Thoughts on evangelism

I have been thinking a lot about the topic of evangelism lately, mostly because I am preparing to teach a series of lessons on it at my church. One of the ideas I am struggling to express has to do with the goal of evangelism, or rather, some things that are NOT the goal of evangelism, but that have been mistakenly stated as goals of evangelism. First among them, in my mind, is the myth that we need to “convert people” in order to increase attendance in our churches, and therefore the contributions given. That’s just plain idolatry. Maybe I’ll write about that some other time.

The issue I’m thinking about right now is that we have acted like the goal of evangelism is to earn favor with God. The myth says that the number of souls we “save” is directly proportional to the quality of our faith. It says, “If you’re a really GOOD Christian, you’ll convert a lot of people.” Further, it says, “If you’re not converting people, you must not be a very good Christian.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it assumes we can do anything to earn more favor with God. From what I read in the Bible (without going into a lot of proof-texting here), God doesn’t love any of us better than any others; He loves all persons equally, even those who don’t put their faith in Him. The point of following God isn’t to “get in good” with him, but to be made over into His likeness, through Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and transformation by the Holy Spirit. Being saved isn’t about the process of becoming good enough to get into Heaven, but of becoming like God enough to display His Kingdom here on earth.

Obedience, then, is not what we do to keep God happy. It’s what we do to keep ourselves on track with His transformation of our lives and our characters to match His own. So, evangelism, like anything else we do in His name, doesn’t make us any better; it’s one of the things we do to allow transformation in us. If we hold back from doing anything that pleases God, we hold back some part of our lives that needs His touch to make it more complete. By not obeying, whether it be in evangelism or anything else, we miss out on opportunities to be made better than we are.

Some people are good at evangelism – they’re gifted for it. Others of us, like myself, aren’t particularly gifted for it. That doesn’t excuse us from our need to work at it, to try our best, and to submit our lack of giftedness to God, so that He can work through our weakness to achieve His goals.

When it gets down to it, evangelism isn’t that hard. We just have to let people know that God cares about them, and wants them to be His. What goes on from there is God’s doing. There are things we can do to prepare ourselves to express God’s truths to them. I intend to learn more about those things in the coming months. Maybe I’ll write about them as I learn them.