Is evangelism out of fashion?

Sue Holdsworth

47 minutes ago

5 min read

I’m not a natural evangelist. At least, I’m not a natural evangelist if this means knowing how to share my beliefs about sin and salvation with non-church friends. I do, however, study mission, which includes evangelism. I want to share some observations about mission and evangelism that I have gleaned from my studies of church members engaged in missional initiatives and from interviewing pastors, to discover the issues they are currently facing.

I once started a welcome outreach to asylum seekers where they could come and hang out, ask questions about living in Australia, and make new friends. We also made introductory English lessons available. Most people who came along were traumatised by experiences in their home country, plus their perilous voyage to Australia by sea, on boats that were not fit for purpose. Some people came because they had faced persecution as Christians in their home country, while others were from persecuted ethnic minorities. Most had left families behind and would often show me their photos, wondering when they would next see them. For many, their Muslim faith was the only constant in their lives.

I had recruited some local churches to join this initiative, and I soon had a dedicated team alongside me. Unfortunately, we had some very different ideas about what we should be doing. My aim was to incarnate God’s love through welcome and acts of service, including the offer of English lessons. Other strong personalities insisted on English lessons for all attendees, complete with Bible studies. I was unable to convince these volunteers to go gently with our guests, who had suffered much. This led me to leave the project, as I was unable to condone the methods being used by these volunteers.

Although this was painful at the time, it got me thinking about how we do mission and evangelism well. I define mission as anything that expresses God’s love for creation, and evangelism is a vital part of this. I decided to enrol in a PhD, to study this question in depth. I engaged in a study of four, church-based, missional initiatives. Two of these initiatives were churches providing English conversation classes for new migrants, one was a cooking club for migrant women, and a fourth was a church-run training school offering employment training for new migrants. All the churches I studied are evangelical. I discovered that these groups of Christian volunteers went one of two ways when it came to evangelism. Most, quite correctly, were unwilling to engage in overt evangelism during sessions because the people attending had been told they were coming to benefit from a particular service. It would, the volunteers told me, be disingenuous and manipulative to do this. I noted little to no group prayer among these volunteers and no talk about God and their faith journeys during downtime together (and I was there for many church events and planning sessions). How, I wondered, can we naturally talk about God with non-church friends if we do not talk about him with our Christian friends? What, I wondered, fuelled these initiatives if prayer together was absent? It felt as though, while well motivated, these initiatives were no different from any secular agency offering a community service.

A second type of initiative I studied was all about evangelism. Volunteers at one of the initiatives I studied made sure God was brought into conversations whenever possible. To their credit, this team prayed together before sessions and at other times. They were passionate about people coming to know Jesus. This was a tough call, as the women attending came from a strict, internally policed Muslim migrant community.

These volunteers were discouraged. They talked to me about the women being “resistant” to the gospel, and they had not seen any conversions in twenty years of service. The estate they worked on was described to me as “tough ground”. I noticed that the people attending classes were only celebrated when they showed an interest in Christianity, which was rare.

I concluded that neither of these models of mission was optimal and came to understand that many Christians no longer engage in evangelism because we don’t know what to do. Many of us have rejected past models of evangelism as manipulative, ineffective, or just plain weird, but we don’t know what to do instead.

At most of the initiatives I studied, I noticed that volunteers were most motivated to provide pastoral care. This led me to learn more about pastoral care principles and practices. What I discovered was that when we apply these practices to friendships with non-church friends, evangelism finds a natural place. This involves learning to be good listeners, who listen out for the deep stories that people tell us. It involves creating space in relationships for others to step into, should they choose to, to self-reveal. When friendships are mutual and when we commit to learning from each other and growing through life together, when we celebrate people as they currently are, not how we want them to become, talk about God, life and meaning will find a natural place.

Supervision is a vital part of pastoral care practice, and we can engage in informal peer supervision as we meet together with our church friends for prayer, Bible study, and group reflection. This provides the fuel that enables our mission and provides the discernment needed to become sensitive to the needs and desires of our non-church friends.

Learning to love others well enables us to “diffuse” God’s love wherever we find ourselves during the course of each week. Churches have long relied on stay-at-home mums and early retirees for their volunteer base. People are now retiring later and mums are going out to work, meaning volunteers for church-based mission programmes are in short supply. I have interviewed pastors who told me that they are now too stretched, due to staff shortages and compliance workloads, to initiate new mission initiatives, even if volunteers were available.

If we take the idea of “diffusing” God’s love seriously, this lack of volunteers can be overcome. Noticing the lonely colleague in the lunchroom, popping in on a neighbour, or making friends with regular commuters on the bus or train all diffuse God’s love. Being the mum at the school gate who communicates care through careful listening, rather than competing to tell our own stories, also communicates God’s love.

Women are often natural relationship builders. Let’s not divorce this ability from our Christian faith. If this doesn’t come naturally, it’s amazing what quiet listening can achieve. Our non-church friends are not projects for conversion. They are people wanting friends who care, they have wisdom of their own that we need to hear, and they are friends worth celebrating because they are created in God’s image. *Some information has been altered to preserve anonymity.