Evangelism First Century Style.

Evangelism First Century Style.

Sunday after Sunday it is the same. People in church who have not made a decision for the Lord. But they keep coming.  And then there are some people who consider us their church but either haven’t made a decision or attend other venues we other but do not attend worship services.

You would wonder how that is that some people  would attend but acknowledge Jesus is not their Saviour and Lord. You may question, don’t we preach the gospel? Yes we do but we grow them into the decision. We strongly believe in, “Belong, Behave and Believe” and just allow the process of growing into Christ. Some, I would say, fall into the kingdom of God. They find themselves making a decision for Jesus like some people  fall in love.

Part of it is that some people attend our church occasionally and attend somewhere else too. So we just pastor everyone who comes in and accept them as part of our community. We decided to disciple everyone, as if they were believers, even if they were not. In other words, we treat everyone as a Christian even when we are unsure if they have made a decision for Christ. We found that this pre decision discipling worked to ground them in their faith and to borrow a phrase, we “assimilate” them into the collective (the Borg of Startrek.)

Let me explain two biblical models of evangelism. The popular one, that I subscribed to for years, was the “road to Damascus.” It follows the story of Saul on the road who has a powerful life changing encounter with Christ. It leaves a great story to tell and a definitive day as to when Christ was encountered and a strong impressive story of encountering Christ in a life changing moment. It was my experience (actually on a road!) and that of thousands. At our church we still give invitations to accept Christ at a definitive “come to Christ” deciding moment. And time after time people do. For a long time it was the way we operated. And we still give these invitations.

Then we noticed something that was rather discouraging. Our record of decisions for Christ was high. High enough to cause us to boast even. But as our leadership discussed where these people were we realized many did not stay nor keep their decision for Christ.

We made another  observation. We had people who had come to Christ and we didn’t know when or that they had. When we questioned them we found some of them just “fell into the kingdom of  God.” And still followed Him. They knew they had come to Christ but it was more gradual and they weren’t sure exactly when. When they were baptized they often just made up a  date as to when they had come to Christ!

Their experience was more of a “road to Emmaus.” Walking along with Jesus, and getting to know him. Then came the revelation that this is the Saviour, and a decision to accept. We find that in our church experience our statistics of those who have come to Christ may not be as high for the records, but we retained more in the kingdom. This also went along with our method and thought to just accept people as one of us, and disciple them as if they already were one of our faith and community, then in time they will believe the same as us and then act the way a Christian should. Or in other words their behaviour becomes more Christ like.

So both styles of evangelism are biblical. And both work. When you meet the unsaved in our church, rejoice with us and let them be. They’ll get there. I love the unsaved. Such nice raw material! “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.”