Personal Evangelism: Priorities and Practices
A few months ago I started a series of blog posts on personal evangelism. My goal in doing this was twofold: to motivate myself to share my faith more effectively, and to help equip other followers of Jesus to do the same.
And it's working — at least for myself. I've had several opportunities recently to share my testimony with others, and it's almost like the Lord has been bringing people to me who are already moving towards faith on the Engel scale. (See also pages 54 – 57 on this topic in Wimber's book Power Evangelism).
What has helped me are the guiding principles for doing evangelism that I described previously and which can be summarized like this:
The Lord wants everyone to be saved, and he's commissioned and empowered his followers (including me!) to help Him gather people into his kingdom. So let's get on with it!
To put this into practice, whenever I go out into the marketplace I try to start by praying a simple prayer along these lines.
But it's still hard. Often I don't know what to say to people and feel like it would be useless to even try to talk to them about Jesus. And instead of feeling I'm being led by the Spirit, I usually feel like God is a million miles away from this cold, dark world I live in.
The answer of course is to persevere. But it's also important to build upon these evangelism principles by adding priorities and practices. It's just like when you're building a house, you first lay down the foundation and then you erect the walls. And that's what I'll try to briefly do here.
Evangelism Priorities
The number one priority for effective personal evangelism is to make time for people. You can't tell people about Jesus if you don't talk with them! Our world is so hectic nowadays, and we are so stressed out most of the time, that we tend to be more focused on the tasks we need to do than the people we encounter as we perform them. This is probably the major hindrance that prevents us from sharing our faith with those we encounter in the marketplace. Valuing people more than our tasks, goals and accomplishments is a huge shift for many of us, but it's essential if we're to become effective in evangelism.
Another priority when doing evangelism is open, honest sharing of your personal experience of God. Sharing your testimony — what you were like before you were a Christian, how you became a Christian, and how meeting the Lord changed your life — is generally more effective in winning people's hearts than reciting the Bridge to Life (Navigators), the Four Spiritual Laws (Campus Crusade for Christ) or some other salvation formula.
A third priority is to view evangelism as a lifestyle. When Jesus called his first disciples, he told them he would make them fishers of men (Matt 4:19). Then later after he rose from the dead, he instructed them to go and make disciples, that is, others who would do what Jesus taught them to do (Matt 28:18-20). And if we too are followers of Jesus, then clearly our main job is to fish — to work with the Lord to bring men and women into God's kingdom.
Evangelism Practices
While taking time just to talk with people must be a priority for those of us who want to become more effective in evangelism, it's even more important for us to learn how to listen. While the ultimate goal of evangelism is to bring people into the kingdom, our immediate goal when we share our faith with someone should simply be to try and lead them one or two steps higher on the Engel scale. If you can simply lead them from merely having some interest in Jesus Christ to deciding to investigate Jesus further, for example by reading one of the gospels or visiting your fellowship, then you've probably done your job for the day as far as fishing for that particular person is concerned, because they've gone from sniffing the bait to actually taking a nibble. To accomplish this, you must listen carefully how people respond when you talk with them as this enables you to determine what level of awareness, interest and involvement they already have with Christianity.
A second practice that is important when doing evangelism is to use the J-word. For example, if you're in a conversation with someone and they offer some objection concerning what they perceive as negative in Christianity, you might respond with "Well, you have a point there. But Jesus says..." and simply quote some verse where Jesus said something that bears on the subject. Remember, the goal of evangelism isn't to win people to Jesus, not to your church or denomination or personal way of thinking.
Finally, if you want to become more effective in sharing your faith you should make it a practice to ask God for boldness. When the early disciples did this together in Acts 4:23-31 the result was that they were filled with the Holy Spirit and with boldness to proclaim the gospel even in the face of opposition. As Ken Blue, the former pastor of Foothills Vineyard in San Diego once told us many years ago, "Evangelism is just guts."
So ask God for guts.
Cheers, Mitch
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