the question of his authority to the Corinthian church, or answering questions as to whether or not believers can eat food dedicated to other gods. Similarly, we should also be bold in asserting the same truth and yet we should not shy away from clearing up questions and dilemmas that nonbelievers have. I can say that, from my own experience, most of my time spent ministering to people is spent in clarifying their view of God and helping them to realize what the Bible asserts and what it does not. I see this as valuable because it enables people to realize what it means to truly believe in God and Jesus Christ His son, without any other excess baggage provided by their own, often unfavorable, experiences with Christians.

We need to be careful in choosing our battles however. Just because I am to declare and proclaim the Gospel doesn’t mean that I should work the gospel into every single conversation I have, as previously mentioned. I have friends who would often talk about doing something utterly ridiculous, and when I dryly mentioned that following through with their idea might not be wise, they were quick to reply with “Jesus did it.” This ranged across all manner of deeds, whether it was just drinking a beer, going skydiving, or something truly outrageous. The first few times I was quick to respond with a “no he didn’t,” but as I soon caught on they were just playfully joking with me. I learned not to respond to the bait. The reason I mention this is that one of my friends who used to do this to me has recently given his life to Christ. Now, if I were to have been nitpicky over my friends’ jokes I doubt that it would have helped.

Part of picking our battles is also speaking the truth in love. I am sure that there will be times that we need to be hard on the people we know and love. I am sure that some of those times may concern their attitude towards Jesus Christ. However, even in those times, we must also be loving. That does not mean we should become pushovers, as Pollard points out, “Love has teeth when necessary (Pollard, p. 25).” It does mean, however, that we are not abrasive or insulting in our witness. Pollard also gives us this example of a conversation between himself and a Christian student:

Sometimes, during a mission, Christian students tell me they have just had a ‘big argument with my friends about God.’ I often reply, ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry.’ Now, that isn’t the reply they expected to receive. So they sometimes continue, ‘Don’t worry, I won the argument.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but did you lose the person?’

Treating a person as a person, and not as the victim of our possibly razor-sharp philosophy and theology, is what helps people to see the love of God. No one enjoys being raked over the coals. There have been several times where I wanted to drive home a point about someone’s non-Biblical worldview, and I felt that my point would blast their non-Christian presuppositions out of the water, so much so that I forced the conversation past where my interlocutor wished to take it and ended up only hurting the cause of Christ. I trust God to be able to still reach those people, but I certainly did nothing to help in those instances.

It is also important for us to be relevant to those whom we present the Gospel to. Pollard shares a fictional anecdote in his writings about a friend of the reader’s asking about the nature of Jesus’ death, the reader launching into an academic answer of sacrifice in light of Jewish temple practices, and this friend subsequently heading off to the pub having no idea what the reader is talking about (Pollard, p. 103). We need to speak to be understood, not in evangelistic terminology so familiar to us, such as “being saved,” but in terms that people can understand. If we are motivated by love, as Paul says we ought to be in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 5:14) then we will want to speak to the people we meet at their level, not in robust academic terms that showcase our own knowledge nor in proud evangelistic language that isolates the listener. If we are speaking a message of God’s love then it is contradictory to that same message to act out of arrogance or pride.

Similarly, we should also engage people in dialogue not monologue (McPhee, p. 96). No one wants to be preached at. While not related to a religious experience, I remember once when I had opened up and was vulnerable with a friend of mine. Rather than trying to engage me with my concerns, he began pontificating upon some related subject and became so entangled with himself and what he was saying that he had essentially forgotten about me. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly feel either loved or engaged by my friend at that particular moment. We also need to be respectful and honest with those whom we hope to engage. Saint Francis gives us an example of this in his willingness to acknowledge the truth of perspectives that varied from his own. “The small amount of truth mixed up with the heresies of his day he readily accepted, while he rejected the errors and mistakes of the secretaries… (Gemelli, p. 43).” This might not seem terribly important except that Saint Francis, at least chronologically, was associated with an era in the church that, regrettably, often killed those of heretical perspectives. While, as Christians, we need to affirm the inspiration of the scriptures and the singular saving grace of Jesus Christ, we should also not be afraid of acknowledging those elements of truth in differing religions and world views. Very often we are afraid to acknowledge the truth of non-Christian perspectives, and this can have disastrous consequences:

Christians have followed the way of Jesus... demonstrating it by social action. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, however, this changed… it was partly due to a reaction against theological liberalism, which reduced the value of the Bible and increased the importance of social action. Instead of just rejecting part of theological liberalism (the devaluation of the Bible), many Christians rejected all of liberalism’s insights and consequently rejected social action. If only we had affirmed the elements of truth that liberalism maintained, we would not have thrown out the social-action baby with the biblical-criticism bath water (Pollard, p. 55).

It is unfortunate that with all the calls to assist the poor in the book of Isaiah alone, that Christianity has lost its rightful association with love, compassion, self-sacrifice and mercy. Not only has Christianity lost its association with these virtues in the eyes of the world, but also in ourselves, with professing believers being wary of engaging the world in such a charitable manner for fear of being misidentified as some sort of anti-Christian liberal. How can we proclaim a loving and merciful message if we ourselves are not loving and merciful? But what does this look like? It is difficult, especially in our world of sensitivities concerning differences and disagreement, to as Ravi Zacharias once said, “Disagree without being disagreeable.”

Pollard has offered us one, and not necessarily the only, method of lovingly engaging people about Christ. He has dubbed it “positive deconstruction.” The process is defined as such, says Pollard, because he is “Helping people to deconstruct what they believe in order to look carefully at the belief and analyze it. The process is positive because this deconstructing is done in a positive way – in order to replace the false belief with something better (Pollard, p. 44).” In so following such guidelines as these, we are able to engage people not as hostile enemies, but as friendly and loving people who are also interested in the truths of existence. Rather than berating people into submission with philosophical clubs we can assist them in climbing the wall of unbelief to the Gospel beyond.

But it is not enough merely to talk to people. We must also live the life we are calling others to live; we must speak through our actions as well as our mouths. In fact we already do, whether we realize it or not. Therefore we should be conscious of how our lives reflect the Gospel, and attempt to bring our lives more and more under the direction of Jesus Christ. McPhee, quoting Amy Carmichael’s “Edges of His Way,” offers a sharp reminder:

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

Are read by more than a few,

But the one that is most read and commented on

Is the gospel according to you.

Who we are and what we do often speaks louder than what we say. One of the things that I have found myself often worrying over, in terms of witnessing to nonbelievers, is trying to find that balance between pushing too quickly for growth and not pushing enough. I have a friend of mine who has recently given his life to Christ, over whom I worried and prayed for many years. I also, in retrospect, never had an agenda with him apart from enjoying being his friend. I also have another friend whom, upon my first meeting him, claimed to be a Christian yet does not live a life that is in keeping with the gospel. Unfortunately, I pushed him very hard, and as a result I have seen very little growth in him. Regardless of whether we struggle with pushing someone too fast, or too slow, we need to remember that growth takes time. “We are sadly mistaken if we believe that the conviction of sin is ordinarily an instantaneous thing (McPhee, p. 51).” On the night of my conversion, while God convicted me of my hypocrisy and of many core sins I lived in, He did not convict me of all sin at once. Over the years He has done this more and more. Similarly it takes time to build friendships with people that we meet. We become more comfortable with that person, open up to that person, and share with that person.

If we want to reach people, we also have to go where the people are. We can’t do “armchair evangelism” and expect anything to come of it. “God has called us… we must be prepared to place ourselves right in the middle of the tensions, the alienation, the aches, and all the rest of society’s ills, for it is just there that the reconciling presence of Christians is needed most of all (McPhee, p. 33).” Jesus himself often enjoyed a reputation as a friend of “tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 11:19),” and as I once heard an evangelistic speaker say, “I hope you all have reputations like that.” Now he was speaking partly in jest, because we could have those reputations by actually being drunkards and prostitutes. But his message was that we would go out to the lost, the poor, the needy, the hurt and minister to them the love of God in His son Jesus Christ.

Yet this judgment for the company we try to reach need not come from only nonbelievers, but also professing Christians as well. I remember during my involvement with Campus Crusade for Christ during my college years that one of the students wanted to bring her roommate to our weekly meetings but she was afraid of us judging her roommate because she did not fit into the “Christian culture” that was alive and well in our chapter of Crusade. I also remember being at a Crusade conference and I watched all the chairs in a classroom fill up except for the two chairs beside a male student with long hair and black clothes. As two young men entered, they searched for seats and found those last two and got into a small argument over who would sit closest to the long-haired man.

Christians seem to change from being skeptical to being gullible. This is partly due to the social pressure that comes with belonging to a new community. They want to fit in with the church or Christian group they have joined… Consequently, they pick up a whole set of ideas covering everything from the consumption of alcohol to the acceptability of rock music, from Sunday shopping to the morality of various fashions. The tragedy is that, all too often, new Christians like this wake up some time later and realize they can’t believe all these ideas any more. And so they give them up. All of them. Including Jesus (Pollard, p. 90).

Yes we are still sinners, saved only through the mercy of God through His son Jesus Christ, but we cannot use this as an excuse for rejecting those things which we find personally objectionable due to taste. We can’t put our Christian t-shirts, music and slang terms on the same pedestal with Jesus. We can’t put our personal preferences ahead of the love we are told to share. I am not saying that such shirts, music and slang are necessarily wrong, but we need to remember that they are not necessarily right either. The Christians I know who listen only to Mercy Me and Kutlass in their cars seem just as sanctified as those who listen to Metallica and Britney Spears. Indeed, clinging so tightly to our “Christian culture” may only serve to further highlight the hypocrisy and sinfulness in our own lives, as people see us proclaiming one message with our clothes and music, and a contrary one with our actions.

I realize that we are not perfect. We don’t need to be perfect, just honest. I have found that a willingness to see one’s faults and ask forgiveness for them speaks a hundred times louder than a stubborn insistence on clinging to one’s self-serving convictions.

I’ve never met one unbeliever who expected Christians to be perfect. They know that Christians are human, that they will fail. Unbelievers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect integrity. It’s one thing to fail; it’s another thing to come across as someone who never does. When we fail… the words ‘I’m sorry’ should jump freely from our tongues (Pollard, p. 152).

I once suspected a close friend of mine of meaning me harm when, in reality, there was no just cause for me to do so. After several tense hours I was convicted, took my friend aside, and apologized for my attitude and behavior towards him. He freely accepted my apology and has never held it against me. My friend calls this being the “gutsy guilty.” I think that, as Christians, we should be the first to ask for forgiveness for our own shortcomings and failures. We should always strive for integrity of character and honesty with others in admitting our wrongs. We do not need to be perfect, but we do need to be honest. We can’t proclaim Jesus as the only truth if we ourselves live surrounded by lies.

In conclusion, we can walk away with several applications. We should remember that we witness to others through both word and deed. We need to engage others but we also need to wait on God, in faith, to open the doors through which He wants us to bring the gospel. We also don’t need to have all the answers because God already does. Once again we need only to be honest with our own doubts and confusions and in so doing we can also point people to Christ with a humble heart, mind and contrite spirit. Finally we should be critical and honest of our own incorrect beliefs and sins. This is not some formal methodology, despite its formal presentation. Rather it is my attempt at a simple guide to how we should, at least, begin to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission. Before his ascension into Heaven, Jesus left us with his command: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 28:18-20).” Let us go forward in grace and truth to witness to the lost. First and foremost Christ himself will be with us, even to the end of the age.

Bibliography

Zondervan, NIV Study Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, 1973.

Pollard, Nick. Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult. Intervarsity Press, 1997.

McPhee, Arthur G. Friendship Evangelism: The Caring Way to Share Your Faith. The Zondervan Corporation, 1978.

Moyer, R. Larry. Twenty-One Things God Never Said: Correcting Our Misconceptions About Evangelism. Kregel Publications; Grand Rapids, MI; 2004

Gemelli, Agostino. The Franciscan Message to the World. Burns Oates and Washbourne, LTD. London, England; 1934.