You know the format. There’s a big tent or a rented auditorium, flyers in every mailbox, and church members asking their neighbors again and again to come along. Then there are night after night of slides full of beasts, horns and prophetic charts.
For a lot of people in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, it worked. Real people found Jesus that way, and I don’t want to take anything away from them.
But I think most of us in the West know it isn’t working the way it used to. Our neighbors don’t come to hear a stranger explain Daniel 7. When they do come, plenty of them leave thinking Adventists care more about beasts than about people. And the friend we kept nagging to come can end up feeling like a target rather than a friend.
That’s the harm part. If the first thing people associate with us is fear, charts and a hard sell, we’ve made it harder for them to meet the Jesus we actually want them to meet.
Jesus mostly did his evangelism at dinner tables, by wells and on hillsides.
That doesn’t mean talking about our faith is wrong. It just means something that worked a hundred years ago may not be a great idea today. It’s a bit like the horse and buggy. It had its day, and now you only see it at the odd historical reenactment.
But writing off evangelism altogether would be a terrible idea. When we stop talking about something and shrink away from it, part of us has stopped believing it. So let’s get better at sharing our enthusiasm, and at actually living it. Let’s be the kind of community people would want to join in the first place.
“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35).
Photo: Tima Bogun / Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/VtUeEKDPWrg)
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