Someone once told me that every single
human being has a desire to believe something, to become something and to
belong to something. As we enter into relationship with others we need to
listen for the clues to where people are at in this process. Ask people
questions about what they believe, find out what they are searching to belong
to, help them to come to grips with what they want to become.In some cases, the
answers to these questions will be very practical. Some people want to become a
nurse, or a mechanic. Others may want to become significant or necessary. A few
people we talk to will reveal that they want to belong to a family, or a
discussion group. We may even find that some are already identified with people
who share their
viewpoint. Until we engage people in
real, honest relationship we’ll never discover the answers to these questions,
and we cannot help others find their own answers to these questions.
If nothing else, you can start your
conversation by saying, “You know, I was reading the other day about how
everyone wants to believe, belong to, and become something. What do you think
about that?”
Let the Holy Spirit guide things from
there and see where things go.
Another useful concept for me lately
has been the understanding that there are two different styles of evangelism we
can employ. As described in Spencer Burke’s book, “Making Sense of Church,” the
two styles are “Warrior” and “Gardener”.
The “Warrior” model is the predominant
method that I have been trained in over the course of my Christian life. This
model uses ideas like closing the deal, winning the lost, and targeting
sinners, as if they were deer on the other end of our hunting rifle. Our
mindset, in this model, is squarely centered on results, and often we expect
the result to come sooner rather than later. If we take a shot and miss, we
simply move on to the next target and take a shot at another one.
Granted, this sort of evangelism style
has been largely successful in bringing hundreds of thousands of people into
faith in Christ over the years. Perhaps, again, our focus has been so centered
on conversion that many have fallen through the cracks, but over the decades of
the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies especially, this “Bag’em and Tag’em” mode of
evangelism netted
scores of new converts.
I think in today’s culture this warrior
form of evangelism is a dead-end. If anything, it does more damage to the
Gospel than good, in my opinion. The reason why is that, honestly, we’ve gotten
so good at blasting out the message that “Jesus Loves You” and “Jesus Died For
Your Sins” that the world is tired of hearing it. What they want now is to see
it. They want to see, with their eyes, if what we say is true, and they are
looking at the lives of those who identify themselves as followers of Jesus to
find the evidence.
The “Gardener” model of evangelism
takes a much different approach. Like a farmer or a gardener who plants, waters
and protects the growing things in their care, we need to recognize that making
the plant produce fruit is not our job. Gardeners recognize that they are simply
cooperating with the natural process of growth inherent in the creation. This
does not mean that the gardener does nothing, far from it. As anyone who has
tended a garden knows, success depends on daily attention and care, but the
bloom and the fruit will come in due time. These things cannot be forced or
coerced. They must be allowed to occur in an organic and natural way.
To apply this to evangelism, it means
trusting that God loves people more than we do. It means daily placing our
attention on the lives and spiritual development of those whom we are in
contact with.Our goal is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit as He urges us to
love people into the Kingdom of God. This means we’ll be invested in their
lives for the long haul. We’re not to love them because we want to push them
into our way of thinking. We are to love them simply because God loves them. We
have to demonstrate to people that we are committed to love
them in tangible ways so that when we
say, “Jesus Loves You”, they might have good reason to believe it might
actually be true.
