As we were driving back to Rio from a conference we had attended, Edgar Hallock, head of Southern Baptist publishing in Brazil, and I got to reminiscing, as people do on a long trip. We found that both of us had spent the summer of 1938 in New York City.
“What did you do that summer?”
“Aside from working in a bread factory, a lot of street-meeting work. What did you do?”
“Helped at a mission, and I did a lot of street-meeting work, too.”
“Funny how the street meeting has almost passed out of North American church life.”
This is one change in evangelism during the past thirty or forty years. Another is the near demise, in most of the United States outside the South, of local church evangelistic meetings.
These meetings were often, but not always, specifically evangelistic. Some followed a Bible-exposition pattern, which, while not advertised as evangelistic, usually brought some unbelievers to Christian faith. Peter W. Philpott, Lewis Sperry Chafer, and Arno C. Gaebelein were three who held such series, one or two weeks in length, at our Presbyterian church in New York City.
The church of my high-school days, along with hundreds of other metropolitan-area churches, cooperated in Billy Graham’s New York crusade last month. For most of these churches, this was the first series of evangelistic meetings they had been involved in since Mr. Graham held his previous New York crusade twelve years ago. Summer tent meetings, winter Bible conferences, prophetic conferences, street meetings, and similar limited efforts on a single-church level, or even with several churches cooperating, are no longer held.
Thank God for Billy Graham. But in giving Mr. Graham his unique gift, did God intend to phase out other evangelistic efforts? Should churches put all their eggs in a crusade basket, one that perhaps lies some years in the future?
I think not. And I believe Mr. Graham would be the first to encourage increased evangelism on a local level. In fact, he has encouraged this through the Berlin and regional congresses on evangelism.
Furthermore, many churches in Canada and the United States are located far from an urban center; they can never expect the privilege of participating in a Billy Graham crusade.
What can the local church do?
1. Rethink the philosophy that relegates evangelism to a large, areawide crusade. Plan a series of meetings on a local level, perhaps with the cooperation of one or two other churches.
But don’t expect the sort of interest that was shown thirty years ago. Today we compete against television and dozens of other activities unknown in 1938.
We cannot lose sight of the fact that children and teens in the local church must be evangelized. We face a serious attrition of college-age students from the church; perhaps annually recurring evangelistic efforts on a local level would impress the Gospel on them more strongly than the pattern of “salvation-every-Sunday” in many Sunday schools.
“Evangelism” is a word that has lost its appeal in many churches, and to many students. For example, twenty-five years ago Wheaton College had a week of “evangelistic meetings” each semester. Today they are “spiritual emphasis” weeks.
2. The church should train for personal evangelism (known as “soul-winning” by a previous generation).
Campus Crusade for Christ’s lay institutes have provided such a training program. In the view of some observers, however, the “Four Spiritual Laws” on which so much of this training hangs are akin to the unvarying pattern of verses used in the past. Familiarity with the Scriptures and flexibility of approach are needed in personal evangelism. Perhaps we need to free people for the Holy Spirit’s leading in particular witnessing situations, not bind them to a set method. (Does our Lord’s command to his disciples not to pre-plan what they would say when brought before rulers have any bearing on explaining the Christian faith to one’s peers?)
Regardless of the method, a series of young people’s meetings, adult training hours, or midweek meetings provides a means of indoctrinating our people with the facts of the Gospel. And when we prepare people to witness to others, we help them clarify their own faith.
3. The church should structure witnessing situations into its program, especially for teens and students.
College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, has arranged spring-vacation trips to a depressed area of Appalachia for its high-school group. Physical labor (digging a septic field, painting a church building) is combined with group meetings and personal witnessing. West Coast churches have planned similar field work in evangelism at Indian missions and in depressed areas of Mexico.
4. The church should encourage grass-roots evangelism in the places where members live and work. Neighborhood evangelism is one of the most effective means of bringing people to Christ today.
In Westchester County, a sophisticated suburb of New York City, eighty Bible-study groups meet each week in homes. This movement (Neighborhood Bible Studies, Box 222, Dobbs Ferry, N. Y. 10522) is part of a bigger pattern throughout North America—and increasingly in other areas of the world. Discussion Bible study is the pattern of these meetings, based (in initial appeal, at least) somewhat on the “Great Books” type of approach.
Mrs. Jill Renich has a growing movement (Winning Women) in Michigan. Miss A. Wetherell Johnson leads a strong work among women on the West Coast. Both of these efforts are teacher-oriented; both have had a large number of conversions. Similar groups of men and couples are meeting in other places.
That Saturday night in Rio after I left Mr. Hallock, I saw 150 people standing quietly on a plaza, listening to a speaker who held an open Bible.
“That’s a street meeting,” my Brazilian host explained. “The Pentecostals hold them all over the city.”
And I found that throughout Brazil, adobe homes—single-room dwellings—are places of worship and Bible study.
Perhaps this does much to explain the wildfire spread of Christianity in Brazil and other South American countries.—JOSEPH BAYLY, managing editor, David C. Cook Publishing Company, Elgin, Illinois.
