Here is an article written by James Rayment about evangelism, courtesy of Logos.com, the platform where I manage my biblical resources.
Introduction
I run The Al-Ma’idah Initiative, an organization that trains Christians to communicate truth to Muslims in ways that resonate. I work out of a coffee shop in Seattle, where I regularly have conversations with people from a wide range of worldviews. Over the years, my evangelism relationships have led me on extraordinary adventures—from the streets of Guadalajara, Mexico, to the deserts of Saudi Arabia—and I have seen God do amazing things.
Yet I find most Christians dread evangelism. They feel inhibited from having conversations about faith with non-believers. But in my experience, their efforts at evangelism feel unnatural and unnecessarily difficult due to some simple mistakes.
Let’s identify and address these so that you can feel more confident—and even enjoy—what God has called each of us to do.
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Waiting to earn the right to share
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Avoiding controversial topics
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Rejecting those who resist
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Losing your composure
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Relying on a script
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Outsourcing your evangelism
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Trying to evangelize alone
1. Waiting to earn the right to share
Many Christians feel they must earn someone’s trust before sharing the gospel with them. So instead of being upfront about what they believe, they try to avoid bringing attention to their faith, hoping that one day, when the time is right, they’ll be able to speak as a friend whose input is valued.
But building a relationship on a shallow foundation of shared activities or pop culture without anything of depth requires Christians to shrink back from their identity and God’s Spirit within them. Yet it’s precisely this Spirit and our nature as “salt of the earth” that our non-believing friends need (Matt 5:13).
Sometimes Christians have an evangelism strategy that looks like this: Be someone’s friend for years, waiting for them to face an existential crisis, at which point we swoop in and share the gospel. (In this way, we are kind of rooting for our friends’ lives to collapse, so that we can help them rebuild.) Now, such collapse certainly happens to some. But remember, not every testimony is, or needs to be, a dramatic one. For instance, although Jesus’s healing ministry is memorable, there were also thousands in the crowds who just saw him and believed.
2. Avoiding controversial topics
Growing up as a Christian in the UK, every piece of conventional wisdom I received instructed me that the best thing Christians could do was steer clear of controversial issues, as such things get in the way of our ability to share the gospel. After all, the Bible does say to avoid foolish controversies (Titus 3:9).
Yet we err when we apply this too broadly. Consider that many of the controversies modern Christians want to avoid are the very things the Bible thinks important to address. Jesus and his apostles don’t merely address salvation. They address our sinful human nature as the reason we need God’s salvation in the first place. They address sexuality, money, politics, culture, and how we are to live as transformed individuals.
While many in our culture will be offended by what the Bible has to say about these topics, others will experience God’s Word as the remedy to a sickness they could never diagnose. In fact, I would argue that our failure to apply the Bible to a host of issues has created a vacuum that non-Christians, like Jordan Peterson, are filling with Bible-adjacent ideas.
3. Rejecting those who resist
When I worked for a well-known missions agency, I was trained to categorize people into three groups: seeker, neutral, or closed. I was taught to respond to each based on their openness to the gospel.
But while this may be a natural way to deal with people, I don’t believe it aligns with what the Bible teaches.
First, according to the Bible, the reason we are saved isn’t primarily because we seek God, but because God himself seeks us: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).
Further, if you look at the ministry of Jesus, some who were initially receptive to him, like Judas, later betrayed him. Others who were originally antagonistic to Jesus—like James (John 7:5) and Paul (Acts 9:1–2)—God redirected for his own purposes, making them into some of his greatest messengers.
One of my friends is from Turkmenistan. His brother-in-law was the first Turkmen to become a Christian after the fall of the iron curtain. My friend’s friend reacted, “Turkmen are Muslim! If you weren’t my wife’s brother, I would kill you right now!”
Sensible mission agencies would tell you this person is closed to the gospel and you should move on. However, being in the same family meant that there were months of heated arguments, which eventually resulted in my friend becoming a Christian—and eventually a pastor. In fact, he essentially became one of the founding fathers of Turkmen Christianity, facing imprisonment, torture, and assassination attempts. None of that has stopped him from faithfully teaching the Bible for decades and becoming the leading provider of Christian Turkmen content worldwide.
It haunts me to think about non-Christians we may have given up on due to their initial resistance. When you look at leaders like Moses (Exod 3–4) and Paul, both of these men were resistant before God intervened. And God did not squash their stubbornness and aggression; he redirected it for his glory.
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4. Losing your composure
Running a ministry to Muslims in a liberal city like Seattle, I’ve notice some interesting patterns. I’ve observed a commonality between those with revolutionary worldviews and those with Islamic ones: Both often expect me, their convinced ideological opponent, to respond to them with fear or anger. They either anticipate that I’ll bow to the inevitability of their ascendant ideology without pushback, or that I’ll react with unhinged fury, confirming their stereotype of the bigot or Islamophobe. What they are not prepared for is a jolly Christian who is friendly and honest, confident yet calm!
We’re familiar with Peter’s call to give a defense “with gentleness and respect.” But I’ve never sat through an evangelism training that emphasized courage. Yet courage is such an important part of evangelism that the Apostle Paul actually refers to it as a sign to them: “[A]nd not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God” (Phil 1:28).
Not only will being calm and courageous make us more interesting to talk to, it’s also a way of leaning on the promises of God.
5. Relying on a script
In my experience, much of the evangelism training in the Christian world—both East and West—focuses on simple methods or formulas designed to make evangelism easy to teach. There is certainly a measure of wisdom in that.
What I have observed is that many such methods, like the Four Spiritual Laws, are built for very specific contexts, like sharing the gospel with a stranger on a college campus. The downside of this simplification is that people may become well equipped to share on campus, but have a hard time adapting what they’ve learned once they leave that open marketplace of ideas (and their flexible schedules) for a more structured life with fewer natural opportunities to engage others.
The New Testament never gives us an exact formula for how to share the gospel. Instead, we see the gospel preached in different ways to different groups of people depending on context. Paul puts it this way: “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col 4:5–6).
Notice Paul’s assumption: “each person” may need a different answer. Therefore, we should not be preparing to repeat the same conversation over and over, but to apply the whole counsel of God to any situation. This takes more training and discipleship than an evangelistic script can provide, but it will serve us better in the long run and make evangelism more natural.
6. Outsourcing your evangelism
Growing up in England, where there were not as many evangelical Christians around, inviting friends to church always felt difficult. For me, that meant I felt a need to explain the gospel to my non-Christian friends in a way that made sense to them, because I didn’t expect church to resonate with them.
When I moved to America, I joined a rising Seattle megachurch—one that later imploded. For my first couple of years there, I loved it, and I couldn’t wait to invite people to hear the Bible clearly preached in a way that connected with our time and place. But once problems and church drama came to the surface, I was no longer excited to bring my non-Christian friends. This gave me an important realization: If I don’t share the gospel with my non-Christian friends, there might not be anyone else who does.
At this point I realized I had been slacking. I hadn’t been working to communicate Christianity in a way that my friends would understand. I had just been inviting them to hear someone else do it.
Now, inviting your friends to church is good. But consider that you may actually be better suited to share the gospel with them then your pastor or favorite speaker might. God is capable of introducing your friend to anyone—but he chose to put you in their life.
7. Trying to evangelize alone
To counterbalance my previous point, we also need to understand that the church is one body with many parts. Your words will uniquely resonate with some people and not others, and you probably know who those people are.
But you probably also know people in your Christian community who could reach those you can’t. Perhaps there’s a way you could introduce them?
And even for those you can reach, introduce them to your Christian community. Show them that it’s not about you being exceptional, but that God is at work, not only in your life, but also in the lives of others.
After all, Jesus said: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). If your non-believing friends only encounter you alone, how would they ever get to see the love amongst Christians in action?
Jesus told his disciples he would make them “fishers of men” (Matt 4:19). Maybe we picture one guy with a line catching a single fish. But the fishing his disciples practiced was a team sport—several men shoulder to shoulder, each holding part of a net, wading through the water together.
So find your team. Walk shoulder to shoulder in speaking the truth in love to the people around you who need to know Jesus.
And I hope you have as good a time doing it as I have.