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Friendship without evangelism
(A 'chief danger of the 21st
century)
That is, while we agree that friendship
evangelism is probably the most consistently effective means
of evangelising for individuals (we’ll grant that power
evangelism and mass evangelism will trump this in some
circumstances), in practice it is too often too much
friendship and not enough evangelism.
And that’s a gigantic problem.
We came across an evangelism guide that prompts the
evangelist to list 100 friends who don’t know Jesus for
purposes of prayer and to arrange evangelistic appointments.
If 1.6 million Salvationists, for example, each did
that, we’d evangelise 160 million people pretty quickly!
That sounds impressive (and would be).
The challenges are as follows:
·
too
careful to nurture and protect the friendship that we don’t
evangelise the friends.
Now, even if this isn’t the case for you or for any
Salvationists, for the sake of argument, it remains the case
for too many Christians worldwide.
And though the math might suggest that all of the
Christians in the world are at least 1% of the global
population, it seems patently and tragically obvious that
there are billions of people whose Christian friends aren’t
evangelizing them.
·
not enough
friends. The
second part of the problem is that we don’t have enough
friends. Maybe you
saw that bit about listing 100 friends and you figured that
beyond your soldier friends you might get stuck in low double
digits. You’re not
alone.
So, what’s the takeaway?
Two-fold:
First,
Salvationists have to step in the gap created by Christians
who camp out at friendship and don’t touch the evangelism by
evangelizing some of the billions of people who lack a
reasonable Christian witness.
That means we have to evangelise other people’s friends
who are not (yet?) our friends.
Second?
We have to make more friends.
Look ahead.
So, by all means, engage in friendship
evangelism. If you
are a solid Christian and you DON’T evangelise your friends,
you are misrepresenting yourself to them.
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