A room full of blank faces, staring at the floor. Yes, this was often the response from my small group of older teen boys when I asked them a difficult question. But today the faces were blanker and more awkward than usual. No-one ventured an answer. The question: When was the last time you told someone about Jesus?
Their silence told me everything I needed to know. A quiet crossness began to bubble up inside me. I’d been telling them about the importance of evangelism for two years now! I’d got them to write down the names of friends who they wanted to lead to Jesus; I’d encouraged them to pray for their friends every night. Yet not one of them had taken the plunge and even attempted to share the gospel.
Then, one of them did say something. The cheeky, outspoken one (of whom I figure God is particularly fond) looked me in the eye and, like Jesus, answered my question with another. ‘When was the last time you told someone about Jesus?’ I don’t know if it was intuition or a lucky shot, but he floored me. In one line he’d entirely encapsulated what was wrong with my approach to evangelism. I’m great at telling other people to do it. I’m just not so great at doing it myself.
Maybe this isn’t you at all. Perhaps you’re the sort of person who is regularly late for meetings because of all the unexpected evangelistic conversations you got into on the journey. You’re famed in your church for leading scores of your friends to Jesus; they’re having to build an extension to the church to cope with the results of your influence (and of course they’re naming a room after you). If that’s you then please move along, there’s nothing to see here.
Still with me? Then I’m going to assume not only that you find evangelism tricky, but also that you think it’s a good thing, and would like to get better at it (*waits as a few more people turn the page*). For this article is not intended as an opportunity for self-flagellation, but self-improvement.
Intentionality and relationships
The most common objection for many youth workers – especially those of us who work in full-time ministry – is that we simply don’t know too many people our own age who aren’t already members of the God squad. We might have a couple of old school friends or neighbours who fit into that category, but generally our life is spent in a religious bubble. Others among us might have the opposite problem: we live and work in an environment that is decidedly not Christian, and sharing our faith involves a sense of head-above-the-parapet risk. In either case, the solution is kind of the same: we need to be intentional about evangelism, and we need to invest in building deep relationships through which to do it.
When we’re intentional about evangelising our friends (and others), we move beyond a general attitude of trying to be a good witness, and begin to take deliberate actions that enable people to be presented with the gospel message. It’s the difference between hoping that my neighbour will figure out that I love Jesus all by herself (based on the care I take never to mow the lawn before 9am), and looking for an opportunity to explain that I go to church. It doesn’t start or stop there; if I’m serious about wanting her to come to faith, I’ll have been praying for her ahead of that conversation, and at some point I’ll follow it up with an invitation to come along herself.
Now of course, you can take that too far. I recently became obsessed with the idea that a close friend of mine was going to become a Christian. I bought him a book. I prayed night and day(ish). I became gripped with the belief that all that remained was for me to ‘close the deal’ with an intentional conversation during which I would share the gospel in four easy to remember points. Unfortunately I confused intentionality with intensity; when we next met for dinner, I pretty much ruined the evening with a relentless hour-long gospel pitch. My friend objected fairly early on; I ignored him and kept going. In hindsight I’m fairly ashamed of myself; if anything my actions that night moved him further away from faith. The moral of the story: don’t try to force it.
Still, the vast majority of testimonies from people who have come to faith involve the story of how one person got alongside them and helped to explain the gospel (albeit with a little more tact and subtlety than I displayed). This may have taken place in a course or small-group setting, but ultimately evangelism is about relationships. Very few people become Christians because a random member of the public grabbed them in the street and forced them to read Luke’s Gospel (although I’m sure it has happened). Much more commonly they do so because they have both seen the truth of the gospel in someone’s life, and heard the truth of the gospel from someone’s lips.
If we don’t have many relationships with non-Christians, then perhaps it’s time to start investing in some. Essentially, the first step of evangelism is just to go and make some friends! If the opposite is true, and we’re surrounded by non-believers, then the first move is to begin investing more deeply into some of those fringe relationships. It’s not just about having lots of friends who aren’t Christians – it’s also important that those relationships are strong enough to cope with deeper (and potentially less comfortable) conversations about subjects like faith.
What was wrong with my approach to evangelism? I’m great at telling other people to do it. I’m just not so great at doing it myself
Relaxing into evangelism
While you may be comfortable with forming friendships, the idea of sharing your faith may strike terror into your heart. If that’s the case, relax. We don’t need to feel pressured to talk about God all the time with our friends, or to push for a ‘conversion’ like a hard salesman working on commission. We simply need to invest in friendship, through which who we are, and what we’re passionate about, can naturally become clear.
My favourite quote ever on personal evangelism comes from Rico Tice, who reassured listeners to a Premier Radio programme: ‘If you’re sharing your faith with someone, just remember that all the time you’re doing it, the Holy Spirit is whispering, “This is true. This is true. This is true.”’ It’s a great reminder of where the power and the glory lie when we evangelise. A lot of our fear about the process can be wrapped up in a subconscious belief that we need to lead people to faith; actually the Holy Spirit does that. Our role is to make ourselves available to God, to be prepared to talk about him to those he leads us to, and simply to point them to the truth that we think we have found. God will do the rest.
Practical ways to share
That doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Make friends, invest in those relationships, and relax. When the opportunities do arise however, we return to that idea of intentionality. To equip you for such an eventuality, here are six ideas for ways that you can naturally share your faith with your friends. All of them are intended for the context of relationships – inflict them on random strangers and the results could play very differently…
1. Buy some books. Assuming you have friends who read, why not invest in some good pre-evangelistic books to give them as gifts? Everyone likes being given a present, and reading a book is an extremely non-threatening way to start exploring faith. Possibilities include Phillip Yancey’s What’s so Amazing About Grace?, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Under no circumstances give them a copy of The Shack.
2. Offer to pray. If a good friend is going through a tough time, then it’s perfectly appropriate to offer prayer. This is actually far more appropriate than attempting to offer some half-baked theological explanation for why God might be allowing their suffering. The key is to make the offer sensitively, and just once. If they are interested, they’ll accept; don’t feel you have to keep asking. (NB: If you offer to pray, make sure you actually do pray!)
3. Invite one friend to church. You’ll know when the time is right in your relationship. If they’re a friend, then they’re interested in your life, and when church is such an important part of it, it’s only natural that you’d invite them along. Christmas and Easter particularly present fantastic opportunities for this – who doesn’t love carols by candlelight?
4. Be brave on social media. The Internet has given us many terrible things (like those awful pictures of clouds with Bible verses written across them), but also gospel opportunities. Not only is Social Media a great place to demonstrate the Christian distinctiveness of the way you live your life (right?), it’s also an unthreatening communication medium through which to make invitations, say encouraging things, and loop your non-Christian friends into conversations about faith.
5. Write a letter. In the digital communication age, handwritten letters have moved from being out-dated to increasingly valued. The time and effort taken to write and post a letter is appreciated by the person receiving it, so you’re communicating something unspoken just by using that medium. So why not take an opportunity to write an encouraging letter to someone you know well, telling them how much they mean to you, and how much God loves them?
6. Start something. Feel like you can’t find anything appropriate to bring your friends to? Then start your own club, course or regular meeting. This could be an Alpha or Christianity Explored course that you run in your own front room, a book club that sometimes addresses faith-based reading, or a social gathering where you agree to discuss some of the big life questions. The objective is to remove the barrier of brining someone into a ‘churchy’ context led by people they don’t know or relate to.
I spent years and years trying to persuade one of my best friends that the hope I had was not in vain, and all to no avail. Then, one day, when I hadn’t seen him in person for a few months, he told me that he wasn’t free to meet for a drink because he ‘had Alpha’ that night. When I marvelled that he was attending the course, he corrected me; he was one of the leaders, having been through the course once already. One of my best friends had become a Christian, and he was too embarrassed to admit that I’d been right all along. Of course, although I’m sure I played my part, it really wasn’t about me. Evangelism is about God meeting with people; we just get to make some introductions. Though Jesus commands us to go and make disciples, it’s God who changes hearts. And it’s God who gets the glory when our ‘efforts’ prove successful.
Remember that evangelism is a long-term commitment; people generally come to faith because God meets them through the enduring relationships they have with their good Christian friends. If we’re going to ask our young people to take sharing their faith seriously, then as their leaders we have to be demonstrating that it’s possible and natural for us to do so too.
Tool up for evangelism
Want to share your faith with your friends, neighbours, and anyone else who comes with 100 yards? These practical ideas will support your efforts.
Neighbourhood prayer walk – Want to evangelise your neighbours? Then go on a prayer walk around your neighbourhood, praying specifically for your neighbours, and asking God to create opportunities to get to know them better.
Read up – If you’re going to share the gospel, make sure you’ve read the gospel! Make sure you’re reading and absorbing the words and actions of Jesus daily; evangelistic words pack a lot more punch when they’re taken directly from (or are clearly supported by) scripture.
Apologetics prep – Get ready for those tricky conversations by spending time thinking about and writing down what you would say to someone if they asked you to ‘give an account of the hope that you have’ (1 Peter 3:15).
Ask for prayer support – If you’re going to be having intentional evangelistic conversations, ask a group of Christian friends who you trust to pray for you – maybe even while you know those conversations are going to be taking place. When my church runs an Alpha course, we have a team in another room praying for the delegates. Why not apply that idea to personal evangelism?
Practice – Get together with another Christian and role-play evangelistic conversations, not so that you become the master of every apologetics argument (no-one ever became a Christian because they lost the argument, remember), but so that you relax into the idea.–
