Recently I have found this word, concept, command, calling, (whatever it is) very interesting, intriguing, frustrating, scary, CONFUSING and DIFFICULT. I think most people kind of have a similar feeling about evangelism. It seems to strike up so many emotions and so many questions. And the bottom line is that it just seems to not really be happening much. Why is that? We hear about it nearly every Sunday in some form or another. There are countless different evangelism strategies out there for us to learn, and yet we seem to be doing very little of it and when we do it, most of us (me included) rarely get the results we were hoping for.
Last week I started a new series where we are going to take a few weeks and try to look at this idea of evangelism and try to understand it just a little better and take a bit of the fear and confusion out of it. We spent some time asking the question "WHY should we be doing evangelism"? What is our motivation? We looked at some of the statistics which say that more than 4.5 billion people in the world today are without Christ and over 1 billion of those have never even heard of Christ or the gospel story. That should motivate us. People dying without Christ and the fact that God loves these people, should motivate us.
Something else that should motivate us to do evangelism is that fact that scripture tells us to do it. We discussed several passages (Matthew 5:14-16, Romans 10:10-18, I Cor. 9:19-24, Matthew 28:16-20, and Acts 1:8) and saw that ALL people, not just the professionals, are called to evangelize. This call from scripture is ultimately why we should be evangelizing.
This week we are going to discuss the question of "HOW do we do evangelism?" Hopefully we will learn some very simple, critical concepts that should make evangelism much easier and definitely more productive.
