Evangelism Passion Building...

For years I've been praying that God would do a work in my heart, growing a heart for the lost and giving me the boldness to share.  He's answering that prayer.

On Saturday I attended an evangelism conference with 5 others from my church.  At the end of the conference the 25 or 30 participants split up into groups of 2 or 3 and we went out to practice what we had learned.  While my partner and I (one of the fellow "elders" in our new church plant) had limited success, in that brief hour 9 men and women came to saving faith in Christ!  Praise God!

I am in the process of identifying and translating and publishing good, effective books on evangelism.  My goal is to get these training materials in the hands of the evangelical church in Albania to get people re-engaged in the process of personal evangelism.

Last week I went out with another of my fellow "elders" in our new church plant to go witnessing in a new neighborhood.  We were using a brief survey as our means to enter into spiritual conversations.  Nobody became a Christian, but that's not how we measure "success" – we faithfully shared the Gospel with 2 young men that day.  Who knows when or how that seed might take root.

I am in a type of accountability group with one of the men from our church.  Basically we've each committed to pray for the other on a daily basis specifically for boldness in sharing the gospel. We both struggle with boldness and, rather than giving in to that natural passive tendency, we are praying that God's Spirit will transform our hearts to be bold when we should be bold.

Ten minutes before I sat down to write this letter I was sitting in a cafe talking with my friend G.  I have been praying for him for many months and today we got deeper into spiritual things than ever before.  (Maybe God is answering my prayer about boldness!)  He is very convinced that "there is one God and that's enough."  This is probably the #1 objection most Albanian men throw into a conversation within seconds of talking about spiritual things.  I'm going to post on Facebook in our Albanian Church Planting group there and ask these other pastors what answers they have found most effective.

My phone just rang to let me know I'll have to leave this letter half-way written in just a moment.  I have arranged to drink coffee with a young man from a local church nearby who works 2 jobs.  He is a graduate of the CCL from years ago and we meet on a semi-regular basis so we can talk about various areas in his life, but I try to never leave our meetings without asking him how his lifestyle evangelism is going.  He's still hesitant and uses the "I'm Busy" excuse too often, but he's starting to realize the importance.  Recently he started volunteering on an online Christian forum for the very purpose of doing evangelism and you should have seen his joy as he described to me an online encounter where he shared Christ and the person responded in faith.

This weekend was a very busy weekend from a ministry perspective and so yesterday (Monday) I decided to take a Sabbath rest.  This happens all too infrequently, but yesterday an hour of quiet time turned into multiple hours and I just had a fantastic day with God.  And the lynch-pin of the day – the one subject I kept coming back to time after time after time in prayer – was the list of unbelieving men that God has allowed me to develop relationships with over the last months.  I prayed again and again that God would draw them to Himself.

Our new church plant was founded with the explicit intent of becoming a multiplying body.  From the word "go" we wanted to seek conversion growth (as compared to transfer growth) and we wanted to train the people in our body to win and disciple others.  6 months into the process we are finding very little forward progress.  And so a few weeks back in church found us preaching a 4-week series of messages on our vision statement, central to which is that EVERY believer MUST be involved in evangelism in order to see the type of multiplication we believe God desires from our church.

Last Tuesday one of the young ladies at our church asked Melodye if she could bring several of her friends over as part of an outreach.  The idea was to do some kind of craft or cooking lesson as the "hook" and then to share testimonies to reach out to them on a spiritual level.  After a wonderfully successful evening Melodye just bubbled over with enthusiasm as we talked that night.  And this last Saturday I was sitting near that young lady during the seminar lunch and she started talking about how great it had worked that she and Melodye could play "tag-team" in that type of evangelism.

Have you ever stopped to think what would happen if every believer would win and disciple one person every 10 years?  A quick look at a calculator tells me we would see 10% growth in the church every year – a growth rate any church would love to see!  That means we would DOUBLE the size of the church every 7.2 years.  But it's not happening.  Why?  Go back to the first sentence of this paragraph and re-read the underlined words...

In that evangelism seminar I attended on Saturday one of the things the speaker said was that every one of us should attempt to share Christ with someone 5 times per day.   That wasn't a typo - I intended to write the number "five."  I don't know about you, but that sounds almost impossible -- maybe it was an "ear-o" where I heard wrong.  But in any event, it's a wake-up call to me -- even with my recently greatly increased focus on evangelism it's still rare for me to engage in an evangelistic contact 5 times per WEEK...

My point, dear readers (yes, I'm addressing both of you... :-)  ), is that it's time for us to get on the stick and change our evangelical sub-culture to go back to our evangelistic roots.  Do you see the same root in both of those words, "evangelical" and "evangelize"?  That's where we came from! And yet for most evangelicals today that word ("evangelical") has lost all implications of an action and instead simply describes a particular doctrinal stance.

Lifestyle...  Lifestyle...  Lifestyle...!  Let's get our priorities in order!