Rethinking Evangelism

We have to think bigger

I got enough feedback on my recent article “Should You Feel Guilty for Failing to Evangelize?” that I thought it warranted a follow-up to explain my point of view with a little more depth.

To be clear, I’m not saying don’t evangelize. As I wrote, if the opportunity arises, you should at least extend an invitation, a “come and see” of sorts.

But when I said the average Christian likely isn’t going to be a good evangelist with a slew of converts to show for their efforts, I meant what I said. What I don’t mean is that the church is resigned to never grow because of this reality.

Rather, I believe we’re thinking far too small with our approach of trying to guilt everyone into evangelizing.

You have to understand, what I’m advocating here isn’t a quibble over evangelism but a large scale overhaul in how we think of the church and her design.

Let’s use, for the thought experiment, a football team.

This team has been losing a lot lately. When you look at the scoreboard, the solution seems simple: we need more touchdowns.

The simplest answer? Spend practice teaching everybody to score touchdowns, and if they fail at it, point to the scoreboard deficit and let them know they’ve let the team down.

Obviously, football doesn’t work this way.

Occasionally an offensive lineman or a defender will score a touchdown, but that’s not their primary role. “But we need more touchdowns, though,” someone might remind us. The irony is, if everybody abandons their primary roles to try to score a touchdown every play, the team isn’t going to score many touchdowns, if any at all.

No, it’s by everyone playing their part in the system that the team has its best chance to score. A unit moving as one, made up of separate contributing parts, is always more effective than a collection of individuals doing the same thing. You know, kind of like a body (Romans 12:4-8, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4:11-16).

It would be incredibly short-sighted to try to turn everyone into a touchdown scorer just because the team needs more touchdowns.

Similarly, in our desperation brought on by slow growth, we think our only shot at getting back on track is by making everybody an evangelist. Instead, we have to trust the process that the system God prescribes will produce the fruits He expects.

The aim of the Great Commission and the book of Acts was not only to pick off a few individual converts but to convert Christians and disciple them to produce a cultural revolution, which produces more converts. If you have any kind of family history in the church, you’re proof that it worked.

The sustained strength of the church comes from the rank-and-file membership living counter-cultural lives so the church is bright and salty (Matthew 5:13-16).

Instead of patiently building this culture, we’ve opted to try to make everybody score evangelistic touchdowns.

In the meantime, our competitive advantage of looking different from the world has disappeared.

While we push evangelism to the degree that even many worship services have been re-envisioned as spiritual infomercials, our pews are filled with Christians who look just like the world. We don’t touch the issues that would make us stand apart because that would hurt the numbers and, after all, “you can’t bind that.”

So, we have Christian marriages that are just as egalitarian and dysfunctional as the world’s. We have Christian kids and teenagers who are just as self-centered and surly as the world. We have Christians who refuse to live under Christ’s Lordship in their work and hobbies. And we wonder why we can’t “score touchdowns” in our evangelism.

My belief is that if we actually discipled the people we do have into a noticeably different lifestyle, we’d all do a much better job of reaching the ones we don’t have.

I used to agree with those who said nobody is going to ask you about your Christian life. But even my own experience reveals it’s just not true. People often don’t ask why we’re different because we aren’t noticeably different.

Growing up, I and my family had dozens of conversations about the Bible with hockey teammates and their parents who couldn’t understand why we couldn’t miss church just this one time for a big game, or why our church did things so differently, or why we homeschooled, or why my sisters dressed the way they did, or just generic Bible questions they knew we could probably help them with.

In fact, I’m currently in a weekly study with an old teammate who reached out after years apart because he was looking into Christianity and knew us as the first place he could turn for answers.

I’m not bragging—it was my parents who made the decisions that created the opportunities, not me. They lived out their discipleship in a way that made them peculiar, and it opened the doors.

Are we willing to call people to be “weird?” Because that’s the cost of evangelism.

I don’t think we are willing, or at least we haven’t been. For my parents, many of those choices that opened evangelistic doors caused members of our own church to call them weird and treat them as outcasts.

You’ve probably seen it, too. To continue the example, how many congregations won’t discipline families who skip for youth sports? If we could be noticeably different in just that one way, think of how many chances it would create to give an answer for the hope within us.

But we aren’t noticeably different. We let people be exactly the same as the world, and instead of working on that, we scold them for not evangelizing. We want everybody to try to score touchdowns because we don’t have the time or the patience to teach them how to block.

As I argued in the previous piece, the spread of Christianity came via evangelism, but the sustainment and long-term growth has to come from something slower and far less noticeable.

We can be patient and start rebuilding the long-term system we abandoned decades ago, or we can keep throwing deep passes to talented, important players who might not be able to catch in the hope that they might come down with a few touchdowns.

For me, I’m going to advocate building the system.