Evangelist

Leader, author, and evangelist Leighton Ford wrote the following as he remembered his wife, Jean Graham Ford, and her brother, Billy.

“Don’t forget the evangelists.” That’s what my Jeanie would say every time we headed off to help young leaders to spread the gospel. “Don’t forget the evangelists.”

She and her brother Billy were two of a kind. Both raised on a red clay dairy farm in North Carolina with a strict mother, who taught them the Bible and a kind father who guided them with his prayers. They both became Christ sharers who felt called to let others know this God who loved and could save them.

He traveled across the world preaching to millions and millions. She stayed close to home for the most part living that good news with her three children and her husband. He raised his powerful and strong voice like a thunder. She spoke like a quiet stream with a voice made quiet by her childhood polio.

He opened his arms wide with an invitation to come to the cross. She held her arms open closely hugging others with a touch that took away tears and fears. He preached about sin and judgment and forgiveness. She showed grace in her face. He used stadiums as his pulpit. She taught in a spacious room in a friend’s home.

Now that they are both with the Lord they loved, I can see them standing side-by-side, and imagine him saying: “You are two of the very best evangelists I’ve ever had.” So – may we never forget the evangelists!

In 1943, a young pastor was offered the opportunity to take over a popular Gospel Radio program called Songs in the Night. Since the cost of keeping the program on air was rather high, the pastor, who had a large vision to reach souls with the gospel, told his board that he would be willing to forgo part of his salary to help defray the costs involved. The suggestion was eventually accepted by the board.

The young pastor then approached a well-known Gospel singer, requesting him to sing and lead the choir on the program. After initially trying to back out, the singer eventually agreed to help out. That decision would change the course of his life and ministry forever! He later said, “It was the beginning – the humble beginning – of an unbelievable journey…It was exciting to be a part of something wonderful unfolding”.

The Gospel singer was George Beverly Shea and the young pastor’s name was Billy Graham.

Possible Preaching Angles: Similarly, when we take decisions that seek to glorify God, He will lead us to opportunities and open doors that only He can bring about. The God- honoring decisions we take will surely determine our destiny.

Kris Lackey thought he had hurricane-proofed his manuscripts. An English professor at the University of New Orleans, he had saved his fiction and papers (including the novel he had half-finished) via hard drive, flash drive, and hard copy. But as the murky waters continued to rise and he was forced to evacuate his home, he left his papers and computer equipment behind. Even so, he left them in high places—tables and bookshelves well out of harm's way. He was, by no means, expecting the 11 feet of water that completely besieged his house during Hurricane Katrina.

Returning more than a month later, Lackey found pages floating in mud, completely indecipherable, as well as what was left of his flash and hard drives. Nothing was retrievable. Nothing.

Boston Light, America's first lighthouse, just celebrated its 300th birthday—but Sally Snowman will be the first to let you know some more specifics about what that "birthday" really means. "The original tower built in 1716 was blown up by the British in 1776," she explains. "We have the new one."

Sally Snowman mans—or "womans," in her words—the lighthouse, serving as its 70th keeper (and the first female to have the title). Over the three centuries since its inception, a keeper has kept the light burning; however, the position in 2016 looks markedly different from those who held the role in the 18th century. As the lighthouse is now "fully automated," Snowman "maintain[s] the grounds, giv[es] tours and manag[es] 90 volunteers."

Yet even with these modernized tasks, Snowman realizes the significance of her job: "Here I am in 2016, the keeper for our 300th anniversary," she says. "That's way beyond my wildest dreams."

Possible Preaching Angles: The various roles within the body of Christ—missionary, teacher, preacher, etc.—look drastically different within various contexts: whether historical eras or cultural circumstances. The importance and the purpose of those roles, however, has remained constant since Jesus' command to "go and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19).

In February 1954, a navy pilot set out on a night-training mission from a carrier off the coast of Japan. While he was taking off in stormy weather, his directional finder malfunctioned, and he mistakenly headed in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, his instrument panel suddenly short-circuited, burning out all the lights in the cockpit.

The pilot "looked around … and could see absolutely nothing; the blackness outside the plane had suddenly come inside." Nearing despair, he looked down and thought he saw a faint blue-green glow trailing along in the ocean's ebony depths. His training had prepared him for this moment, and he knew in an instant what he was seeing: a cloud of phosphorescent algae glowing in the sea that had been stirred up by the engines of his ship. It was the "least reliable and most desperate method" of piloting a plane back onto a ship safely, but the pilot—future Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell—knew that was precisely what he needed to do. And so he did.

While he did not articulate it this way, Jim's life was saved because of light. Not just any light, but "bioluminescent dinoflagellates," which are tiny creatures that contain luciferin, a generic term for the light-emitting compound. Bioluminescent organisms live throughout the ocean, from the surface to the seafloor, from near the coast to the open ocean.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Evangelism—How many people surround us daily who are in a spiritual condition that mirrors Lovell's dilemma? What will light their journey when they look into the blackness all around them? When their eyes adjust to the darkness, what life-saving light will they see? (2) God's Word—Is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. (3) Jesus is the light of the world.

Leighton Ford, evangelist and brother-in-law of Billy Graham, once met the former boxing champion Muhammad Ali at a hotel in Sydney, Australia. Ford listened as Ali regaled a group of admiring onlookers before introducing himself as "Billy Graham's brother-in-law." Ali's face lit up as he said, "Oh Billy! Billy! I love Billy! I went up and saw him at the house at Montreat and he signed a book for me." Ford explained what happened next:

We got into a very interesting conversation. He was not only very articulate, he was also a very bright man. Of course earlier in his life Ali had become a Muslim, but he told me and the onlookers, "You know I have travelled all over the world. And I have seen all these different religions. It seems to me that they all have the same thing. It's kind of like you have a river, and you have a lake, and you have a pond, and you have a stream. But they all have water in them, so they are all the same, aren't they?"

I said, "Muhammad that is very interesting. But suppose you have all of them and suppose they are all polluted. Then you would need a purifier, don't you? You see that's who Jesus is. Jesus is the purifier." And he thought about that for a minute and he said, "That's good. I had never thought about it quite like that. Jesus, the purifier."

I know that Muslims don't refer to Jesus as "the Son of God" because they interpret that in some physical way that God had relations with Mary, which of course isn't true. So I told him, "Did you know that in the Bible Jesus is called the Second Adam?" And he said, "I didn't know that." I said, "Yes, you see there was the first Adam that God made in the first creation. Then the second Adam was Jesus, the new creation, in whom everyone can become new." And he said, "I've got to think about that."

Well it was 30 years ago and I haven't seen him since. I know that "The Greatest," as he called himself, has met the One who alone is really the Greatest, because all great ones pass away. But he has come face-to-face with the One great God. I wonder what Muhammad Ali had to say, or maybe he would say, "God what do you have to say?"

In an essay in the book A Place for Truth, Tim Keller claims that he often hears people say, "I don't know which religion is true" or "No one can know the truth." According to Keller, this often leads to a conversation that goes something like this:

I'm talking to someone who does not believe in Christianity or Christ. At some point he or she responds to me suddenly, "Wait a minute, what are you trying to do to me?"

I respond, "I'm trying to evangelize you."

"You mean you're trying to convert me?"

"Yeah."

"You're trying to get me to adopt your view of spiritual reality and convert me?"

"Yeah."

"How narrow! How awful! Nobody should say that their view of spirituality is better than anybody else and try to convert them to it. O no, no, no. Everybody should just leave everybody else alone."

"Wait a minute …" I say. "You want me to adopt your take on spiritual reality; you want me to adopt your view of all the various religions. What are you doing to me? What you're saying is, you have a take on spiritual reality, and you think I would be better off and the world would be better off if we adopted yours. I have my take on spiritual reality and I think mine is better than yours, and I'm trying to convert you to mine …. If you say, 'Don't evangelize anybody,' that is to evangelize me, into your Western, white, individualistic, privatized understanding of religion."

Keller concludes by stating,

Who's more narrow? It's not narrow to make an exclusive truth claim because everybody makes an exclusive truth claim …. Everybody has a take on reality. Everybody thinks the world would be better if those people over there adopted mine. Everybody …. Narrowness is not the content of a truth claim. Narrowness is our attitude toward the people who don't share our point of view.

In Iran, Mehdi Dibaj, an Assemblies of God minister, spent nearly 10 years in prison for his faith. A convert from Islam in 1955, Dibaj is given every opportunity by the authorities to regain his freedom. First, he is asked to sign a paper admitting he was wrong and that he wants to return to Islam. When this fails, he is beaten, tortured, and put through mock executions. His wife succumbs to pressure, converts to Islam, and marries another man, though Dibaj's children refuse to renounce their faith.

Next Dibaj is offered freedom in exchange for admitting he is mentally unstable. It is only after fellow pastor Haik Hovsepian-Mehr, chairman of Iran's Protestant Council, courageously sends out an open letter to Western media publicizing Dibaj's plight that he is freed. Not long after, Haik disappears and his murdered body is found. Still, Dibaj refuses to flee and continues his pastoral ministry; soon he meets the same fate. What is the result?

"In 1977 there were only 2,700 evangelicals in Iran out of a population of 45 million. Of these only 300 were former Muslims. . Today, there are close to 55 thousand believers, of whom 27 thousand are from Muslim backgrounds."

When my wife and I went to Dallas Seminary, we decided we wouldn't live in the "cemetery" housing. Instead, we lived in the high-class, red-light district. If you want to get an introduction to life itself, that's the place to be. We made a commitment to take one non-Christian person, couple or individual, out to dinner once a week. Did we ever get a liberal education. But what fun; we had people coming to know the Lord right and left in that place, because we simply loved them. We opened our home to them.

When John Grisham wrote a book called A Time To Kill, it sold just five thousand copies in hard cover. I don't think it was advertised, ever made a list or was reviewed by anybody that I know of. It was sort of a flop.

Then he wrote The Firm, and it wasn't advertised either. It was hardly reviewed, and the reviews it got weren't very good. But people read it and liked it and told other people they liked it and The Firm sold seven million copies.

John Grisham has written several other books, and today the number-one paperback best seller in the United States is by John Grisham. And the number-one hardcover best seller is by John Grisham. That has never happened before in history, and it's not because of advertising, not because of the publisher's clever marketing plan, but because somebody liked the book. I guess a lot of people liked the book and told other people, until millions of these books have been sold.

Christians are people who like Jesus. They've experienced him, and so they tell somebody else. It doesn't take a newspaper ad. It doesn't take a review in a magazine. Evangelism is people who like Jesus and have experienced him, telling other people, until it has spread to thousands and millions and tens of millions and hundreds of million and more.

Being an extrovert isn't essential to evangelism--obedience and love are.

Missionaries who dressed like the Chinese suffered a few snags. In the gossipy colonial enclaves of Shanghai and Hong Kong, "going native" caused outrage and hilarity. When China Inland Mission workers first adopted Chinese dress, it seemed to other expatriates as if they were putting on the clothes of the enemy, "aping Chinese dress and manners." Western suits, the diplomats said, offered protection and prestige, the power of the flag.

It seems so simple to adopt "the costume of the country" as a courtesy to one's hosts. But this "simple" policy of Hudson Taylor had some surprising ramifications.

"Full Chinese dress" was one of Taylor's hardest and fastest rules, a symbol of his intention to create an indigenous Chinese church shorn of foreign trappings. "The foreign dress and carriage of missionaries, ... the foreign appearance of chapels, and indeed the foreign air imparted to everything connected with their work has seriously hindered the rapid dissemination of the truth among the Chinese."

In a hierarchical society like China, however, where every button, every feather, every ripple of silk, denoted one's status, putting on Chinese clothes was no simple matter. How to choose the right costume? The missionaries did not want to be confused with Buddhist priests in saffron robes, nor with upper-class Confucian scholars.

The CIM chose to dress like poor school teachers, a humble costume that befitted their goal of converting China from the bottom up. Such dress, they claimed, offered a sort of spiritual passport into the hearts and minds of the people.

Indeed, this costume allowed CIM pioneers to make some of the most prodigious, and dangerous, explorations of inland China. In 1875, for example, two men and a Chinese evangelist walked across China in safety a few months after a British official named Margary--dressed in uniform whites, with a guard of soldiers--had been murdered.

In the People's Republic of China, the largest nation in the world and a billion people strong, is what is called the Three-Self Church. That is the state-approved church. Several of us from Wooddale, a couple of years ago, were in Beijing, and we went to one of the services of one of the Three-Self Churches. It was an old building, built around the turn of the last century. We had a translator there. There were hymns sung, some of them were to western tunes which we knew. They read the Bible. They had prayers. There was a sermon, a Bible teaching, that I thought was fine.

But they're not allowed to evangelize. That's part of the deal with the state. "You can do your thing as long as your thing doesn't include persuading somebody else."

There are about 50 million Christians in the People's Republic of China who have chosen not to be part of the Three-Self Church, and meet in house churches, because they're convinced you can't be a Christian unless you evangelize. They say that the two go together; and if you don't evangelize, you're not a Christian. They would say that those who are in the Three-Self church are really not Christians, as far as the New Testament definition is concerned.

Evangelism is like strong horseradish: people praise it with tears in their eyes.

There are other word associations we could make with the concept of evangelism. For some people, evangelism is an evangelical mugging mission, where we go into a phone booth, come out with a big red S on our chests and charge out into a neighborhood, seldom our own, to win it for Christ.

For others, it's some kind of evangelical ambush where we lure the honest, unsuspecting victim to some type of an event, lock the doors, and sing twenty-two verses of "Just as I Am."

Some people think of evangelism as a bombing mission where, from protective cloud cover at 30,000 feet, we fill backyards with gospel bombs.

For others, evangelism is herding fish into the stained glass aquarium where the big fisherman throws the lure from the pulpit.

An evangelist is a person with a special gift and a special calling from the Holy Spirit to announce the good news of the gospel. You're an announcer, a proclaimer, an ambassador. And it's a gift from God. You can't manufacture it, you can't organize it, you can't manipulate it.

I study and read and prepare all the time, but my gift seems to be from the Lord in giving an appeal to get people to make a decision for Christ. Something happens I cannot explain. I have never given an invitation in my whole life when no one came.

We are not saved by our view of the Bible. We are saved by our view of Jesus Christ and our acceptance or rejection of him and the life we live after we come to Christ.

The modern world is said to have made discipleship harder. But it has also made evangelism easier. Today's world is said to be multiplying crises all around us. But we must never forget that, for the gospel, each crisis is an opportunity.

Surely there can be no deeper joy than that of saving souls.

When as a young man Robert Morrison had first sailed to China, he was asked, "Do you really expect to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire?" In reply, Morrison spoke more prophetically than he knew: "No, sir, but I expect God will."