Evangelism: How to Get Involved

Leaders of “A Celebration of Evangelism,” to be held September 20–24 in Cincinnati, recently met to exchange views on what it takes to proclaim the Gospel effectively in our world. A shortened text is presented here toCHRISTIANITY TODAYreaders in the hope that some of the insights will be considered worthy of emulation on a wider scope. Participants in the discussion were the Reverend Gary Demarest of La Canada Presbyterian Church in La Canada, California; Executive Director Bruce Larson of Faith at Work, New York; the Reverend Richard C. Halverson of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland; President Lars Granberg of Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa; Walter Shepherd, former Presbyterian missionary; the Reverend Robert Pitman of Casa Linda Presbyterian Church in Dallas; and the Reverend Howard C. Blake, executive secretary of A Celebration of Evangelism.

Question: Gentlemen, each of you has a reputation in the evangelical church not only for being deeply concerned with evangelism but also for being able to get others involved in it. What do you say to those who have committed themselves to Christ and want to get turned on to evangelism?

LARSON: I’m not sure telling them anything will do it, but sharing an experience might. When we discover that the Cross means we can be reconciled not just to God or our neighbor but to ourselves, and realize that God says, “I love you unconditionally just as you are, and no amount of improvement on your part will make me love you more than I do right now”—that kind of an experience of the Cross turns a person on to share with others.

Q: Before we go farther, I’d like to hear a brief answer to a basic question: What is evangelism?

SHEPHERD: Evangelism is not keeping secret the life that Jesus Christ has given me.

DEMAREST: Sharing in word, life, and deed the good news of God’s love in Christ.

PITMAN: Evangelism is to know Jesus Christ, to know that he is a real person, that he is alive today, that he loves us, that he wants to be involved in our lives, and that he wants us to be involved in his life and in what he is doing in the world today.

LARSON: I think evangelism is introducing people to the Evangel (who is Jesus). Jesus said, “If I, the Son, shall set you free, you’ll be free indeed.” So the results of evangelism are that a man is set free from destructive habits, self-hate, and all the rest. But he is also set free to lose his life and become involved in the lives of others by the power of the indwelling Christ.

HALVERSON: Evangelism is what happens when one is in fellowship with Jesus Christ and in fellowship with others who are in fellowship with Jesus Christ.

Q: Can you give any suggestions about how a local church could develop its emphasis and enthusiasm in evangelism?

LARSON: When Christians experience the grace of God during the week by doing the will of God, being in small groups, trying to find ways to be obedient in their families and on their jobs, then we can lead them in a celebration on Sunday of what has been happening during the week. But what we frequently find is people who have not had an experience of Christ during the week coming to church to “have an experience.” That’s all wrong. And we shouldn’t let that kind of expectation—that wanting to turn the Sunday service into a make-up period on the subject of God—dominate our Sunday services. We don’t come to church on Sunday to experience God, but to celebrate the fact that we’ve been with him through the week in various ways.

DEMAREST: I think the greatest reward of the pastorate today, one that many of us are experiencing throughout the country, is seeing people come alive as they discover their own gifts of evangelism—sharing and communicating their faith more by giving themselves to people than by talking. In the process, they discover that they are exercising a ministry of evangelism. They are the evangelists! To watch them come alive is very exciting.

SHEPHERD: To me, a great deal of what we have been saying about rediscovering the Church’s role, function, mission, has to do with the individual member who has come to know the resurrected Christ. It has to do with his participation, his involvement, in that ongoing mission to the world.

PITMAN: I was in a home meeting a short time ago in which the question was asked, “What do you want to see happen in your church? Not a voice was raised in favor of a building program or reorganization of the Sunday school. The emphasis was on people and the needs of people. When you discover that the Church is people, not brick and mortar or institutional form, this is the beginning of Celebration.

Q: Let’s press this a little further. None of you seems to be talking about an evangelism “program.” Just what kind of forms do you find this new life taking?

HALVERSON: One of the most revolutionary texts for me personally was that passage in Mark where it is recorded that Jesus chose twelve to be with him. It seems to me you can put the weight of all the training, the orientation, and the instruction that Jesus planned for the twelve in that little preposition with. The important thing was that he was with them. They were with him. And I think that not only pastors but also the officers and the people of the church must learn to be with people, just for the sake of being with them. Not even for the sake of winning them to Christ (because that would be like wanting to be with them to sell them insurance), but just being with them because you love them.

Q: Are you saying that the conscious decision to get to know someone so that we can win him to Christ is detrimental to evangelism?

HALVERSON: I believe it is. I believe that attitude communicates a kind of commercial spirit, much as if you are trying to sell something. Your motivation might be absolutely right, but think what the person is feeling. What he thinks is, “He doesn’t love me; he just wants a convert.” And then he thinks, “If I don’t do whatever he wants me to do, he will be disappointed.” And then he will do something just to please us. The interesting thing (and alarming to us who are committed to evangelism) is that again and again and again we don’t relate to people. We don’t love people. We try to win them to Christ. We don’t get a response, and boy, that’s the end. We don’t have anything more to do with them. They’re out!

PITMAN: I think one of the problems of the modern church is that we have become absolutely obsessed with statistics—too interested in the numbers of converts we put on our rolls each year. We have lost sight of the fact that we’re in the people-God business. We’re not just compilers of statistics on baptisms.

Q: Today’s youth culture gets a lot of headlines. How do you get evangelism across the generation gap?

LARSON: If we love as Jesus loved, which certainly means being vulnerable, then old people who are lonely, frightened, and insecure can identify with young people who are lonely and frightened and insecure. Once you go into any kind of depth at all about your life and witness to it, it bridges all the generation gaps.

HALVERSON: I’m involved in a congregation where a “generation gap” simply doesn’t exist because somehow we got the idea that one of the things that happened at Pentecost was that the Lord created a community. Those people were one. They loved one another; they served one another; they were conscious of belonging to one another, of needing one another. There was mutual dependence and a sense of responsibility to one another. When this kind of community exists, I don’t think you’re very conscious of ages or generation gaps.

DEMAREST: There is also a freedom from barriers caused by external appearance. Maybe in southern California we are more sensitive to this, but I’m still amazed how many people have a real struggle getting through the long hair, the beard, the beads, the clothing, to the person. And it’s true in reverse with the kids. They have a hard time getting through the suit and tie to the person. The Gospel gets us across the age thing—it also gets us across the externals. We really can get free from all the cultural externals and hangups. The Gospel gives us that freedom to always go for the person and not get blocked out by the externals.

Q: What kind of relation do you see between social action and personal evangelism?

LARSON: I think there is a reaction in the Church today to the old polarity of social action versus evangelism. They were both impersonal. Nothing was more impersonal than the old “personal” evangelism, which really meant scalp-hunting or doctrine-pushing or decision-card-signing. Nobody knew anybody. The old social action was just as impersonal. It was a group of bleeding-heart liberals dreaming up a program for some ghetto and going down and pushing it on them. The reaction to that was typically, “Don’t try to change our lives with a program. Give us yourselves and live with us for a bit and together we’ll find the program that may lift the burden.” I think we’re coming into a deeply personal age where there’s going to be a new kind of social action and a new kind of evangelism where people get involved with one another.

DEMAREST: I think we have to do a lot of homework on the distinction between social concern and social action. Most of us have been willing to be socially concerned on an individual level, but we have hedged on social action that involves us in political legislation to change structures that may contribute to the suffering. We evangelicals have been quick to put the first-aid station at the bottom of the cliff, but we haven’t been as quick to be at the top of the cliff and change the dangerous terrain.

Q: Do you see “signs of the times” that give particular urgency to evangelism in our day?

GRANBERG: Gilbert Murray, the great Oxford classicist, described the Hellenistic Age in which our Lord was born as a period of the failure of nerve. It was a divided age—socially divided into slave and free, religiously divided. What gave that age hope was the “fear not” of the angels announcing the birth of Christ and the example of the new people of God, who were genuinely for one another in an age of strife and division. There are many parallels with present history. People are searching for ways to be brought together. I think the most effective binder between people is the person of Jesus Christ and the new spirit he has the power to infuse into men.

DEMAREST: In the Church we have been either silent or timid about proclaiming the Gospel with its frankly supernatural aspects grounded in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. And then, just as we have been about to surrender to a humanistic orientation, we suddenly find the young generation of “Consciousness III” (according to Charles Reich) turning to the supernatural, the mystical—astrology, magic, and all that. I think we realize that the Gospel in its openly supernatural aspects is more relevant than ever.

Q: Are you saying that while many of us within the Church question the relevance of our own faith, people outside the Church are turning to it with new enthusiasm?

DEMAREST: I’m not sure they are turning to the same faith, but I think they are disillusioned with the purely horizontal orientation—the supremacy of science, the effort to eliminate the supernatural. I’m just saying there is a new openness on their part. They see much more to life and to this world than what we can measure and taste and touch.

LARSON: The three big words of the student revolution today—love, joy, peace—just happen to be the first three fruits of the Holy Spirit. There is a hunger for God in young people; we Christians ought to cheer for this hunger and interpret it to them.

HALVERSON: There is a sense, too, in which some leaders today (local, national, and international) feel that they have used up all their options. That man has done all he can do collectively and individually and that things simply aren’t working. It’s almost as if our solutions are feeding the problems. But when they hear who Christ is, what he came to do, they may be very responsive.

Q: Each of you is working very hard planning for the Celebration of Evangelism to be held in September. What do you see as its goals?

DEMAREST: I feel that the Celebration has emerged out of a desire to combine denominational efforts in the Presbyterian and Reformed family and bring about a new awareness of contemporary evangelism. As we talk together we will feel that the Gospel is to be celebrated in our day and that evangelism properly involves us in celebration. The people who come to the Celebration will be enriched by the cross-pollination of ideas from all parts of the country, learning from one another what’s happening in evangelism.

LARSON: My priority goal for this time is not to increase the use of mass evangelism, or even to evangelize people, but rather to provide a place where Christians can come and learn how to be evangelists. This is the day of the lay apostolate, and I hope that thousands will be equipped there to go out in the streets of America and into offices and schools and lead people to Christ.

PITMAN: I think that the element of renewal is in our minds, too. I personally feel that the Celebration is going to be directed to the grass roots of the church—the local pastor, the local congregation, the church officers. We expect the people of the churches to be renewed and thus more effective in their outreach for Jesus Christ wherever they are. I hope the Celebration will enable us all to discover that spiritual renewal is more than a deep-seated hope of man—it’s the very heartbeat of God.

GRANBERG: I hope the Celebration of Evangelism will be a time when we recapture the vision of the first century and learn to live together as a new people, a people of one heart and mind. I hope that this will be a time and place when young people, their parents, and perhaps their grandparents will get together to discover ways to reach people for Christ.

BLAKE: Let me just add a footnote. I think the Church needs a Celebration of Evangelism badly for its own sake. We’ve gone through a phase of soul-searching that sometimes reached masochistic proportions. I think this Celebration will give us a chance to quit looking at our own inner workings, our own shortcomings, and refocus on Jesus Christ, and then through Christ to rediscover one another as fellow members of the body of Christ. With this kind of rediscovery we will be able to turn outside and share Jesus Christ with the world.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.