Evangelism - help please!

[Tim Patrick]

Hi all,

I want to ask a question about evangelism - particularly evangelism to white anglo types like me. Basically, I want to know where it's happening and producing fruit. Where are anglos hearing the gospel and coming to faith in any substantial numbers? (Anywhere seeing 10% growth by conversion? 5%? 2%?) I'm looking for some models. Can anyone help?

I know that the publishers of the various small group evangelistic courses all claim fabulous successes for their various programs but does anyone have good evidence of this actually being so? I know of a few people who have come to faith through these courses (and so I still support them) but I don't see them bringing about mass conversion by any measure.

A secondary question is What are the bottlenecks? Conservative, educated evangelicals would seem to have a sufficiently good grip on the gospel message - good enough to share it with others - and yet we don't really appear to be converting at a particularly impressive rate (speaking here in human terms, you understand). We have evangelistic sermons, courses, 'pre-evangelistic' socials, etc, etc, but not buckets of fruit to show for it all. Why not? Are we doing something wrong? Is it just that the people of the times we live in are too closed to the message? Are we stuck in old evangelistic ruts that we need to break out of? Do we assume to much of the evangelistic 'event' and not work hard enough on another part of the process?

I'd really appreciate your reflections on this. At the end of the day, we want to grow the Kingdom and see people saved from their sins and brought into a relationship with Jesus. I struggle with how little of this I see happening and want to think about what we may be doing wrong or what we're not doing that perhaps we should be.

Tim

[Jono Smith]

Great question Tim.

It's late and I've just come out of a committee meeting so I'm going to be either:
a) Very brief. Or
b) Very angry and given to ranting...
I could wait until the morning, but I can't sleep while such a great post goes unanswered.

One of the problems, in my experience, is a lack of fired-up evangelists who stick around in the local church (post 1st year uni).

Most pastors are like me. They love seeing God save people. They even love speaking to unbelievers about Jesus. But without a fired-up evangelist regularly turning our attention to evangelism, us pastors tend to concentrate on other things.
Left to our own devices, us lone pastors (with no evangelist to slap-us-around a bit) end up running painful "evangelistic programs" that attract our church members and few others.
We run church dinners disguised as "evangelistic dinners" and dry bible studies disguised as "introductions to the Christian faith".

I've done it. You've probably done it.
How did we get so entrenched in the life of the church, and so removed from interaction with the world, that we seriously thought that young, sexually perverted, money-hungry, self-gratifying, pagan men and women would be interested in our $50 a head church dinner with *bonus* 50 minute jargon-laden sermon???

I'm not trying to offend anyone here. I'm really preaching to myself.

So anyway... This kind of thinking on behalf of us pastors just confirms what the evangelist had thought all along: "Missiology is my thing, best leave the ecclesiology to the pastors." So he continues to attend the church when he can, but he spends all his free time working for the Campus Ministry etc. instead of pushing the mission agenda at his local church. "What's the point anyway?"

Maybe I'm wrong. But right now I have an evangelist at my church who constantly reminds me that evangelism needs to be at the top of my ministry priority list. Spurgeon had an elder who he named his "Hunting Dog" because he was always on "the watch for souls". My friend at church is the same.
Without this guy I think I'd be so focused on my people, my small groups, my next sermon - that I'd neglect my 'duty' to engage with people who don't know Jesus.

So that's a picture of what's happening in my experience.

As far as evangelistic models go...

I'm so sick of pre-packaged evangelistic tools. I know there are good ones out there. We've just run Dominic Steele's "Ideas that Changed the World" course. It was actually very good. If you get someone to run it well (as we did) then it's worth the investment.

What gets me excited, however, is when the saints are given the opportunity to speak to people about Jesus in organic (that is uncontrived) situations.
So often I hear young adults say that they can't tell their friends about Jesus because they don't have all the most obscure answers to all the most unlikely objections to Christianity. They want more training!
I think the real issue isn't lack of training, but lack of experience. Church kids who actually stick around at church past their 18th birthday just don't have much experience in speaking to unbelievers...

BUT! If they are regularly ushered into a situation where they have the opportunity to engage with unbelievers (e.g. a weekly gathering of Christians and their unsaved mates at the pub), and are encouraged by a fired-up evangelist to talk about Jesus, then almost invariably they find that they are more-than-capable of sharing the gospel with unbelievers.

We have had previously timid young men at our weekly pub gathering telling their mates (with honest sincerity) that they're going to hell if they don't repent and stop hating Jesus. That's awesome to watch.

Of course, this is made a lot easier for them if they are sharing the gospel with unbelievers who they have spent some time with over a few weeks or months (with regular interaction)... But that (i.e. the benefit of forging relationships instead of just tract-bombing people) is another issue for another discussion.

I know your question was probably more concerned with rating and evaluating current evangelistic models, but I'd be keen to hear some reflections on people's experience as well. As with my "Belong, Behave, Believe" post, I'm happy for people to evaluate my experience and give their 20c.

Keep us thinking my friend!

Cheers,
Jono.

[Matt Williams]

Hey Tim & Jono,

I have a thought on evangelistic tools.

They seem to work incredibly well when run by the person who wrote them. Dominic Steele gets amazing results from Introducing God at Annandale; and I was at St Clements Mosman when John Dickson was running Simply Christianity and it was dynamic, with lots of people converted.

I wonder if the limited effectiveness of "courses" is because it is rather like preaching someone else's sermon. The depth of reflection and conviction behind the courses, the obvious sincerity of a person sharing what they believe; is there most of all when the people who wrote the courses are preaching the message the way it makes sense to them to say it.

Perhaps, if we do think having courses is helpful, we may find them more effective if we each develop our own. Sure it's re-inventing the wheel; but no more so really than writing our own sermons...

Just a thought.

Matt

[David Paton]

Hi Jono,
Isn’t it great that the church has diversity, and that some people are so single-minded about evangelism!  Let’s hope that they don’t spend all their time in pubs with unbelievers, and that we are also blessed by their passion for evangelism!
I am not sure about which factors influence conversion rates.  Cross Cultures, which runs at Melbourne Uni, in conjunction with St Jude’s Carlton, has a lot of international students come to faith in Christ.  They have a steady stream of people being baptised. 3 people were baptised in one night recently!
Maybe the key to success here is that in cross cultural ministry there is the opportunity to talk to people and to serve them.  Sharing things about our own culture, and listening to their’s, is a great way of forming relationships.  Often international students also need help with accomodation, getting around, and practical living issues, which we can help them with.  This is the ideal context for sharing the good news about Jesus.
The other thing they do is proclaim the gospel regularly.  Whether it be in Bible studies, sermons or after dinner :)
Regards,
David

[Jenny George]

David's example of Cross Cultures kind of highlights what Tim is asking in the OP. If ministry to international students is having such fruit, why not white anglo types??

Is it us? Or is it our culture? What's going on here?

Should our response be to pour more resources into white anglo ministry. Or should we go where God is clearly blessing the ministry and pour our resources into international student ministry? It's not an either/or obviously but there is some sense in which we make choices about how we spread our effort.

Great question, Tim. I'm still thinking.

Jenny

[Luke Isham]

I was listening today at Ridley over morning tea to a Pentecostal pastor who was telling me about an evangelist who visited his church.  This Evangelist was basically just a machine for Jesus.  A ministers kid who came to Jesus in highschool and then prayed and evangelised his way through school seeing a fair number become Christians.  That brought to mind the conversion of my AFES worker (Sam) at University of Tasmania (where I was a student) who said he'd been working at a petrol station as a pimply young man, reading the bible sometimes but completely non-Christian and then one day a bloke walked in to buy petrol and asked if he'd heard the good news of Jesus?  Sam was converted shortly thereafter.  

It seems we are all to be involved in evangelism, that is clear and incontestable.  Some of us though are clearly gifted or hardwired for evangelism and should be empowered, encouraged and prayed for all the time. Numbers in the West seem to be down, whether that's weeded out the culutral Christians or not I don't know.  However the long and the short of it is evangelism is highly important and we don't seem to be doing enough of it.

It's strange ministry to International students and company seems to be going well while white-Anglo ministry is flagging.  Do we concentrate only on areas of need or only on areas of success? Whatever the case is it needs to be given more strategic priority.  When I'm a minister I want to give constant personal attention to evangelism, I'll probably flounder around for a year or two figuring out who I'm best at relating to but I want to commit to it until I pass finally into the Kingdom.  However I'm going into a Diocese (Tasmania) where evangelism at a strategic, city or statewide level is more promoted then in Melbourne.  For people in Melbourne this is discouraging because you might be working personally for evangelism but at a larger, higher level not much is being done.  If circumstances change in the future and I work in a diocese that doesn't see evangelism as a wonderful, urgent high priority task then I would fee somewhat discouraged and focus on my own patch more.  


*Sorry Tim, I don't have a "successful" model to tell you, apart from my own accedotal experience that the most successful ministries I've personally seen and been apart of are university and International based and have been characterized by prayer, good bible teaching and strategic planning.

[Jereth]

Hi Tim,

A secondary question is What are the bottlenecks? Conservative, educated evangelicals would seem to have a sufficiently good grip on the gospel message - good enough to share it with others - and yet we don't really appear to be converting at a particularly impressive rate (speaking here in human terms, you understand). We have evangelistic sermons, courses, 'pre-evangelistic' socials, etc, etc, but not buckets of fruit to show for it all. Why not? Are we doing something wrong?

Great question, not sure I know the answer. I guess I wonder whether "conservative, educated evangelicals" really do have a good grip on the gospel message. Lately I've been getting the sense that we don't hear the gospel preached nearly enough in church because everyone assumes we already know it -- the hazard being that we all gradually forget it over time. Or we remember the technical details but lose the sense of its truth, power and relevance and our minds aren't well exercised at expressing it.

Maybe we're over-intellectualised? I don't know about others, but I've been listening to a fair bit of Mark Driscoll lately (thanks mainly to my wife who has become a bit of a Driscoll junkie!) and hearing Christianity proclaimed unashamedly in rough, "crude", simple ways is extremely powerful. Looking around at most of the beer-drinking pagans I move with in work/family/social circles, I would have to say that most of them are going to respond better to blunt Driscollian preaching than to our aloof, university-lecture-style Anglican preaching. My hunch (which I cannot prove) is that this is why big baptist and non-denominational churches in the outer suburbs seem to be doing so well (numerically anyway). Let's remember that only a relatively small proportion of Aussies have a university degree -- the total opposite of the situation here at MASG I suspect!

I recommend getting hold of the keynote speech by John Anderson at the Belgrave Heights Men's Convention this year. He powerfully reminded us we can have a lot of confidence in our message. I know that personally, lack of confidence is frequently an issue.

Jereth

[Jereth]

Jereth wrote:

Maybe we're over-intellectualised? ... Let's remember that only a relatively small proportion of Aussies have a university degree -- the total opposite of the situation here at MASG I suspect!

An addendum to what I wrote before- the first place I learnt to evangelise aussie pagans was the university campus. In other words, an environment where Christianity had to overcome other world views intellectually in order to convince people. We had to be able to take on the likes of Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins in order to commend our religion. Witness the recent Melbourne CU mission which pitted two big brains against each other (and drew a massive crowd!). The church I attend has something like a 95% tertiary educated membership, continuing the tradition. See also this opinion article in today's Age for another example of what I'm talking about: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/red-hot-enlightenment-led-me-to-believe-in-one-fewer-god-20080722-3jas.html Yet the average Aussie working class bloke (who I've encountered more of since leaving uni, and even more working as a GP in the outer suburbs) is concerned primarily with money, sport, his penis, mates, his boss, his penis, his car, his toys/electronic gadgets, his back yard, and his penis. He doesn't give a crap about the world of big ideas and theories. He wonders what all the fuss is about climate change, wonders why the government doesn't just build more dams to fix our water shortage problem, and hasn't got a clue who Morgan Tsvangarai is. It's been quite a culture shock for me! And I really feel ill-equipped to get to know these sorts of people, let alone how to start up gospel conversations with them.

[Paul Barker]

Unrelated to our culture but the following is a report from an American friend of mine recently returned from Nigeria. It is so encouraging it is worth sharing:

Good friends—
 
I have just returned from four unforgettable weeks in the Nigerian village in which I worked on the translation of the Kamwe (Higi) New Testament 1968-74.  After 34 years away, I was deeply moved by the warm welcome of so many people and their expressions of appreciation.  My Kamwe name (Zira Gapa) seems to have become part of local legend, so there were endless streams of people wanting to greet me, shake my hand, and have their pictures taken with me wherever I went.
 
There were all kinds of opportunities to speak about the importance of reading Scripture and serving Christ: extensive interviews by Adamawa State Television, invitations to speak to large church gatherings, and a huge 3-hour outdoor reception at the new Michika Civic Centre, attended by several thousand people.  I was also invited to open the new Kamwe Christian Community Forum, a center for the entire Kamwe community.
 
During my four weeks in Michika, I worked with the Kamwe Bible Translation Committee, taught a week-long course for thirty potential Bible translators and reviewers, and spent time especially with the chief translators, checking their translation of Ruth, Esther, and parts of Exodus.  The primary goal was to help lay a solid foundation for the translation of the Kamwe Old Testament—a project that will probably take a good bit of our time over the next ten years.  They hope that I will be able to return to Michika every year in my role as translation consultant.
 
One of the greatest joys was to see the extent to which the gospel has now permeated the area.  In the early 1950s, fifteen years before I arrived, there were almost no Christians.  The first evangelists were converted Kamwe lepers and a blind man.  By the time I arrived, there were small churches in most of the larger villages.  Now an estimated 95% of the Kamwe people (total population at least 400,000) call themselves Christians, and very little of the old paganism is seen.  There are churches everywhere—26 different denominations in Michika itself!  Here, then, is one Nigerian group on the borders of Islam that has responded in large numbers to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
 
I was thrilled to hear that people attribute at least some of this growth to the arrival of the Kamwe New Testament in 1976.  (After the first edition of 5000 copies was sold out, 10,000 copies of a revised second edition were produced in 1997—and now 25,000 copies of a new paperback version have just arrived in Nigeria.)  It was a deep joy to see so many Kamwe walking around with their New Testaments in hand, and to hear so many reading it fluently.  The New Testament in turn provided the text for the hugely popular Jesus film in the Kamwe language.  So I’ve returned home with a heart full of gratitude for what God has done among the Kamwe, and for the role the Kamwe New Testament has played in it.
 
Thank you so much for praying for me, and for God’s blessing on me, during these few weeks; I’m very grateful.  Please continue to pray for the deepening of the work of Christ in and through Kamwe believers all over Nigeria.  They repeatedly asked me to send their greetings and thanks to all of you who are praying for them.
 
Warmly, in our Savior,
 
Roger (Zira Gapa)

[Luke Isham]

Great news Paul, very encouraging, Praise God! (Thanks for posting it.)

However sadly, it also shows how vast the evangelism gap is in Australia. When will the numbers turn?  Will they in our life times or are we ministers of the drought?

[Paul Barker]

Agree, Luke, it is not our culture but I posted it by way simply of encouragement in general and so that on this blog we don't get overabsorbed in theological debate but keep rejoicing in the power of God's word.

[Luke Isham]

Hey Paul, it may be politically insensitive to comment on this , but in your role are you aware of strategic plans at Diocesan level to evangelise Melbourne? (Areas of most need, success stories, failure reports, areas of greatest resources etc.) If you can comment and they do exist, is there a communication problem? Because I get the sense from the Eastern Suburbs church where I work that it is fairly much each parish for themselves, God help them.  

[Tim Patrick]

Luke Isham wrote:

Hey Paul, it may be politically insensitive to comment on this , but in your role are you aware of strategic plans at Diocesan level to evangelise Melbourne? (Areas of most need, success stories, failure reports, areas of greatest resources etc.) If you can comment and they do exist, is there a communication problem? Because I get the sense from the Eastern Suburbs church where I work that it is fairly much each parish for themselves, God help them.  

Or you might argue that we have a greater problem if evangelism isn't going on parish-by-parish. What is a diocese other than a collection of parishes? I think that local parishes are exactly where mission should be spearheaded. If a bishop or archdeacon can help a local parish get going with outreach, that's great. However, I would really want to hope that most ministers come into their jobs with some smarts about this already and aren't just waiting for strategic direction for their parish to be handed down from 'head office'.

There's a question about able local leadership somewhere in here...

Tim

[Paul Barker]

The diocese is planning mission programmes for 2009-2010. it is still in planning and preparation stages so little is yet ready for communication to parishes at this stage.

[Danny Saunders]

Hi Tim,

On his recent trip to Sydney Mark Driscoll listed 18 reasons why evangelism is not happening effectively in Australia. You can read a synopsis here:

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/insight/driscoll_18_obstacles_to_effective_evangelism/

I think he's spot on with his observations and this article could be used to fruitfully continue this discussion.

BTW - a couple of us from our church went 'gospel roaming' in the Shopping Centre next to our church on Sunday and had some very meaningful conversations with a number of people. I shouldn't be surprised because we had prayed for this, but 2 completely non-churched guys came to church that night simply from having the conversation with us earlier that afternoon. They've also agreed to catch up with us over an ale to talk over some things. Obviously they're not there yet but the journey continues. Praise God.

Maybe we simply need to get out there amongst the lost sheep and do it rather than keep talking about it and running programs and conferences?

In Him,

Danny  

[Jordan]

That's really encouraging Danny.

I like your approach: more prayer, more boldness, and get on with it.

Can I ask how you managed to strike up conversations in that setting? Also, what age were these guys?

Jordan

[Alex Milner]

"BTW - a couple of us from our church went 'gospel roaming' in the Shopping Centre next to our church on Sunday and had some very meaningful conversations with a number of people."

Hmm evangelism at Greensborough Plaza - must raise this with the management!

Great to here Danny - and thanks for the link to the summary of Driscoll's talk.

[Tim Patrick]

Hey Danny,

Thanks for sharing those things with us. What great news about those guys coming along to church - praise God! It really is convicting for us to hear stories like this - reminds us that we should just pray and then get out there and tell people about Jesus!

The NT gives us at least one (sad) reason as to why more people aren't coming to faith: 'The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few'. Good on you for getting out into the fields. We should all pray that the Lord of the harvest will send out more workers into his harvest.

Great, Tim