Evangelism
By mallisle
- 1263 reads
In the book of Acts it is true that a few people were led to Christ by a chance encounter, for example, the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in chapter 8. What was a lot more usual was people becoming Christians through evangelism. The main way that the church in apostolic times grew was through mass evangelism on a large scale. A popular hymn in the 1970s was, 'One shall tell another and he shall tell his friend.' I have always thought that that would take an awfully long time, for one to tell another and him to tell his friend. Bearing in mind that it might take several years to lead someone to Christ anyway, some of us are not going to be around that long. The Billy Graham organisation did some research after Mission England in 1984 and asked how many people had become Christians through family influence, church activities, friends and evangelism. The answer was that about a quarter of the people had become Christians through each. Even in 1984 evangelism worked. It worked as well as anything else we had tried, including church barbecues, bringing your children up as Christians or witnessing to your friends. But if you had asked those questions in the early church, what sort of conversation would you have had? How many people here were saved on the day of Pentecost, how many of you are among the five thousand who were saved when the apostles were preaching shortly afterwards, and how many people became a Christian because one of their friends told them about Jesus? One, the Ethiopian eunuch, had become a Christian because he happened to meet someone who told him about Jesus. Even then, it wasn't someone that he actually knew.
I don't wish to deny that for some people a Christian friend is the best way you could ever reach them, but if the early church had relied on that as heavily as we do, it would never have gotten off the ground. It is true, as one preacher said, that you are the only Jesus that some people will ever see, but how many people will ever see you? I had never met anybody like that. A girl in my class at school was a Christian, but I had never actually spoken to her. None of the boys knew anything about her faith. That girl might never have witnessed to more than a few people as a friend, although I don't wish to deny that friendship evangelism can be effective. What the early church didn't do was open up a youth club. They didn't organise a barbecue and ask people to invite their friends and family to the barbecue. They preached morning, noon and night, especially when the authorities told them that they couldn't. People go out for half an hour with a packet of leaflets and feel frustrated because they didn't see anyone come to the Lord. They think that street evangelism is out of date, that if they had lived a hundred years earlier they would have seen many people saved in that half hour, and that this is simply the wrong period of history to be an evangelist. The problem is not that evangelism doesn't work but that we don't do it on a large enough scale. If a man wanted to be a councillor he wouldn't just leaflet one street. He would leaflet every street in a large area, up to 4,000 houses, and probably more than once. The church in the book of Acts did evangelism on that sort of scale. If we did, we would see people come to Christ.
Our church is not persecuted because it doesn't do anything to be persecuted for. Jesus said that lack of persecution is not a compliment. There are places in this world where Christians and muslims have peacefully co-existed side by side for hundreds of years. That's because the Christians never told the muslims about Jesus. I'm sure that if we knocked on the muslims' door and gave them all an evangelistic leaflet a few times a year we'd be persecuted. One organisation had a bus that went on to an estate in London that was full of heroin addicts. The drug dealers told them to leave because they were preaching the gospel. If all the heroin addicts got saved they would be out of business. Can you imagine how much persecution there would be if we went on to estates like that and actually started leading heroin addicts to Jesus? A Christian was in prison and a man asked him for his phone card so he could buy some drugs. He didn't give him his phone card so they put a radio battery in a sock and hit him on the head. Can you imagine if Christians in prison started healing heroin addicts in large numbers, if a Christian's shadow just had to fall on a drug addict, or the drug addict just had to touch a cloth the Christian had touched and he would be healed? Remember the words of Jesus, greater things than me will you do. There are many people today who would like to rediscover the New Testament church. I would like to point out that if we ever manage to do this most of our evangelists will go to prison and many of them will be martyred. Are we willing to pay the price?
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