Like many people, one of my struggles is trying to come up with ways to “do evangelism” in the 21st century. I loathe gimmicks, and I loathe bait-and-switch events. Relational evangelism is really the way to go, but it still leaves huge gaps: what about all the lost folks we don’t have relationships with, and how do we build those relationships to begin with? I’m still searching for answers to this.

But there is one classic approach that I think still has merit: going door-to-door. Its merit is not through its effectiveness – it is terribly ineffective – but comes from the fact that (1) going door-to-door keeps our people intentional about evangelism; (2) it helps us talk to people we would otherwise never cross paths with; and (3) it helps with the “go and tell” of the great commission – too many of our evangelistic approaches are more along the lines of “come and hear”.

There are many who argue that we should not do door-to-door evangelism because of its ineffectiveness in the 21st century. I am tempted to join them, but thus far have resisted for the reasons mentioned above.

You have probably heard the (apocryphal?) story about D. L. Moody. One day following a service a lady came up to him and told him that she did not like the way he practiced evangelism. “Well, what’s your way?” he asked the lady. “I don’t have a method,” she responded. Moody concluded, “Then I like my way better than yours.” It is fine to dislike various methods of doing evangelism, but make sure you have an alternative to propose.

What are some other ways you do evangelism? How do you build relationships with non-Christians? What non-gimmicky approaches do you use to start conversations? How do you go about fulfilling the great commission?

The Southern Baptist Convention is a group of autonomous churches working together for certain causes. Historically, the primary cause for denominational cooperation has been evangelism. 100 churches (or 42,000 churches in the case of the SBC today) working together can do more to send missionaries around the world than 1 church trying its own thing. Thus the Southern Baptist Convention has from the start been a convention organized to facilitate the missions work of the various individual churches that voluntarily participate.

The work of the local church, however, is a bit more broad. While true that churches exist to facilitate the missions and outreach work of individuals within the church, this is not all that churches do. At a bare minimum we must speak of at least two functions of the local church: going forth to tell, and drawing together to grow. Both functions together serve one purpose: glorifying God. Thus the functions are not ends in themselves but ways of working for God’s glory.

The first function is the function of missions. We go throughout our neighborhoods and towns and countries and world sharing with others the bad news about sin and the good news about the grace, love, and mercy of God through Jesus Christ, praying that God might use us to lead others to himself.

The second function is the function of discipleship. We work to grow and ground believers in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. Recognizing that it is not enough to get someone to profess faith in Christ, we then lead believers in the process of growing more like Christ each day.

The distinction in these functions is important. More and more I am hearing voices within the SBC speak as though the first function were the only real work of the church. For example, take the following snippet from the Great Commission Resurgence proposal:

[The Southern Baptist missional vision should be] As a convention of churches, our missional vision is to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations.

In and of itself, that would be fine. As a missional statement it gets across what missions is intended to do: spread the gospel around the world. But the proposal goes on to say:

This missional vision must drive everything that Southern Baptists do, and reset every priority of the local church and denomination.

Here we should see the problem. The problem isn’t just in the GCR proposal. I’ve heard it from pastors, read it on SBC blogs, and seen it in denominational publications. The problem is that this kind of focus leads us to ignore or at least downplay one of the two functions of the church. We become so focused on expanding the walls of the city that we ignore the condition of the things inside the city. We are so focused on reaching unbelievers that we neglect discipleship and have a denomination full of superficial faith.

It is striking to me that the majority of the Bible is written for those already claiming to be the people of God. The majority of the Bible calls God’s people to greater knowledge, to deeper faith, to more faithful obedience. In the New Testament, the passages calling believers to share the gospel make up just a small subset of the passages calling for holiness, for obedience, for knowledge and understanding, for lives of prayer and studying the things of God.

We must go and tell. We must share the gospel. We are right to stress the importance and necessity of evangelism. If we do not share the gospel, we are sinning. But sharing the gospel is the fruit of a life focused on Christ. The more we grow in our love for God, the more we walk in obedience to God, the more we live in the righteousness of God, the more we will delight to tell others about God. The reason so much of our evangelism sounds so superficial is because it is. We have trained our people to tell others God loves them but we have not trained our people to love God.

I think the best concise definition of evangelism is, “Loving God enough to make him known.” There are several things that makes this a good definition, but for our purposes this definition shows that the one telling the gospel must first be growing in his love for God, something that can only happen through discipleship, through walking in holiness, through growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. The more believers walk with God, the greater our love grows. The more our love grows, the greater our desire to share him with others.

Thus we cannot say that a missional vision should drive everything we do. Getting back to the distinction between the local church and the Southern Baptist Convention, we can and should define the SBC in missional terms since that is why it exists. But the work of the local church goes beyond the work of the convention. Drawing together the two functions of the church and its one great purpose, something like the following might be a better vision for the local church: “Seeking the glory of God by helping believers grow in their love of God and faithfulness to God and by helping believers share the love of Christ throughout the world.”

The following comes from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ book Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. As he prepares to discuss Matthew 5:27-30, Lloyd-Jones pauses to discuss sin and evangelism. Below is what he has to say about true and false evangelism.

This doctrine [what sin is], therefore, is absolutely vital in determining our conception of true evangelism. Three is no true evangelism without the doctrine of sin, and without an understanding of what sin is. I do not want to be unfair, but I say that a gospel which merely says, ‘Come to Jesus,’ and offers Him as a Friend, and offers a marvelous new life, without convicting of sin, is not New Testament evangelism. The essence of evangelism is to start by preaching the law; and it is because the law has not been preached that we have had so much superficial evangelism. Go through the ministry of our Lord Himself and you cannot but get the impression that at times, far from pressing people to follow Him and to decide for Him, He put great obstacles in their way. He said in effect: ‘Do you realize what you are doing? Have you counted the cost? Do you realize where it may lead you? Do you know that it means denying yourself, taking up your cross daily and following Me?’ True evangelism, I say, because of this doctrine of sin, must always start by preaching the law. This means that we must explain that mankind is confronted by the holiness of God, by His demands, and also by the consequences of sin. It is the Son of God Himself who speaks about being cast into hell. If you do not like the doctrine of hell you are just disagreeing with Jesus Christ. He, the Son of God, believed in hell; and it is in His exposure to the true nature of sin that He teaches that sin ultimately lands men in hell. So evangelism must start with the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, the demands of the law, the punishment meted out by the law, and the eternal consequences of evil and wrongdoing. It is only the man who is brought to see his guilt in this way who flies to Christ for deliverance and redemption. Any belief in the Lord Jesus Christ which is not based on that is not a true belief in Him. You can have a psychological belief even in the Lord Jesus Christ; but a true belief sees in Him one who delivers us from the curse of the law. True evangelism starts like that, and obviously is primarily a call to repentance, ‘repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.’

One questions often asked of Calvinists is why we believe anyone should evangelize if ultimately salvation is the work of God. It is a fair question but it is really a question for everyone.

Why does God use human beings to carry out any part of his plan? We are sinful, lazy, obstinate, bad at following directions, inefficient creatures. It seems that God could accomplish far more if he kept us from being the workers of his will.

For example, why doesn’t God surround the world with angels? From every part of the earth angels could proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. They saw the cross. They stand before God in Heaven. They would be visible evidence of the existence of God. But they would still preserve choice. Angels would not be able to force anyone to believe so they would not cause a conflict with those who believe salvation comes entirely through a free choice of human beings able to accept or reject the gospel.

Why doesn’t God use angels? Why does God use humans to carry out one of the most important tasks in his creation?

It is enough to say that God uses people because that is his will. We do not have to know the reason. God commanded us to go and tell, we go and tell. But we also know that God is glorified when he is proclaimed by those whom he has saved. When his praise is on the tongues of his people his holiness is magnified. Who better to demonstrate the value of his saving grace than those who have received it?

Whether Calvinist or not, I think we can (and should) agree that the role of humans in salvation has nothing to do with persuasion or the free choice of man. God uses us because he is pleased to do so and because by our proclamation he is glorified.

Some see evangelism as a burden but it is one of our most precious gifts. God has given us the opportunity to do something of eternal significance. This is part of having a life that is not wasted. While obeying God’s command to go make disciples we find that it is not a labor, a chore, but a tremendous joy and privilege to share with people the great grace God has lavished on us in his saving mercy. This is something the angels could never do.

So why are you still reading? Go and tell!

You’ve most likely heard the gap illustration of salvation. Just to refresh your memory, it goes like this.

God created man to live in relationship with him. We stood with him, walked with him. Then Adam and Eve sinned and caused a great void to open up between man and God. There was no way we could cross that void. It was a deep canyon with God on one side and man on the other.

Jesus gave the solution by crossing the canyon, something we could not do. He came among us and lived and died on the cross, paying the penalty for our sins. The cross then became the bridge between God and man, giving us the means to cross the canyon and reach God. Through the cross we can find God and salvation.

Let me suggest an alternate picture.

God created man to live in relationship with him. We stood with him, walked with him. Then Adam and Eve sinned and all creation fell as though down a huge cliff. We stood at the bottom of that cliff with God at the top. Nothing we do would enable us to climb the cliff.

Jesus presented the solution by descending the cliff. He stepped down from high above and lived among fallen humanity. He died on the cross, paying the penalty for our sins. Through the cross he draws us to himself. Jesus then ascends back to God at the top of the cliff, taking us with him.

The difference in these two illustrations is enormous. In both of them God is the one who makes salvation possible. Man is helpless to make a way to God. But in the first God only makes salvation possible, not certain – and only in a world different from our own. In the first illustration Jesus creates a bridge we must walk across to be saved, but this ignores man’s inability to walk toward God. Dead in our sins, we neither have the desire nor the ability to approach God. We are enemies in rebellion against him. The first illustration is truly semi-Pelagian in imagining some ability remains in man so that he can walk to God. Perhaps some who present this illustration would include the Arminian notion of prevenient grace, the belief that God has enabled people to respond to him. This would take the illustration out of the realm of Pelagian heresy but it still leaves the person with an ability the Bible says we simply do not have.

The second illustration does a better job of presenting the biblical picture. It is not perfect, no illustration can contain everything, but it shows that man is not capable of any of the work to reach God.

God brings us to himself. He descends the cliff, does what is necessary to bring us into righteousness, then wraps his arms around us and carries us with him back into Heaven. This is what it means to be saved, to be found in the arms of Christ when he has returned to his heavenly home. “But wait!” you say “He was raised 2,000 years ago! I was not there, I could not have been risen with him!” Ahh but you were, dear saint. Thus we are told a few times in the New Testament, as at Ephesians 2:6, that God has raised us up with him and ​seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. In an event that is both very real and very mysterious, all the saints of God were raised with Jesus Christ. He carried us from the fallen world to the throne of his Father. This is the only way our salvation could take place.

Perhaps I should make some tracts.

Preacher, when you exhort your people to do evangelism, be careful to instruct them in the use of Scripture. The Bible is our primary witnessing tool. Tracts, evangelistic presentations, and the testimony of personal experience *might* have their place, but they will never replace or supersede the Bible. Please, please don’t leave your people thinking that relating their own experience of salvation is a more effective, more important method of evangelism than sharing the Bible.

And while on the subject of evangelism, never promise people that if they follow a particular method it will result in a definite conversion. Salvation is in God’s hands, not ours, and he has made no guarantees.