What is Evangelism?

Let's start here. Evangelism is effective proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ to those who do not believe and to those who have not heard. This is a good place to start, but there is much more to evangelism than this.

We tend to confuse the call and gift of evangelism with the techniques associated with it. This for many our chief block to evangelism: confusing technique for content. We tend turn something more into something less.

Within Evangelism, there are a variety of techniques and methods. Their utility depends on the time, commitment and energy we have invested to do them well. But even as we work hard at doing these well, we must always be careful never to confuse the medium for actual evangelism.

We might spend a lot of time marketing our churches; that is, letting the community at large know we are there. While marketing is not evangelism, it can be a useful and effective tool for evangelism.

Hospitality is very important. Making our churches as genuinely welcoming as can be is vital to the vibrancy and sense of welcome of our congregations. This is at the heart of what many congregations can do to practically evangelize the people who come to the worship or programs of the Church. But hospitality is not evangelism, but an essential element of evangelism.

We have also spent time over the years on storytelling as at the heart of evangelism. To effectively tell the story of our faith, of how God has touched our lives and how we changed through our relationship with Jesus Christ under the power of the Holy Spirit, is at the core of what it means to be an evangelist. Even this, in an of itself, is not evangelism.

Evangelism is more than any of the techniques we might us. It is nothing less than the effective proclamation of the Good of Jesus Christ to those who do not believe and to those who have not heard. To effectively proclaim the Gospel of Jesus is also to trust the God will use the outcome for God’s purposes. The people we share the Good News with may respond, but maybe in a way that is different than we expect. They may join a church of another tradition. They may chose to become a "solo" or "lone" believer who does not attach to a single community. They may hear, understand, and even accept the validity of what we say. and still not choose to come to the waters of baptism. Our job is to bring the message and to give the results to God.

How do we know our evangelism is working? Each subset and tool of evangelism has their own measures of success: for example, the number of visitors might tell us how good our marketing campaign was. We might measure the quality of our hospitality through how many visitors returned and how many of them became inquirers. We might measure how many inquirers become baptized members and this will tell us how effective we are at incorporating new members into our congregations. But none of these, even taken together, tell the whole story of what effective evangelism is.

We know we are doing effective evangelism when we see more and more Christians showing and telling the Good News of God in Christ. When we become natural and effective communicators of the Gospel, then we know that evangelism is making a difference. When our evangelism transforms our living so that we do not compartmentalize our faith but instead sees every day, every relationship, and every encounter as being and seeing Christ, then we know that our evangelism is making a difference both in our lives and in the lives of others.

Evangelism is more than the sub-sets of communications, marketing, hospitality or even personal evangelism and storytelling, no matter how well we do it. Evangelism, at its heart, is sharing with others without strings or conditions the gift that we ourselves have been freely given: new life in Jesus Christ.

(Note: This is a reprint of an article written in April, 2007 and revised in April, 2008 for the Evangelism Commission of the Diocese of Bethlehem. It had previously appeared on the old web-page within the DioBeth website. Over the next few weeks, I will be migrating material from that site onto this blog. atg+)