Tonight I was together with some folks from my church, Illini Life. Our objective for the night consisted of discussing where we find ourselves as a ministry, listing our strengths and weaknesses and such.
It didn’t come as a surprise to most of us when we admitted that we are weak in evangelism and this potentially could be a major threat to the longevity of this group. As leaders and thinkers tend to do, I (and I suspect others) jumped to thinking about how we can fix this. How do we address this weakness?
Over the course of my Christian life I’ve heard a lot of teachings on evangelism and why I should be doing it more – the thing about these teachings though, I usually walk away feeling motivated by guilt. “I’m not a good enough Christian”, “I must not love God enough”, “Do I really have an ‘eternal perspective’?” These sorts of things haunt me as I walk through life and so I might share about Jesus with a friend, but probably more motivated by guilt then because I truly believe they need to the truth of The Gospel.
Continuing in that group conversation though: We stopped and listened to an interview with some respected Christian leaders and Church researchers. What struck me out of this interview – these guys addressed weakness in evangelism in another manner. Essentially they claimed churches who have a strong emphasis on spiritual formation and true discipleship – building Jesus Followers with a kingdom mindset – are seeing evangelism happening. The natural outward flow of someone Following Jesus is to bring others into that lifestyle. While this isn’t ground breaking, it caused me to think and question how we approach this weakness.
This raises questions for me, How much do I believe this idea? Do I trust this conclusion? And inversely, if our evangelism is weak, does that really mean our discipleship is weak? I welcome your thoughts and experiences – I’m processing so input is helpful.
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