What is evangelism? That is a great question. Over the years I’ve discovered that there are as many definitions of “evangelism” as there are people offering definitions. Some focus on the message, others on results, some on the recipients of the message and still others on the methods used. I like to define evangelism as introducing people to the good news of Jesus Christ so that they will begin a relationship with God through Jesus.
However, this was not the definition that shaped my early pastoral ministry. I remember graduating from seminary in the mid 90’s and receiving a postcard in the mail; email really hadn’t caught on yet, inviting me to serve on the Baltimore-Washington Conference Board of Evangelization. I had no idea what that was, but now that school was behind me I had some time in my schedule to fill. So with my new degree and my one class in evangelism, I joined this Conference committee, prepared to fully engage in their work. But what was that work? I soon learned that we spent most of our time and energy developing “programs” to teach congregations how to invite people to their buildings in order to get them to participate in worship and activities and hopefully become members. This practice became my understanding or definition of evangelism. It was invitational so that more people would come to the church building and participate in the life of the Church.
Don’t get me wrong, there was and is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach. It was built on a premise that most people were not comfortable sharing their faith but would be willing to extend an invitation to join them for a worship service or activity in the hopes that the “professional” church people would do the faith sharing piece. It is a practice we continue today, but I wonder, is building based evangelism dead?
While I still see an important role for our buildings in equipping people in the faith, I believe the practice of congregations expecting people to come to us needs to be replaced. As Lauren and I wrote in a previous article, we are called to make the shift and return to the call of Jesus to “go therefore and make disciples” or as we said a better translation is “as you are going, make disciples”. How do we do this? How do we move beyond the walls of our buildings, in order to share our faith and invite others into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ? This is a great question and one we will explore in our next post.