3 Evangelism

3 Evangelism

3



Evangelism

We shall now try to answer from Scripture the following four questions concerning the Christian’s evangelistic responsibility. What is evangelism? What is the evangelistic message? What is the motive for evangelizing? By what means and methods should evangel­ism be practiced?

What Is Evangelism?

It might be expected that evangelical Christians would not need to spend time discussing this question. In view of the emphasis that evangelicals always, and rightly, lay on the primacy of evangelism, it would be natural to assume that we were all perfectly unanimous as to what evangelism is. Yet, in fact, much of the confusion in present-day debates about evangelism arises from lack of agreement at this point. The root of the confusion can be stated in a sentence. It is our widespread and persistent habit of defining evangelism in terms, not of a message delivered, but of an effect produced in our hearers.

For illustration of this, look at the famous definition of evangelism which the Archbishops’ Committee gave in its report on the evangelistic work of the Church in 1918. “To evangelize,” declared the Committee, “is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through him, to accept him as their Savior, and serve him as their King in the fellowship of his Church.”

Now this is in many ways an excellent definition. It states admirably the aim and purpose of the evangelistic enterprise, and rules out many inadequate and misleading ideas. To start with, it makes the point that evangelizing means declaring a specific message. According to this definition, it is not evangelism merely to teach general truths about God’s existence or the moral law; evangelism means to present Christ Jesus, the divine Son who became man at a particular point in world history in order to save a ruined race. Nor, according to this definition, is it evangelism merely to present the teaching and example of the historical Jesus, or even the truth about his saving work; evangelism means to present Christ Jesus himself, the living Savior and the reigning Lord. Nor, again, is it evangelism, according to this definition, merely to set forth the living Jesus as Helper and Friend, without reference to his saving work on the cross; evangelism means to present Jesus as Christ, God’s anointed Servant, fulfilling the tasks of his appointed office as Priest and King. “The man Christ Jesus” is to be presented as the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5), who “suffered once for sins . . . that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet 3:18) the One through whom, and through whom alone, men may come to put their trust in God, according to his own claim: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). He is to be proclaimed as the Savior, the One who “came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15) and “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3:13)—“Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess 1:10 rsv). And he is to be set forth as King: “For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom 14:9 rsv). There is no evangelism where this specific message is not declared.

Again, the definition makes the point that evangelizing means declaring this specific message with a specific application. It is not evangelism, according to this definition, to present Christ Jesus as a subject for detached critical and comparative study. Evangelism, according to this definition, means presenting Christ Jesus and his work in relation to the needs of fallen men and women, who are without God as a Father and under the wrath of God as a Judge. Evangelism means presenting Christ Jesus to them as their only hope, in this world or the next. Evangelism means exhorting sinners to accept Christ Jesus as their Savior, recognizing that in the most final and far-reaching sense they are lost without him. Nor is this all. Evangelism also means summoning men to receive Christ Jesus as all that he is—Lord, as well as Savior—and therefore to serve him as their King in the fellowship of his church, the company of those who worship him, witness to him, and work for him here on earth. In other words, evangelism is the issuing of a call to turn, as well as to trust; it is the delivering, not merely of a divine invitation to receive a Savior, but of a divine command to repent of sin. And there is no evangelism where this specific application is not made.

The definition under review establishes these vital points well. But on one fundamental matter it goes astray. It puts a consecutive clause where a final clause should be. Had it begun: “to evangelize is to present Christ Jesus to sinful men in order that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, they may come,” there would be no fault to find with it. But it does not say this. What it does say is quite different. “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come.” This is to define evangelism in terms of an effect achieved in the lives of others; which amounts to saying that the essence of evangelizing is producing converts.

But this cannot be right, as we pointed out at an earlier stage. Evangelism is man’s work, but the giving of faith is God’s. It is true, indeed, that every evangelist’s aim is to convert, and that our definition perfectly expresses the ideal which he longs to see fulfilled in his own ministry; but the question whether or not one is evangelizing cannot be settled simply by asking whether one has had conversions. There have been missionaries to Muslims who labored for a lifetime and saw no converts; must we conclude from this that they were not evangelizing? There have been un-evangelical preachers through whose words (not always understood in the sense intended) individuals have been soundly converted; must we conclude from this that these preachers were evangelizing after all? The answer, surely, is no in both cases. The results of preaching depend, not on the wishes and intentions of men, but on the will of God Almighty. This consideration does not mean that we should be indifferent as to whether we see fruit from our witness to Christ or not; if fruit is not appearing, we should seek God’s face about it to find out why. But this consideration does mean that we ought not to define evangelism in terms of achieved results.

How, then, should evangelism be defined? The New Testament answer is very simple. According to the New Testament, evangelism is just preaching the gospel, the evangel. It is a work of communication in which Christians make themselves mouthpieces for God’s message of mercy to sinners. Anyone who faithfully delivers that message, under whatever circumstances, in a large meeting, in a small meeting, from a pulpit, or in a private conversation, is evangelizing. Since the divine message finds its climax in a plea from the Creator to a rebel world to turn and put faith in Christ, the delivering of it involves the summoning of one’s hearers to conversion. If you are not, in this sense, seeking to bring about conversions, you are not evangelizing; this we have seen already. But the way to tell whether in fact you are evangelizing is not to ask whether conversions are known to have resulted from your witness. It is to ask whether you are faithfully making known the gospel message.

For a complete picture of what the New Testament means by evangelism, we need not look further than the apostle Paul’s account of the nature of his own evangelistic ministry. There are three points to note about it.

1. Paul evangelized as the commissioned representative of the Lord Jesus Christ. Evangelism was a task that had been specifically entrusted to him. “Christ . . . [sent] me . . . to preach the gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). Now, see how he regarded himself in virtue of this commission. In the first place, he saw himself as Christ’s steward. “This is how one should regard us [myself, and my fellow-preacher Apollos],” he wrote to the Corinthians, “as servants of Christ, and [in that capacity] stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1 rsv). “I am . . . entrusted with a stewardship [of the gospel]” (1 Cor 9:17). Paul saw himself as a bondslave raised to a position of high trust, as the steward of a household in New Testament times always was; he had been “approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel” (1 Thess 2:4 rsv; cf. 1 Tim 1:11-12; Tit 1:3), and the responsibility now rested on him to be faithful to his trust, as a steward must be (cf. 1 Cor 4:2), guarding the precious truth that had been committed to him (as he later charges Timothy to do [1 Tim 6:20; 2 Tim 1:13-14]), and distributing and dispensing it according to his Master’s instructions. The fact that he had been entrusted with this stewardship meant, as he told the Corinthians, that “necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16; cf. Acts 20:20, 26-27; 2 Cor 5:10-11; Ezek 3:16ff.; 33:7ff.). The figure of stewardship thus highlights Paul’s responsibility to evangelize.

Again, Paul saw himself as Christ’s herald. When he describes himself as “appointed a preacher” of the gospel (2 Tim 1:11; 1 Tim 2:7 rsv), the noun he uses is ke4ryx, which means a herald, a person who makes public announcements on another’s behalf. When he declares, “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23), the verb he uses is ke4rysso4, which denotes the herald’s appointed activity of blazoning abroad what he has been told to make known. When Paul speaks of “my preaching,” and “our preaching,” and lays it down that, after the world’s wisdom had rendered the world ignorant of God, “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor 1:21; 2:4; 15:14 kjv), the noun he uses is ke4rygma, meaning not the activity of announcing, but the thing announced, the proclamation itself, the message declared. Paul, in his own estimation, was not a philosopher, not a moralist, not one of the world’s wise men, but simply Christ’s herald. His royal Master had given him a message to proclaim; his whole business, therefore, was to deliver that message with exact and studious faithfulness, adding nothing, altering nothing, and omitting nothing. And he was to deliver it, not as another of man’s bright ideas, needing to be beautified with the cosmetics and high heels of fashionable learning in order to make people look at it, but as a word from God, spoken in Christ’s name, carrying Christ’s authority, and to be authenticated in the hearers by the convincing power of Christ’s Spirit. “And I, when I came to you,” Paul reminds the Corinthians, “[came] proclaiming to you the testimony of God.” I came, Paul is saying, not to give you my own ideas about anything, but simply to deliver God’s message. Therefore, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”—for it was just this that God sent me to tell you about. “And my speech and my message [ke4rygma] were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor 2:1-5 kjv). The figure of the herald thus highlights the authenticity of Paul’s gospel.

Third, Paul considered himself Christ’s ambassador. What is an ambassador? He is the authorized representative of a sovereign. He speaks not in his own name, but on behalf of the ruler whose deputy he is, and his whole duty and responsibility is to interpret that ruler’s mind faithfully to those to whom he is sent. Paul used this figure twice, both times in connection with his evangelistic work. Pray for me, he wrote from prison, “that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.” God, he wrote again, has “entrust[ed] to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (Eph 6:19-20 rsv; 2 Cor 5:19-20 rsv). Paul called himself an ambassador because he knew that, when he proclaimed the gospel facts and promises, and urged sinners to receive the reconciliation effected at Calvary, it was Christ’s message to the world that he was declaring. The figure of ambassadorship thus highlights the authority that Paul had, as representing his Lord.

In his evangelism, then, Paul consciously acted as the slave and steward, the mouthpiece and herald, the spokesman and ambassador, of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence, on the one hand, his sustained boldness and unshakable sense of authority in the face of ridicule and indifference; hence, on the other hand, his intransigent refusal to modify his message in order to suit circumstances. These two things, of course, were connected, for Paul could regard himself as speaking with Christ’s authority only as long as he remained faithful to the terms of his commission and said neither less nor more than he had been given to say (cf. Gal 1:8ff). But while he preached the gospel that Christ had entrusted to him, he spoke as Christ’s commissioned representative, and could therefore speak authoritatively, and claim a right to be heard.

But the commission to publish the gospel and make disciples was never confined to the apostles. Nor is it now confined to the church’s ministers. It is a commission that rests on the whole church collectively, and therefore on each Christian individually. All God’s people are sent to do as the Philippians did, and “shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Phil 2:15-16). Every Christian, therefore, has a God-given obligation to make known the gospel of Christ. And every Christian who declares the gospel message to any other person does so as Christ’s ambassador and representative, according to the terms of his God-given commission. Such is the authority, and such the responsibility, of the church and of the Christian in evangelism.

The second point in Paul’s understanding of his own evangelistic ministry follows on from the first.

2. His primary task in evangelism was to teach the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ. As Christ’s ambassador, Paul’s first job was to “get across” the message that his Sovereign had charged him to deliver. Christ sent me, he declared—to do what?—“to preach the gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). The Greek word here is euangelizomai, meaning publish the euangelion, literally the “good news.” For that is what Paul’s gospel was. Good news, Paul proclaimed, has come into the world—good news from God. It is unlike anything that the world, Jewish or Gentile, had guessed or expected, but it is something that the whole world needs. This good news, the “word of God” in the usual New Testament sense of that phrase (cf. Acts 4:31; 8:14; 11:1; 13:46; 2 Cor 2:17; Col 1:25; 1 Thess 2:13; 2 Tim 2:9), “the truth” as Paul often called it (cf. 2 Cor 4:2; Gal 2:5, 14; 2 Thess 2:10ff.; 2 Tim 2:18, 25; 3:8), is a full and final disclosure of what the Creator has done, and will do, to save sinners. It is a complete unfolding of the spiritual facts of life in God’s apostate world.

What was this good news that Paul preached? It was the news about Jesus of Nazareth. It was the news of the incarnation, the atonement and the kingdom—the cradle, the cross and the crown—of the Son of God. It was the news of how God “glorified his servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13 rsv) by making him Christ, the world’s long-awaited “Leader and Savior” (Acts 5:31). It was the news of how God made his Son man; and how, as man, God made him Priest, and Prophet, and King; and how, as Priest, God also made him a sacrifice for sins; and how, as Prophet, God also made him a Lawgiver to his people; and how, as King, God has also made him Judge of all the world and given him prerogatives which in the Old Testament are exclusively Jehovah’s own, namely to reign till every knee bows before him and to save all who call on his name. In short, the good news was just this: that God has executed his eternal intention of glorifying his Son by exalting him as a great Savior for great sinners.

Such is the gospel which Paul was sent to preach. It is a message of some complexity, needing to be learned before it can be lived by, and understood before it can be applied. It needs, therefore, to be taught. Hence Paul, as a preacher of it, had to become a teacher. He saw this as part of his calling; he speaks of “the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher

. . . and teacher” (2 Tim 1:10-11).

And he tells us that teaching was basic to his evangel­istic practice; he speaks of “him [Christ] we proclaim . . . teaching everyone with all wisdom” (Col 1:28). In both texts the reference to teaching is explanatory of the reference to preaching. In other words: it is by teaching that the gospel preacher fulfills his ministry. To teach the gospel is his first responsibility: to reduce it to its simplest essentials, to analyze it point by point, to fix its meaning by positive and negative definition, to show how each part of the message links up with the rest—and to go on explaining it till he is quite sure that his listeners have grasped it. And therefore when Paul preached the gospel, formally or informally, in the synagogue or in the streets, to Jews or to Gentiles, to a crowd or to one man, what he did was to teach—engaging attention, capturing interest, setting out the facts, explaining their significance, solving difficulties, answering objections, and showing how the message bears on life. Luke’s regular way of describing Paul’s evangelistic ministry is to say that he disputed (Acts 9:29), or reasoned (Acts 17:2, 17; 18:4; 19:8-9 [dialegomai rendered “argued” in the rsv]; 24:25), or taught (Acts 18:11; 28:31), or persuaded (i.e., sought to carry his hearers’ judgments; Acts 18:4; 19:8, 26; 28:23; cf. 26:28). And Paul himself refers to his ministry among the Gentiles as primarily a task of instruction: “to me . . . to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery” (Eph 3:8-9 rsv). Clearly, in Paul’s view, his first and fundamental job as a preacher of the gospel was to communicate knowledge—to get gospel truth fixed in people’s minds. To him, teaching the truth was the basic evangelistic activity; to him, therefore, the only right method of evangelism was the teaching method.

3. Paul’s ultimate aim in evangelism was to convert his hearers to faith in Christ. The word “convert” is a translation of the Greek epistrepho4, which means—and is sometimes translated—“turn.” We think of conversion as a work of God, and so from one standpoint it is; but it is striking to observe that in the three New Testament passages where epistrepho4 is used transitively, of “converting” someone to God, the subject of the verb is not God, as we might have expected, but a preacher. The angel said of John the Baptist: “And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God” (Lk 1:16). James says: “My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner . . . will save his soul from death” (Jas 5:19-20). And Paul himself tells Agrippa how Christ had said to him: “the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God,” and how he had obeyed the heavenly vision by proclaiming to both Jews and Gentiles “that they should repent and turn to God” (Acts 26:17-18, 20). These passages represent the converting of others as the work of God’s people, a task that they are to perform by summoning people to turn to God in repentance and faith.

When the Scriptures speak in this way of converting, and of saving too, as a task for God’s people to perform, they are not, of course, calling in question the truth that, properly speaking, it is God who converts and saves. What they are saying is simply that the conversion and salvation of others should be the Christian’s objective. The preacher should work to convert his congregation; the wife should work to save her unbelieving husband (1 Cor 7:16). Christians are sent to convert, and they should not allow themselves, as Christ’s representatives in the world, to aim at anything less. Evangelizing, therefore, is not simply a matter of teaching, and instructing, and imparting information to the mind. There is more to it than that. Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught. It is communication with a view to conversion. It is a matter, not merely of informing, but also of inviting. It is an attempt to gain

(kjv), or win (esv), or catch our fellow men for Christ (see

1 Cor 9:19ff.; 1 Pet 3:1; Lk 5:10). Our Lord depicts it as fishermen’s work (Mt 4:19; cf. 13:47).

Paul, again, is our model here. Paul, as we saw, knew himself to be sent by Christ, not only to open men’s minds by teaching them the gospel (though that must come first), but also to turn them to God by exhorting and applying the truth to their lives. Accordingly, his avowed aim was not just to spread information, but to save sinners: “that by all means I might save some” (1 Cor 9:22; cf. Rom 11:14). Thus, there was in his evangelistic preaching both instruction—“in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself”—and entreaty—“We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:19-20). His responsibility extended not only toward the gospel which he was charged to preach and preserve but also toward the needy people to whom he was sent to impart it and who were perishing without it (cf. Rom 1:13ff.). As an apostle of Christ, he was more than a teacher of truth; he was a shepherd of souls, sent into the world, not to lecture sinners, but to love them. For he was an apostle second and a Christian first; and, as a Christian, he was a man called to love his neighbor. This meant simply that in every situation, and by every means in his power, it was his business to seek other people’s good. From this standpoint, the significance of his apostolic commission to evangelize and found churches was simply that this was the particular way in which Christ was calling him to fulfill the law of love to his neighbor. He might not, therefore, preach the gospel in a harsh, callous way, putting it before his neighbor with a contemptuous air of “there you are—take it or leave it,” and excusing himself for his unconcern about people on the grounds of his faithfulness to the truth. Such conduct would be a failure of love on his part. His business was to present truth in a spirit of love, as an expression and implementation of his desire to save his hearers. The attitude which informed all Paul’s evangelism was this: “I seek not what is yours but you . . . I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Cor 12:14-15).

And all our own evangelism must be done in the same spirit. As love to our neighbor suggests and demands that we evangelize, so the command to evangelize is a specific application of the command to love others for Christ’s sake, and must be fulfilled as such.

Love made Paul warm-hearted and affectionate in his evangelism. “We were gentle among you,” he reminded the Thessalonians; “being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess 2:7-8). Love also made Paul considerate and adaptable in his evangelism; though he peremptorily refused to change his message to please men (cf. Gal 1:10;

2 Cor 2:17; 1 Thess 2:4), he would go to any lengths in his presentation of it to avoid giving offense and putting needless difficulties in the way of men’s accepting and responding to it. “Though I am free from all,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews; to those under the law I became as one under the law . . . that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law . . . that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor 9:19-22 rsv; cf. 10:33). Paul sought to save men; and because he sought to save them, he was not content merely to throw truth at them; but he went out of his way to get alongside them, and to start thinking with them from where they were, and to speak to them in terms that they could understand, and above all, to avoid everything that would prejudice them against the gospel and put stumbling blocks in their path. In his zeal to maintain truth, he never lost sight of the needs and claims of people. His aim and object in all his handling of the gospel, even in the heat of the polemics which contrary views evoked, was never less than to win souls, by converting those whom he saw as his neighbors, to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Such was evangelism according to Paul: going out in love, as Christ’s agent in the world, to teach sinners the truth of the gospel with a view to converting and saving them. If, therefore, we are engaging in this activity, in this spirit and with this aim, we are evangelizing, irrespective of the particular means by which we are doing it.

We saw earlier how wrong our thinking would go if we defined evangelism too broadly and fell into assuming that the production of converts was our personal responsibility. We would now point out that there is an opposite mistake which we must also avoid: the mistake, that is, of defining evangelism too narrowly. One way of making this mistake would be to define evangelism institutionally, in terms of holding some particular type of evangelistic meeting—a meeting, let us say, run on informal lines, at which testimonies are given, choruses are sung, and an appeal is made at the close for some outward sign of having received Christ, such as raising the hand, or standing, or walking to the front. Should we equate the church’s evangelistic responsibility with the holding of such meetings, or the Christian’s evangelistic responsibility with bringing unconverted people to such meetings, we should be grievously astray, as the following considerations will show.

1. In the first place, there are many ways of bringing the gospel before the unconverted in order to win them, besides getting them to meetings of this type. There is, to start with, the way of personal evangelism, by which Andrew won Peter, and Philip won Nathanael, and Paul won Onesimus (Jn 1:40-51; Philem 10). There is the home meeting and the group Bible study. Also, and most important, there are the regular services Sunday by Sunday in local churches. Insofar as the preaching at our Sunday services is scriptural, those services will of necessity be evangelistic. It is a mistake to suppose that evangelistic sermons are a special brand of sermons, having their own peculiar style and conventions; evangelistic sermons are just scriptural sermons, the sort of sermons that a man cannot help preaching if he is preaching the Bible biblically. Proper sermons seek to expound and apply what is in the Bible. But what is in the Bible is just the whole counsel of God for man’s salvation; all Scripture bears witness, in one way or another, to Christ, and all biblical themes relate to him. All proper sermons, therefore, will of necessity declare Christ in some fashion and so be more or less directly evangelistic. Some sermons, of course, will aim more narrowly and exclusively at converting sinners than do others. But you cannot present the Lord Jesus Christ as the Bible presents him, as God’s answer to every problem in the sinner’s relationship with himself, and not be in effect evangelistic all the time. The Lord Jesus Christ, said Robert Bolton, is “offered most freely, and without exception of any person, every Sabbath, every Sermon, either in plaine, and direct terms, or implyedly, at the least.” So it is, inevitably, wherever the Bible is preached biblically. And there is something terribly wrong in any church, or any man’s ministry, to which Bolton’s generalization does not apply. If in our churches “evangelistic” meetings, and “evangelistic” sermons, are thought of as special occasions, different from the ordinary run of things, it is a damning indictment of our normal Sunday services. So that if we should imagine that the essential work of evangel­ism lies in holding meetings of the special type described out of church hours, so to speak, that would simply prove that we had failed to understand what our regular Sunday services are for.

2. Second, imagine a local church, or fellowship of Christians, who are giving themselves wholeheartedly to evangelism by the means mentioned above—personal work, home meetings and gospel preaching at their ordinary services—but have never had occasion to hold, or to join in, evangelistic meetings of the special sort that we are considering. If we equated the Christian duty of evangelism with running and supporting such meetings, we should have to conclude that this church or fellowship, because it eschewed them, was not evangelizing at all. But that would be like arguing that you cannot really be an Englishman unless you live at Frintonon Sea. And it would surely be a little odd to condemn people for not evangelizing just because they do not join in meetings of a type of which there is no trace in the New Testament. Was no evangelizing done, then, in New Testament times?

3. In the third place, it needs to be said that a meeting, or service, is not necessarily evangelistic just because it includes testimonies, and choruses, and an appeal, any more than a man is necessarily English because he wears striped trousers and a bowler hat. The way to find out whether a particular service was evangelistic is to ask not whether an appeal for a decision was made, but what truth was taught at it. If it transpired that an insufficient gospel was preached, making the appeal for a response unintelligible to the congregation, the right of the meeting to be called evangelistic would be very doubtful.

We say these things, not to grind a polemical axe, but simply in the interests of clear thinking. It is no part of our purpose to belittle evangelistic meetings and campaigns as such. We are not suggesting that there is no place at all for special evangelistic meetings; that, in face of the rampant paganism of the modern world, would be excessively foolish. The only point we are making here is that there is a place for other forms of evangelistic action too; indeed, under certain circumstances, a prior place. Because God has used meetings, and series of meetings, of this type in the past, there is a certain surface plausibility about the idea that they constitute the normal, natural and necessary, and indeed only, pattern of evangelism for the present and the future. But this does not follow. There can be evangelism without these meetings. They are in no way essential to the practice of evangelism. Wherever, and by whatever means, the gospel is communicated with a view to conversion, there you have evangelism. Evangelism is to be defined not institutionally, in terms of the kind of meeting held, but theologically, in terms of what is taught, and for what purpose.

What principles should guide us in assessing the value of different methods of evangelism, and how much the Christian duty to evangelize really involves for us, we shall discuss at a later stage.

What Is the Evangelistic Message?

We shall have to deal with this fairly summarily. In a word, the evangelistic message is the gospel of Christ, and him crucified; the message of man’s sin and God’s grace, of human guilt and divine forgiveness, of new birth and new life through the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is a message made up of four essential ingredients.

1. The gospel is a message about God. It tells us who he is, what his character is, what his standards are and what he requires of us, his creatures. It tells us that we owe our very existence to him, that for good or ill we are always in his hands and under his eye, and that he made us to worship and serve him, to show forth his praise and to live for his glory. These truths are the foundation of theistic religion, and until they are grasped the rest of the gospel message will seem neither cogent nor relevant. It is here, with the assertion of man’s complete and constant dependence on his Creator, that the Christian story starts.

We can learn again from Paul at this point. When preaching to Jews, as at Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:16ff.), he did not need to mention the fact that men were God’s creatures; he could take this knowledge for granted, for his hearers had the Old Testament faith behind them. He could begin at once to declare Christ to them, as the fulfillment of Old Testament hopes. But when preaching to Gentiles, who knew nothing of the Old Testament, Paul had to go further back and start from the beginning. And the beginning from which Paul started in such cases was the doctrine of God’s Creatorship and man’s creaturehood. So when the Athenians asked him to explain what his talk of Jesus and the resurrection was all about, he spoke to them first of God the Creator, and what he made man for. “God . . . made the world. . . . [H]e himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made . . . every nation of mankind . . . that they should seek God” (Acts 17:24-27; see also Acts 14:15ff.). This was not, as some have supposed, a piece of philosophical apologetic of a kind that Paul afterward renounced, but it was the first and basic lesson in theistic faith. The gospel starts by teaching us that we, as creatures, are absolutely dependent on God, and that he, as Creator, has an absolute claim on us. Only when we have learned this can we see what sin is, and only when we see what sin is can we understand the good news of salvation from sin. We must know what it means to call God Creator before we can grasp what it means to speak of him as Redeemer. Nothing can be achieved by talking about sin and salvation where this preliminary lesson has not in some measure been learned.

2. The gospel is a message about sin. It tells us how we have fallen short of God’s standard; how we have become guilty, filthy and helpless in sin, and now stand under the wrath of God. It tells us that the reason why we sin con­tinually is that we are sinners by nature, and that nothing we do, or try to do, for ourselves can put us right or bring us back into God’s favor. It shows us ourselves as God sees us, and teaches us to think of ourselves as God thinks of us. Thus it leads us to self-despair. And this also is a necessary step. Not till we have learned our need to get right with God, and our inability to do so by any effort of our own, can we come to know the Christ who saves from sin.

There is a pitfall here. Everybody’s life includes things which cause dissatisfaction and shame. Everyone has a bad conscience about some things in his past, matters in which

he has fallen short of the standard which he set for himself, or which was expected of him by others. The danger is that in our evangelism we should content ourselves with evoking thoughts of these things and making people feel uncomfortable about them, and then depicting Christ as the One who saves us from these elements of ourselves, without even raising the question of our relationship with God. But this is just the question that has to be raised when we speak about sin. For the very idea of sin in the Bible is of an offense against God, which disrupts a man’s relationship with God. Unless we see our shortcomings in the light of the law and holiness of God, we do not see them as sin at all. For sin is not a social concept; it is a theological concept. Though sin is committed by man, and many sins are against society, sin cannot be

defined in terms of either man or society. We never know what sin really is till we have learned to think of it in terms of God, and to measure it, not by human standards, but by the yardstick of his total demand on our lives.

What we have to grasp, then, is that the bad conscience

of the natural man is not at all the same thing as conviction of sin. It does not, therefore, follow that a man is convicted of sin when he is distressed about his weaknesses and the wrong things he has done. It is not conviction of sin just to feel miserable about yourself and your failures and your inadequacy to meet life’s demands. Nor would it be saving faith if a man in that condition called on the Lord Jesus Christ just to soothe him, cheer him up and make him feel confident again. Nor should we be preaching the gospel (though we might imagine we were) if all that we did was to present Christ in terms of a human’s felt wants. (“Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Do you want peace of mind? Do you feel that you have failed? Are you fed up with yourself? Do you want a friend? Then come to Christ; he will meet your every need”—as if the Lord Jesus Christ were to be thought of as a fairy godmother, or a super-psychiatrist.) No; we have to go deeper than this. To preach sin means not to make capital out of people’s felt frailties (the brainwasher’s trick), but to measure their lives by the holy law of God. To be convicted of sin means not just to feel that one is an all-around flop, but to realize that one has offended God, flouted his authority, defied him, gone against him and put oneself

in the wrong with him. To preach Christ means to set

him forth as the One who, through his cross, sets men right with God again. To put faith in Christ means relying

on him, and him alone, to restore us to God’s fellowship and favor.

It is indeed true that the real Christ, the Christ of the Bible, who offers himself to us as Savior from sin and Advocate with God, does in fact give peace and joy and moral strength and the privilege of his own friendship to those who trust him. But the Christ who is depicted and desired merely to make the lot of life’s casualties easier by supplying them with aids and comforts is not the real Christ, but a misrepresented and misconceived Christ—in effect, an imaginary Christ. And if we taught people to look to an imaginary Christ, we should have no grounds for expecting that they would find real salvation. We must be on our guard, therefore, against equating a natural bad conscience and sense of wretchedness with spiritual conviction of sin, and so omitting in our evangelism to sinners the basic truth about their condition—namely, that their sin has alienated them from God and exposed them to his condemnation, hostility and wrath, so that their first need is for a restored relationship with him.

It may be asked: what are the signs of true conviction of sin, as distinct from the mere smart of a natural bad conscience, or the mere disgust at life which any disillusioned person may feel?

The signs seem to be three in number.

(1) Conviction of sin is essentially an awareness of a wrong relationship with God. It is not just a wrong relationship with one’s neighbor, or one’s own conscience and ideals for oneself, but with one’s Maker, the God in whose hand one’s breath is and on whom one depends for existence every moment. To define conviction of sin as a sense of need, without qualification, would not be enough; it is not any sense of need, but a sense of a particular need—a need, namely, for restoration of fellowship with God. It is the realization that, as one stands at present, one is in a relationship with God that spells only rejection, retribution, wrath and pain for the present and the future; and a realization that this is an intolerable relationship to remain in, and therefore a desire that, at whatever cost and on whatever terms, it might be changed. Conviction of sin may center on the sense of one’s guilt before God, or one’s uncleanness in his sight, or one’s rebellion against him, or one’s alienation and estrangement from him; but always it is a sense of the need to get right, not simply with oneself or other people, but with God.

(2) Conviction of sin always includes conviction of sins. It involves a sense of guilt for particular wrongs done in the sight of God, from which one needs to turn and be rid of them if one is ever to be right with God. Thus, Isaiah was convicted specifically of sins of speech (Is 6:5) and Zacchaeus of sins of extortion (Lk 19:8).

(3) Conviction of sin always includes conviction of sinfulness. Sinfulness is a sense of one’s complete corruption and perversity in God’s sight, and one’s consequent need of what Ezekiel called a “new heart” (Ezek 36:26), and in our Lord, a new birth (Jn 3:3-7, i.e., a moral re-creation). Thus, the author of Psalm 51—traditionally identified with David, convicted of his sin with Bathsheba—confesses not only particular transgressions (verses 1-4) but also the depravity of his nature (verses 5-6), and seeks cleansing from the guilt and defilement of both (verses 7-10). Indeed, perhaps the shortest way to tell whether a person is convicted of sin or not is to take him through Psalm 51, and see whether his heart is in fact speaking anything like the language of the psalmist.

3. The gospel is a message about Christ. Christ is the Son of God incarnate; Christ is the Lamb of God, who died for sin; Christ is the risen Lord; Christ is the perfect Savior. Two points need to be made about the declaring of this part of the message.

(1) We must not present the Person of Christ apart from his saving work. It is sometimes said that it is the presentation of Christ’s Person, rather than of doctrines about him, that draws sinners to his feet. It is true that it is the living Christ who saves, and that a theory of the atonement, however orthodox, is no substitute. When this remark is made, however, what is usually being suggested is that doctrinal instruction is dispensable in evangelistic preaching, and that all the evangelist need do is paint a vivid word-picture of the Man of Galilee who went about doing good and then assure the hearers that this Jesus is still alive to help them in their troubles. But such a message could hardly be called the gospel. It would, in reality, be a mere conundrum, serving only to mystify. Who was this Jesus? we should ask; and what is his position now? Such preaching would raise these questions while concealing the answers. And thus it would completely baffle the thoughtful listener.

For the truth is that you cannot make sense of the historic figure of Jesus till you know about the incarnation—that this Jesus was in fact God the Son, made man to save sinners according to his Father’s eternal purpose. Nor can you make sense of his life till you know about the atonement—that he lived as man so that he might die as man for men, and that his passion, his judicial murder, was really his saving action of bearing away the world’s sins. Nor can you tell on what terms to approach him now till you know about the resurrection, ascension and heavenly session—that Jesus has been raised, and enthroned, and made King, and lives to save to the uttermost all who acknowledge his lordship. These doctrines, to mention no others, are essential to the gospel. Without them, there is no gospel, only a puzzle story about a man named Jesus. To oppose the teaching of doctrines about Christ to the presenting of his Person is, therefore, to put asunder two things which God has joined. It is really very perverse indeed; for the whole purpose of teaching these doctrines in evangelism is to throw light on the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to make clear to our hearers just who it is that we want them to meet. When, in ordinary social life, we want people to know who it is that we are introducing them to, we tell them something about him and what he has done; and so it is here. The apostles themselves preached these doctrines in order to preach Christ, as the New Testament shows. In fact, without these doctrines you would have no gospel to preach at all. But there is a second and complementary point.

(2) We must not present the saving work of Christ apart from his Person. Evangelistic preachers and personal workers have sometimes been known to make this mistake. In their concern to focus attention on the atoning death of Christ, as

the sole sufficient ground on which sinners may be accepted with God, they have expounded the summons to saving faith in these terms: “Believe that Christ died for your sins.” The effect of this exposition is to represent the saving work of Christ in the past, dissociated from his Person in the pres-ent, as the whole object of our trust. But it is not biblical thus to isolate the work from the Worker. Nowhere in the New Testament is the call to believe expressed in such terms. What the New Testament calls for is faith in (en) or into (eis) or upon (epi) Christ himself—the placing of our trust in the living Savior, who died for sins. The object of saving faith is thus not, strictly speaking, the atonement, but the Lord Jesus Christ, who made atonement. We must not, in presenting the gospel, isolate the cross and its benefits from the Christ whose cross it was. For the persons to whom the benefits of Christ’s death belong are just those who trust his Person, and believe not upon his saving death simply, but upon him, the living Savior. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31), said Paul. “Come to me . . . and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28), said our Lord.

This being so, one thing becomes clear straight away: namely, that the question about the extent of the atonement, which is being much agitated in some quarters, has no bearing on the content of the evangelistic message at this particular point. I do not propose to discuss this question now; I have done that elsewhere. I am not at present asking you whether you think it is true to say that Christ died in order to save every single human being—past, present and future—or not. Nor am I at present inviting you to make up your mind on this question, if you have not done so already. All I want to say here is that even if you think the above assertion is true, your presentation of Christ in evangelism ought not differ from that of the man who thinks it false.

What I mean is this. It is obvious that if a preacher thought that the statement “Christ died for every one of you,” made to any congregation, would be unverifiable, and probably not true, he would take care not to make it in his gospel preaching. You do not find such statements in the sermons of, for instance, George Whitefield or Charles Spurgeon. But now, my point is that, even if a man thinks that this statement would be true if he made it, it is not a thing that he ever needs to say, or ever has reason to say, when preaching the gospel. For preaching the gospel, as we have just seen, means inviting sinners to come to Jesus Christ, the living Savior, who, by virtue of his atoning death, is able to forgive and save all those who put their trust in him. What has to be said about the cross when preaching the gospel is simply that Christ’s death is the ground on which Christ’s forgiveness is given. And this is all that has to be said. The question of the designed extent of the atonement does not come into the story at all.

The fact is that the New Testament never calls on any man to repent on the ground that Christ died specifically and particularly for him. The basis on which the New Testament invites sinners to put faith in Christ is simply that they need him, and that he offers himself to them, and that those who receive him are promised all the benefits that his death secured for his people. What is universal and all-inclusive in the New Testament is the invitation to faith and the promise of salvation to all who believe (see Mt 11:28ff.; 22:9; Lk 2:10-11; 12:8; Jn 1:12; 3:14ff.; 6:40, 54; 7:37; 11:26; 12:46; Acts 2:21; 10:43; 13:39; Rom 1:16; 3:22; 9:33; 10:4ff.; Gal 3:22; Tit 2:11; Rev 22:17; cf. Is 4:1).

Our task in evangelism is to reproduce as faithfully as possible the New Testament emphasis. To go beyond the New Testament, or to distort its viewpoint or shift its stress, is always wrong. And therefore—if we may at this point speak in the words of James Denney—“we do not think of separating [Christ’s] work from him who achieved it. The New Testament knows only of a living Christ, and all apostolic preaching of the gospel holds up the living Christ to men. But the living Christ is Christ who died, and he is never preached apart from his death, and from its reconciling power. It is the living Christ, with the virtue of his reconciling death in him, who is the burden of the apostolic message. . . . The task of the evangelist is to preach Christ . . . in his character as the Crucified.” The gospel is not “believe that Christ died for everybody’s sins, and therefore for yours,” any more than it is “believe that Christ died only for certain people’s sins, and so perhaps not for yours.” The gospel is “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for sins, and now offers you himself as your Savior.” This is the message which we are to take to the world. We have no business to ask them to put faith in any view of the extent of the atonement; our job is to point them to the living Christ, and summon them to trust in him.

It was because they had both grasped this that John Wesley and George Whitefield could regard each other as brothers in evangelism, though they differed on the extent of the atonement. For their views on this subject did not enter into their gospel preaching. Both were content to preach the gospel just as it stands in Scripture: that is, to proclaim “the living Christ, with the virtue of his reconciling death in him,” to offer him to sinners, and to invite the lost to come to him and so find life. This brings us to the final ingredient in the gospel message.

4. The gospel is a summons to faith and repentance. All who hear the gospel are summoned by God to repent and believe. “He [God] commands all people everywhere to repent,” Paul told the Athenians (Acts 17:30). When asked by his hearers what they should do in order to “be doing the works of God,” our Lord replied: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (Jn 6:29). And in

1 John 3:23 we read: “This is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ.” Repentance and faith are rendered matters of duty by God’s direct command, and hence impenitence and unbelief are singled out in the New Testament as most grievous sins (cf. Lk 13:3, 5; 2 Thess 2:11-12). With these universal commands, as we indicated above, go universal promises of salvation to all who obey them: “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43), “Let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev 22:17), “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). These words are promises to which God will stand as long as time shall last.

It needs to be said that faith is not a mere optimistic feeling, any more than repentance is a mere regretful or remorseful feeling. Faith and repentance are both acts, and acts of the whole man. Faith is more than just credence; faith is essentially the casting and resting of oneself and one’s confidence on the promises of mercy, which Christ has given to sinners, and on the Christ who gave those promises. Equally, repentance is more than just sorrow for the past; repentance is a change of mind and heart, a new life of denying self and serving the Savior as king in self’s place. Mere credence without trusting, and mere remorse without turning, do not save. “Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (Jas 2:19). “Worldly grief produces death” (2 Cor 7:10).

Two further points need to be made also.

(1) The demand is for faith as well as repentance. It is not enough to resolve to turn from sin, and give up evil habits, and try to put Christ’s teaching into practice by being religious and doing all possible good to others. Aspiration, resolution, morality and religiosity are no substitutes for faith. Martin Luther and John Wesley had all these long before they had faith. If there is to be faith, however, there must be a foundation of knowledge: a man must know of Christ, of his cross and of his promises before saving faith becomes a possibility for him. In our presentation of the gospel, therefore, we need to stress these things, in order to lead sinners to abandon all confidence in themselves and to trust wholly in Christ and the power of his redeeming blood to give them acceptance with God. For nothing less than this is faith.

(2) The demand is for repentance as well as faith. It is not enough to believe that only through Christ and his death are sinners justified and accepted, and that one’s own record is sufficient to bring down God’s condemning sentence twenty times over, and that, apart from Christ, one has no hope. Knowledge of the gospel, and orthodox belief of it, is no substitute for repentance. If there is to be repentance, however, there must, again, be a foundation of knowledge. A man must know that, in the words of the first of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, “when our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ he called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance,” and he must also know what repentance involves. More than once, Christ deliberately called attention to the radical break with the past that repentance involves. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. . . . [W]hoever loses his life for my sake [but only he] will save it” (Lk 9:23-24). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life [i.e., put them all decisively second in his esteem], he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).

“Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” The repentance that Christ requires of his people consists in a settled refusal to set any limit to the claims which he may make on their lives. Our Lord knew—who better?—how costly his followers would find it to maintain this refusal, and let him have his way with them all the time, and therefore he wished them to face out and think through the implications of discipleship before committing themselves. He did not desire to make disciples under false pretenses. He had no interest in gathering vast crowds of professed adherents who would melt away as soon as they found out what following him actually demanded of them. In our own presentation of Christ’s gospel, therefore, we need to lay a similar stress on the cost of following Christ, and make sinners face it soberly before we urge them to respond to the message of free forgiveness. In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness, in one sense, will cost everything; or else our evangelizing becomes a sort of confidence trick. And where there is no clear knowledge, and hence no realistic recognition of the real claims that Christ makes, there can be no repentance, and therefore no salvation. Such is the evangelistic message that we are sent to make known.

What Is the Motive for Evangelizing?

There are, in fact, two motives that should spur us constantly to evangelize. The first is love of God and concern for his glory; the second is love of man and concern for his welfare.

1. The first motive is primary and fundamental. The chief end of man is to glorify God. The biblical rule of life is “do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31). Men glorify God by obeying his word and fulfilling his revealed will. Similarly, the first and great commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God” (Mt 22:37). We show love to the Father and the Son, who have so richly loved us, by keeping their commandments.

“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me,” said our Lord (Jn 14:21). “This is the love of God,” wrote John, “that we keep his commandments” (1 Jn 5:3). Now, evangelism is one of the activities that the Father and the Son have commanded. “This gospel of the kingdom,” Christ tells us, “will [according to Mark, “must”] be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony” (Mt 24:14; Mk 13:10). And before his ascension Christ charged his disciples in the following categorical terms: “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations.” To this command he added at once a comprehensive promise: “And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:19-20 rsv). The comprehensiveness of this promise shows us how wide is the application of the command to which it is appended. The phrase “to the close of the age” makes it clear that the “you” to whom the promise was given was not solely and exclusively the eleven disciples; this promise extends to the whole Christian church throughout history, the entire community of which the eleven were, so to speak, founding members. It is, therefore, a promise for us no less than for them, and a promise of great comfort too. But if the promise extends to us, then the commission with which it is linked must extend to us also. The promise was given to encourage the eleven, lest they be overwhelmed at the size and difficulty of the task of world evangelism that Christ was laying on them. If it is our privilege to appropriate the promise, then it is also our responsibility to accept the commission. The task laid on the eleven is the church’s constant task. And if it is the church’s task in general, then it is your task and my task in particular. If, therefore, we love God and are concerned to glorify him, we must obey his command to evangelize.

There is a further strand to this thought. We glorify God by evangelizing, not only because evangelizing is an act of obedience, but also because in evangelism we tell the world what great things God has done for the salvation of sinners. God is glorified when his mighty works of grace are made known. The psalmist exhorts us to “tell of his salvation from day to day. / Declare his glory among the nations, / his marvelous works among all the peoples!” (Ps 96:2-3). For a Christian to talk to the unconverted about the Lord Jesus Christ and his saving power is in itself honoring and glorifying to God.

2. The second motive that should prompt us to assiduous evangelism is love of our neighbor, and the desire to see our fellow humans saved. The wish to win the lost for Christ should be, and indeed is, the natural, spontaneous outflow of love in the heart of everyone who has been born again. Our Lord confirms the Old Testament demand that we should love our neighbor as ourselves (Mk 12:31; Lk 10:27-28). “As we have opportunity,” writes Paul, “let us do good to everyone” (Gal 6:10). What greater need has any man than the need to know Christ? What greater good can we do to any man than to set before him the knowledge of Christ? Insofar as we really love our neighbor as ourselves, we shall of necessity want him to enjoy the salvation which is so precious to us. This, indeed, should not be a thing that we need to think about, let alone argue about. The impulse to evangelize should spring up spontaneously in us as we see our neighbor’s need of Christ.

Who is my neighbor? When the lawyer, confronted with the demand of love for one’s neighbor, asked our Lord this question, Christ replied by telling the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:29-37). What that story teaches is simply this: that any fellow human being whom you meet who is in need is your neighbor; God has put him there so that you may help him; and your business is to show yourself neighbor to him by doing all that you can to meet his need, whatever it may be. “You go, and do likewise,” said our Lord to the lawyer. He says the same to us. And the principle applies to all forms of need, spiritual no less than material. So that when we find ourselves in contact with men and women who are without Christ and so face spiritual death, we are to look on them as our neighbors in this sense and ask ourselves what we can do to make Christ known to them.

May I stress again: if we ourselves have known anything of the love of Christ for us, and if our hearts have felt any measure of gratitude for the grace that has saved us from death and hell, then this attitude of compassion and care for our spiritually needy fellow men ought to come naturally and spontaneously to us. It was in connection with aggressive evangelism that Paul declared that “the love of Christ controls us” (2 Cor 5:14). It is a tragic and ugly thing when Christians lack desire, and are actually reluctant, to share the precious knowledge that they have with others whose need of it is just as great as their own. It was natural for Andrew, when he found the Messiah, to go off and tell his brother Simon, and for Philip to hurry to break the good news to his friend Nathanael (Jn 1:40ff.). They did not need to be told to do this; they did it naturally and spontaneously, just as one would naturally and spontaneously share with one’s family and friends any other piece of news that vitally affected them. There is something very wrong with us if we do not ourselves find it natural to act in this way: let us be quite clear about that. It is a great privilege to evangelize; it is a wonderful thing to be able to tell others of the love of Christ, knowing that there is nothing that they need more urgently to know, and no knowledge in the world that can do them so much good. We should not, therefore, be reluctant and backward to evangelize on the personal and individual level. We should be glad and happy to do it. We should not look for excuses for wriggling out of our obligation when occasion offers to talk to others about the Lord Jesus Christ. If we find ourselves shrinking from this responsibility and trying to evade it, we need to face ourselves with the fact that in this we are yielding to sin and Satan. If (as is usual) it is the fear of being thought odd and ridiculous, or of losing popularity in certain circles, that holds us back, we need to ask ourselves in the presence of God: Ought these things to stop us loving our neighbor? If it is a false shame, which is not shame at all but pride in disguise, that keeps our tongue from Christian witness when we are with other people. We need to press on our conscience this question: Which matters more—our reputation or their salvation? We cannot be complacent about this gangrene of conceit and cowardice when we weigh up our lives in the presence of God. What we need to do is to ask for grace to be truly ashamed of ourselves, and to pray that we may so overflow in love for God that we will overflow in love for our fellow men, and so find it an easy and natural and joyful thing to share with them the good news of Christ.

By now, I hope, it is becoming clear to us how we should regard our evangelistic responsibility. Evangelism is not the only task that our Lord has given us, nor is it a task that we are all called to discharge in the same way. We are not all called to be preachers; we are not all given equal opportunities or comparable abilities for personal dealing with men and women who need Christ. But we all have some evangel­istic responsibility which we cannot shirk without failing in love both to our God and to our neighbor. To start with, we all can and should be praying for the salvation of unconverted people, particularly in our families, and among our friends and everyday associates. And then we must learn to see what possibilities of evangelism our everyday situation holds, and to be enterprising in our use of them. It is the nature of love to be enterprising. If you love someone, you are constantly trying to think out what is the best you can do for him and how best you can please him, and it is your pleasure to give him pleasure by the things you devise for him. If, then, we love God—Father, Son and Spirit—for all that they have done for us, we shall muster all our initiative and enterprise to make the most that we can of every situation for their glory—and one chief way of doing this is to seek out ways and means of spreading the gospel, and obeying the divine command to make disciples everywhere. Similarly, if we love our neighbor, we shall muster all our initiative and enterprise to find ways and means of doing him good. And one chief way of doing him good is to share with him our knowledge of Christ. Thus, if we love God and our neighbor, we shall evangelize, and we shall be enterprising in our evangelism. We shall not ask with reluctance how much we have to do in this realm, as if evangelizing were a distasteful and burdensome task. We shall not inquire anxiously after the minimum outlay of effort in evangelism that will satisfy God. But we shall ask eagerly, and pray earnestly to be shown, just how much it is in our power to do to spread the knowledge of Christ among men; and once we see what the possibilities are, we shall give ourselves wholeheartedly to the task.

One further point must be added, however, lest what we have said be misapplied. It must never be forgotten that the enterprise required of us in evangelism is the enterprise of love: an enterprise that springs from a genuine interest in those whom we seek to win, and a genuine care for their well-being, and expresses itself in a genuine respect for them and a genuine friendliness toward them. One sometimes meets a scalp-hunting zeal in evangelism, both in the pulpit and on the personal level, which is both discreditable and alarming. It is discreditable, because it reflects, not love and care nor the desire to be of help, but arrogance and conceit and pleasure in having power over the lives of others. It is alarming, because it finds expression in a ferocious psychological pummeling of the poor victim, which may do great damage to sensitive and impressionable souls. But if love prompts and rules our evangelistic work, we shall approach other people in a different spirit. If we truly care for them, and if our hearts truly love and fear God, then we shall seek to present Christ to them in a way that is both honoring to God and respectful to them. We shall not try to violate their personalities, or exploit their weaknesses, or ride roughshod over their feelings. What we shall be trying to do, rather, is to show them the reality of our friendship and concern by sharing with them our most valuable possession. And this spirit of friendship and concern will shine through all that we say to them, whether in the pulpit or in private, however drastic and shattering the truths that we tell them may be.

There is a famous old book on personal evangelism by

C. G. Trumbull, entitled Taking Men Alive. In the third chapter of that book, the author tells us of the rule that his father, H. C. Trumbull, made for himself in this matter. It was as follows: “Whenever I am justified in choosing my subject of conversation with another, the theme of themes [Christ] shall have prominence between us, so that I may learn of his need, and, if possible, meet it.” The key words here are: “whenever I am justified in choosing my subject of conversation with another.” They remind us, first, that personal evangel­ism, like all our dealings with our fellow men, should be courteous. And they remind us, second, that personal evangelism needs normally to be founded on friendship. You are not usually justified in choosing the subject of conversation with another till you have already begun to give yourself

to him in friendship and established a relationship with

him in which he feels that you respect him, are interested in him, and are treating him as a human being and not just as some kind of “case.” With some people, you may establish such a relationship in five minutes, whereas with others it may take months. But the principle remains the same. The right to talk intimately to another person about the Lord Jesus Christ has to be earned, and you earn it by convincing him that you are his friend, and that you really care about him. And therefore the indiscriminate buttonholing, the intrusive barging in to the privacy of other people’s souls, the thick-skinned insistence on expounding the things of God to reluctant strangers who are longing to get away—these modes of behavior, in which strong and loquacious personalities have sometimes indulged in the name of personal evangelism, should be written off as a travesty of personal evangelism. Impersonal evangelism would be a better name for them! In fact, rudeness of this sort dishonors God; moreover, it creates resentment and prejudices people against the Christ whose professed followers act so objectionably. The truth is that real personal evangelism is very costly, just because it demands of us a really personal relationship with the other person. We have to give ourselves in honest friendship to people, if ever our relationship with them is to reach the point at which we are justified in choosing to talk to them about Christ and in speaking to them about their own spiritual needs­—without being either discourteous or offensive. If you wish to do personal evangelism, then—and I hope you do; you ought to—pray for the gift of friendship. A genuine friendliness is in any case a prime mark of the man who is learning to love his neighbor as himself.

By What Means and Methods Should

Evangelism Be Practiced?

There is today a controversy in some evangelical circles about evangelistic methods. Some are criticizing, and others are defending, the type of evangelistic meeting that has been a standard feature of English and American evangelical life for almost a century. Meetings of this type are well known, for they are very characteristic. They are deliberately made brisk and bright, in the hope that people who have little interest in the Christian message, and who may never have been inside a Christian church, may nevertheless find them an attraction. Everything is accordingly planned to create an atmosphere of warmth, good humor and happiness. The meeting normally includes a good deal of music—choir items, solo items, choruses and rousing hymns, heartily sung. Heavy emphasis is laid on the realities of Christian experience, both by the choice of hymns and by the use of testimonies. The meeting leads up to an appeal for decision, followed by an after-meeting or a time of personal counseling for the further instruction of those who have made, or wish to make, a decision in response to the appeal.

The main criticisms that are made of such meetings—whether they are wholly justified we would not venture to say—are as follows. Their breezy slickness (it is said) makes for irreverence. The attempt to give them “entertainment value” tends to lessen the sense of God’s majesty, to banish the spirit of worship and to cheapen men’s thoughts of their Creator; moreover, it is the worst possible preparation of the potential converts for the regular Sunday services in the churches which they will in due course join. The seemingly inevitable glamorizing of Christian experience in the testimonies is pastorally irresponsible and gives a falsely romanticized impression of what being a Christian is like. This, together with the tendency to indulge in long, drawn-out wheedling for decisions and the deliberate use of luscious music to stir sentiment, tends to produce “conversions” which are simply psychological and emotional upheavals, and not the fruit of spiritual conviction and renewal at all. The occasional character of the meetings makes it inevitable that appeals for decision will often be made on the basis of inadequate instruction as to what the decision involves and will cost, and such appeals are no better than a confidence trick. The desire to justify the meetings by reaping a crop of converts may prompt the preacher and the counselors to try and force people through the motions of decision prematurely, before they have grasped what it is really all about, and converts produced in this way tend to prove at best stunted and at worst spurious and, in the event, gospel-

hardened. The way ahead in evangelism, it is said, is to break completely with this pattern of evangelistic action, and to develop a new pattern (or, rather, restore the old one which existed before this type of meeting became standard), in which the evangelizing unit is the local church rather than a group or cross-section of churches. Then the evangelistic meeting finds its place among the local church’s services—a pattern, indeed, in which the local church’s services function continually as its evangelistic meetings.

The usual reply is that, while the things stigmatized are certainly real abuses, evangelistic meetings of the standard pattern can be, and frequently are, run in a way that avoids them. Such meetings, it is said, have proved their usefulness in the past; experience shows that God uses them still; and there seems to be no sufficient reason for abandoning them. It is argued that, while so many churches in each major denomination are failing in their evangelistic responsibility, these meetings may well be the only opportunity for presenting the gospel to vast multitudes of our fellow men and women. The way ahead, it is maintained, is not to abolish them but to reform them where abuses exist.

The debate continues. No doubt it will remain with us for some time to come. What I want to do here is not to go into this controversy but to go behind it. I want to isolate the key principle that should guide us in our assessment both of these and any other methods of evangelism that may be practiced or proposed.

What is this key principle? The following line of thought will make it clear.

Evangelism, as we have seen, is an act of communication with a view to conversion. In the last analysis, therefore, there is only one means of evangelism: namely, the gospel of Christ, explained and applied. Faith and repentance, the two complementary elements of which conversion consists, occur as a response to the gospel. “Faith comes from hearing,” Paul tells us, “and hearing through the word of

Christ” (Rom 10:17)—or, as The New English Bible expands the verse, “faith is awakened by the message, and the message that awakens it comes through the word of Christ.”

Again, in the last analysis, there is only one agent of evangelism: namely, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is Christ himself who through his Holy Spirit enables his servants to explain the gospel truly and apply it powerfully and effectively; just as it is Christ himself who through his Holy Spirit opens people’s minds (Lk 24:25) and hearts (Acts 16:14) to receive the gospel, and so draws them savingly to himself (Jn 12:32). Paul speaks of his achievements as an evangelist as “what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed . . . by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15:18-19 rsv). Since Augustine, the point has often been made that Christ is the true minister of the gospel sacraments, and the human celebrant acts merely as his hand. We need to remember the equally basic truth that Christ is the true minister of the gospel word, and the human preacher or witness acts merely as his mouth.

So, in the last analysis, there is only one method of evangelism: namely, the faithful explanation and application of the gospel message. From which it follows—and this is the key principle which we are seeking—that the test for any proposed strategy, technique or style of evangelistic action must be this: will it in fact serve the word? Is it calculated to be a means of explaining the gospel truly and fully and applying it deeply and exactly? To the extent to which it is so calculated, it is lawful and right; to the extent to which it tends to overlay and obscure the realities of the message, and to blunt the edge of their application, it is ungodly and wrong.

Let us work this out. It means that we need to bring under review all our evangelistic plans and practices—our missions, rallies and campaigns; our sermons, talks and testimonies; our big meetings, our little meetings and our presentation of the gospel in personal dealing; the tracts that we give, the books that we lend, the letters that we write—and to ask about each of them questions such as the following:

Is this way of presenting Christ calculated to impress on people that the gospel is a word from God? Is it calculated to divert their attention from human and all things merely human to God and his truth? Or is its tendency rather to distract attention from the Author and authority of the message to the person and performance of the messenger? Does it make the gospel sound like a human idea, a preacher’s plaything, or like a divine revelation, before which the human messenger himself stands in awe? Does this way of presenting Christ savor of human cleverness and showmanship? Does it tend thereby to exalt man? Or does it embody rather the straightforward, unaffected simplicity of the messenger whose sole concern is to deliver his message, and who has no wish to call attention to himself, and who desires so far as he can to blot himself out and hide, as it were, behind his message, fearing nothing so much as that men should admire and applaud him when they ought to be bowing down and humbling themselves before the mighty Lord whom he represents?

Again: is this way of presenting Christ calculated to promote, or impede, the work of the word in men’s minds? Is it going to clarify the meaning of the message or leave it enigmatic and obscure, locked up in pious jargon and oracular formulae? Is it going to make people think, and think hard, and think hard about God, and about themselves in relation to God? Or will it tend to stifle thought by playing exclusively on the emotions? Is it calculated to stir the mind or put it to sleep? Is this way of presenting Christ an attempt to move men by the force of feeling or of truth? Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with emotion; it is strange for a person to be converted without emotion; what is wrong is the sort of appeal to emotion, and playing on emotion, which harrows people’s feelings as a substitute for instructing their minds.

Again: we have to ask, is this way of presenting Christ calculated to convey to people the doctrine of the gospel, and not just part of it but the whole of it—the truth about our Creator and his claims, and about ourselves as guilty, lost and helpless sinners, needing to be born again, and about the Son of God who became man, died for sins and lives to forgive sinners and bring them to God? Or is it likely to be deficient here, deal in half-truths and leave people with an incomplete understanding of these things, hurrying them on to the demand for faith and repentance without having made it clear just what they need to repent of or what they ought to believe?

Again: we have to ask, is this way of presenting Christ calculated to convey to people the application of the gospel, and not just part of it but the whole of it—the summons to see and know oneself as God sees and knows one, that is, as a sinful creature, and to face the breadth and depth of the need into which a wrong relationship with God has brought one and to face too the cost and consequences of turning to receive Christ as Savior and Lord? Or is it likely to be deficient here, and to gloss over some of this, and to give an inadequate, distorted impression of what the gospel requires? Will it, for instance, leave people unaware that they have any immediate obligation to respond to Christ at all? Or will it leave them supposing that all they have to do is to trust Christ as a sin-bearer, not realizing that they must also deny themselves and enthrone him as their Lord (the error which we might call only-believism)? Or will it leave them imagining that the whole of what they have to do is to consecrate themselves to Christ as their Master, not realizing that they must also receive him as their Savior (the error which we might call good-resolutionism)? We need to remember here that spiritually it is even more dangerous for a man whose conscience is roused to make a misconceived response to the gospel and take up with a defective religious practice than for him to make no response at all. If you turn a publican into a Pharisee, you make his condition worse, not better.

Again: we have to ask, is this way of presenting Christ calculated to convey gospel truth in a manner that is appropriately serious? Is it calculated to make people feel that they are indeed facing a matter of life and death? Is it calculated to make them see and feel the greatness of God, and the greatness of their sin and need, and the greatness of the grace of Christ? Is it calculated to make them aware of the awful majesty and holiness of God? Will it help them to realize that it is a fearful thing to fall into his hands? Or is this way of presenting Christ so light and casual and cozy and jolly as to make it hard for the hearers to feel that the gospel is a matter of any consequence, save as a pick-me-up for life’s misfits? It is a gross insult to God, and a real disservice to men, to cheapen and trivialize the gospel by one’s presentation of it. Not that we should put on an affected solemnity when speaking of spiritual things; there is nothing more essentially frivolous than a mock seriousness, and nothing more likely to make hypocrites out of our hearers. What is needed is this: that we, who would speak for Christ, should pray constantly that God will put and keep in our hearts a sense of his greatness and glory, of the joy of fellowship with him, and of the dreadfulness of spending time and eternity without him; and then that God will enable us to speak honestly, straightforwardly and just as we feel about these matters. Then we shall be really natural in presenting the gospel—and really serious too.

It is by asking questions of this sort that we must test and, where necessary, reform our evangelistic methods. The principle is that the best method of evangelism is the one which serves the gospel most completely. It is the one which bears the clearest witness to the divine origin of the message and to the life-and-death character of the issues which it raises. It is the one which makes possible the most full and thorough explanation of the good news of Christ and his cross, and the most exacting and searching application of it. It is the one which most effectively engages the minds of those to whom witness is borne and makes them most vividly aware that the gospel is God’s word, addressed personally to them in their own situation. What that best method is in each case, you and I have to find out for ourselves. It is in the light of this principle that all debates about evangelistic methods must be decided. For the present, we leave the matter there.

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