Why
another book on evangelism? Is there really anything new to
talk about and add to the conversation? I had to ask myself
this before even getting started writing this book. There
are lots of things that could be done, so why is this an
important task? I had to ask whether there was anything new
I had to add to all of the talk on evangelism.
My answer is yes, I believe that there
is something new I can add to the conversation. For all of
our books on church multiplication, becoming contagious
Christians, and being missionaries at work, we have been
very unsuccessful at reaching the lost for Christ. Church
attendance is down in the United States and in many parts of
the world. Only in a small amount of countries do we see
actual church growth.
I have done a lot of reading on the
subject of evangelism and have been given some great ideas.
This book is a combination of some of these ideas as well as
some of my own. More so, this book is about moving away from
evangelism by process and understanding that no single
process is going to work in all circumstances.
Too often evangelism has been treated
like a 7 or 12 step process – do these things and you’ll
convert all of your friends and neighbors into wonderful
Christians. The truth there have been some great points made
about evangelism but the final process often only works in a
particular setting. (Some of the biggest churches in America
have an attendance three times as large as the town I live
in. They draw from a large crowd in large cities. The same
method will not see similar results in my small town.)
There are three things wrong these
processes as I see it. First, they are intimidating. We can
read these books and get all fired up and reaching others
for Christ until the first time we try to get out and follow
the process. Then we can’t remember one of the steps or we
get them out of order. We become frozen, afraid that doing
evangelism improperly is worse than doing nothing at all.
The next time the opportunity to share the gospel arises we
keep quiet because the process is too hard.
The second problem with processes is
that they are sold to us as the solution to all of our
evangelistic problems. We are given numerous success stories
about how well this process worked. When we try to go and do
the same thing we fail and we get very discouraged. We
believe that either we are poor evangelists or that we can’t
follow a simple process. What isn’t factored into many of
these processes and success stories is that what works in
Chicago and Los Angeles might not, and probably doesn’t,
work in a city of 50,000 let alone a town of 5,000 or a
village of 500.
Finally, a lot of these processes
aren’t biblically based. That doesn’t mean that they are bad
or wrong, but I prefer to stick with principles that I know
to be absolute truth. Instead of telling stories of how this
process worked for me or someone I know, I would much sooner
tell you the story from scripture of how this principle was
used and how it worked.
All of this lead me to Evangelism
Unprocessed. The goal of this book is to unpack all of the
processes that we’ve tried to make evangelism into. Instead
of steps to follow, this book contains principles for
evangelism. Some may work for you. Others probably won’t. It
will all depend on your situation. What this book will do is
cause you to rethink your view of evangelism and hopefully
turn you away from processes and instead focus you on
building relationships with non-Christians.
Continue to Chapter 1 - A Call
to Action
