:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

The thing we don’t want to know about evangelism is that we tend to preach to people just like us.

If you’re in a well-off church, you start thinking of billboards and gimmicks to draw people in. You talk about purpose and fulfillment and the emptiness of life without Christ. In one sense, I am very sympathetic to such thinking. I applaud the genuine desire to share the love of Christ with others.

However, such thinking is limited in scope and does not take into full account the ministry of Christ that began with a declaration of good news to the poor. When I look at these evangelism strategies, I now see one thing that I haven’t wanted to see all along: I want to share the Gospel with people who are just like me: the same social standing, background, and goals.

If we preach to people just like us, then we’ll know a thing or two about how to relate to them. They won’t question our values or our choices. They won’t rock the boat in our congregations and in our lives.

When such a critique is leveled, the automatic response is to point out the effectiveness of a particular evangelism strategy. Someone can be paraded out to show that it worked and if we had not hosted this event, plastered this billboard around town, or handed out tracts to people on the sidewalk, Jimmy would never have been saved and if we dare question the method that reached Jimmy with the Gospel are we saying that we wouldn’t want Jimmy in our church or worse yet, in hell?

The methods worked, back off.

With all due respect to Jimmy, my greater concern is that we may be working extremely hard to save people like Jimmy with expensive advertising campaigns and resource hungry gimmicks to reach a relatively small portion of the population. And truth be told, this portion of the population may not be all that interested in the Gospel or God for that matter, making them a particularly tough nut to crack.

Thankfully, I don’t think we are faced with an either/or situation with respect to brother Jimmy and his affluent colleagues who want nothing to do with God. We can become a strong witness to the Kingdom of God and the Good News of its coming while also reaching the people that our advertising campaigns and evangelism tricks pass by.

This isn’t anything all that new. Lately there are a number of people who are suggesting the feasibility of such an approach. From Richard Stearns of World Vision to Shane Claiborn of the Simple Way, Christians can maximize their Gospel-preaching by giving away their resources, caring for others, and preaching the Gospel to the poor.

Wouldn’t that say volumes more than a billboard? Wouldn’t people respond to that?

While visiting a church plant in one of America’s poorest cities I stood outside chatting with a friend before the service. This guy I’ll call Raul walked up to us and asked my friend if he could bum a cigarette off him. We soon got into a conversation about himself, his family, and his church background. We told him about the church, and he asked, “So where is it based out of?”

“Right here,” my friend replied.

“For real?” he asked in unbelief.

Why would a group of otherwise well-off Christians embody the Kingdom of God in a neighborhood that has been abandoned by our government and written off by society? Why would Raul be so surprised to find that a group of Christians would set up shop in his neighborhood?

That is the kind of message that a billboard, event, or tract can never communicate: the immediate power and presence of God’s Kingdom among his people.

UPDATE:  I forgot to mention that I began thinking up this post after reading Bill Kinnon’s thoughts the other day.