The Need for Relevant Evangelism...You can share with someone the gospel, and they’ll say, “Oh, well that was true for you, but it’s not true for me.” In other words, that

Transcript - WM511 Evangelism in the Local Church © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

1 of 15

LESSON 03 of 23WM511

The Need for Relevant Evangelism

Evangelism in the Local Church

Good day. In this lecture, we want to look at our changing culture in North America and the implications it has for evangelism. What has happened to our culture has been virtually without parallel. The pace of social change since the late 1950s has accelerated to the point at which, at times, our culture is like a car at full speed with no one holding onto the steering wheel, wildly turning from this to that and that to this with very little clear sense of direction and purpose. That may seem strange to you, because probably most of you listening to this course by tape were born since the late 1950s. You don’t realize what a terribly abnormal time you were born and have come to age in. You don’t realize how much this social change that we have now come to expect as normal is, in fact, abnormal. What the social change our country has undergone since the late 1950s means is that a great deal of the task of evangelism has to be rethought. Let’s look at a few of those points this day.

In your notes, under “The Need for Relevant Evangelism,” – A New Paradigm for Knowing. What was the paradigm for knowing when I came of age, someone now middle aged, or when my parents came of age? It was well summarized by a famous American newscaster, Walter Cronkite, who ended his newscast every evening on “The CBS Evening News” with “That’s the way it is.” Can you imagine that? A thirty-minute newscast, maybe 22 minutes of talk time, and the announcer has the audacity to say, “That’s the way it is!” What would happen if a contemporary announcer, a Tom Brokaw, ended his news with “That’s the way it is?” He’d be laughed out of his position. Everybody knows now that you can’t know how it is. And everybody knows that the world is too complex to explain to me in a thirty-minute news program. But it well illustrates the old paradigm for communicating.

The old paradigm desired truth, and so it stressed logic, evidence, consistency, and ethics as the means of communicating that truth. The new paradigm is quite different. The new paradigm

Micheal Green PhDExperience: Professor, Trinity Evangelical

Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois



2 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

stresses experience, feelings. And so the newscast now is filled with dramatic footage from our “Chopper Five,” a dramatic reenactment of, people crying. Do you ever see someone after a tragedy who’s talking about their quiet faith in God? Rare. It’s usually someone in tears, because what now is desired in communication is an experience, not truth. And that experience is packaged in the form of image, often a narrative or a story; or on visual media, such as television and billboards, in the form of pictures.

Think about the current ads you see on TV. How many of them don’t tell you anything about the product? One that just came out as I was preparing this course shows a sequence of young people wearing pants, zooming around on roller blades, zooming around on skateboards, doing different things. And you watch this, and time goes by, and all you’re watching is people on pants. And you begin to think, Hm, maybe it’s a commercial for pants. What is it a commercial for? And in the last fraction of a second, comes up an ad notice that tells you it is about a certain style of pants. That’s a commercial that’s built around the idea that what people want is experience. And the way you communicate that is with image. In fact, one contemporary marketing slogan says, “Image is everything.” Therefore, buy our product.

This has been very much true in the Church. We’ve seen a shift in preaching in the contemporary evangelical movement from the classical sermon that emphasized logic, emphasized structure, to a sermon that now is much more one of narrative and story. We’re going to talk about this more when we talk about presenting the gospel through messages, but right now what we want to see is that the paradigm for knowing has changed. Where it used to be truth, now it’s experience.

You can share with someone the gospel, and they’ll say, “Oh, well that was true for you, but it’s not true for me.” In other words, that was your experience, but it’s not been my experience. And experience is the only thing that counts. We’re going to have to look at this in many different ways as we go through the course, but it presents a difficulty and a tension in the area of evangelism that previous generations did not have to deal with.

Another issue, which is greatly redefining our task in evangelism and helping us to understand the need for relevant evangelism, is the changing role of the family, whether it be women, single-parent households, reconstituted and blended families, latchkey



3 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

children. The point is that we have a new audience with new values. Let me share some statistics. In the period from 1900 to 1904, only 12 percent of the marriages contracted in those years ended in divorce. In the period from 1940 to 1944, forty years later, 40 percent of all marriages ended in divorce. Now it seems that about two-thirds of all first marriages end in divorce. Individualism, women’s economic gains, the secular perspective of marriage, and other factors have made marriage something that comes and goes. So we’ve all learned to be very, very careful about what we say and how we say it, because you don’t know what that wedding ring means.

In 1970, when my wife was finishing college, about 10.5 percent of all women aged 25 to 29 had never been married. By the time we got married, that statistic had grown. And by the time our children were born, it had reached a proportion of over a quarter of all women. If you exclude women who don’t go to college and only look at the college-educated women, the rise is even more dramatic. The point is, is that our population has changed. People don’t get married at age 18 if they only go to high school and at age 22 if they only go to college. They wait and wait; 25, 30, 32 years old and still single is not unusual, when in the past 21 and not married would’ve been unusual.

When you couple that with the divorce rate that’s climbed almost without parallel, you realize that we have a different audience. In 1950, 18 percent of all married women with children worked outside of the home. Basically, in 1950, people were like “Leave it to Beaver” in many ways. Now moms didn’t wear dresses and have their hair done and earrings on and high heels when they did cleaning, but most mothers with children were at home. By the 1960s, a third of all mothers had gone to work. By 1984, it was up to 57 percent. Now it’s well over two-thirds. In fact, the overwhelming majority of mothers with a child under the age of one now work.

When I was a child in school, children’s problems were things like sticking bubblegum underneath the desk, running in the hallway. Now children routinely suffer stress-related illnesses. Over half the children born since the mid-1980s were born in a home which they would not grow to maturity in; that is. a home that experienced divorce. The majority of children under age one, Mom’s at work. Over half the children in a two-parent home have both parents working.



4 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

What does all this mean? It means that our audience is different. It means that the parents are far more stressed than they used to be. It means that the children are far more stressed than they used to be. It means that things that used to be communicated through large amounts of shared time at home aren’t communicated through large amounts of shared time at home. The battle for the family is over, and the traditional family clearly lost in North America. The only question now is: will those of us that want a traditional family be allowed to choose it as an alternative?

The effects on evangelism are massive. Try doing door-to-door evangelism. They’re not home; and, if they are home, they don’t want to talk to a stranger because they’re too busy. They’ve been out of the home. They don’t have the time to interact with you. Try working with children. Now you have to be so conscious of legal aspects that, in many cases, it’s more difficult to do ministry than it was just a few years ago, because of the legal restrictions put upon us with the decline of stability of society. Try telling the modern family the traditional message, and they hear something that doesn’t connect with them. We have to re-form our ways of communicating the gospel so that people will have time and the ability to understand it.

A third social change is the loss of common religious knowledge. My point here is that they don’t hear what we’re saying. For example, the first two words of “The Four Laws,” the most widely used evangelistic tract in our nation: “God loves…” Law One says “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” What do people hear when they hear “God?” The older generation probably hear: the Creator of the universe who is all powerful, all knowing, all present, who is loving and kind, merciful and just, holy and pure. They probably hear something fairly close to a biblical definition of God.

The younger generation – remember, they’ve never been to church. They’ve had very little parental impact and influence in their life. They know what God is, sure. God is the Force. The Force be with you. He’s yin and yang. He is perhaps personal, perhaps impersonal, perhaps He, perhaps She; but somehow in and around the universe, I think. They can’t define God. They don’t understand what God is. You say, “God,” and they hear “Force.” You say “love,” and what do they hear? They hear lust. Most of the children born since the early 1980s have grown up, at least partially, in a single-parent home. They know what love is; it’s what TV has told them love is. It’s what you do in the backseat of



5 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

a car. They don’t know the difference between love and lust. And so you’ve said to them in your first two words, The impersonal Force that’s in and of the universe lusts for you for its own pleasure. And that isn’t even the beginning of the gospel. That’s just an introductory point.

Do you see my point? The loss of common religious knowledge, which is more severe in certain regions than others, but the loss of that common religious knowledge has made our task in evangelism extremely difficult. We’re going to address this in the course and address it at great length, because its meaning is that they’re not hearing what we’re saying. Therefore, many of our traditional gospel presentations are not communicating to this generation at the level they communicated to previous generations. We’ve got to rethink through what is the gospel. How do we say it? What are they hearing? How do we clarify what we’re saying so that they hear what we desire them to hear, rather than what the secular culture has told them to hear?

A final force reshaping our culture, that has great impact on evangelism and evangelistic strategies, is a changing basis for people groupings. In his book A Clarified Vision for Urban Ministries, Harvie Conn talks about this. Some of these thoughts come from that book and other sources. It used to be that people groupings, or communities as we sometimes call them, centered mainly around culture and location. They still do, to a degree, and in some areas they still do predominantly. But, generally speaking, this is more of the past. In the past, your culture of origin was a defining trait. Your religious, ethnic, cultural heritage told everyone who you were. When I was a young boy, the first day of school every year through grade school, we sat in alphabetical order and, beginning with the A’s and going to the Z’s, stood up, gave our name and our ethnicity. And so we were defined. My name, as you may have guessed, Green, is Irish, but my mother’s side is German. And I quickly learned that in our community, German was higher on the pecking order than was Irish. So I would say, “German and Irish.” But, later on, wanting to be more identified with my father’s side of the family, said Irish anyways, even though it meant less status.

The second way people used to group themselves, and still do, to a degree, and in some areas still do predominantly, was by geography. Where you lived defined who you were. But these patterns have been changing, and it’s a slow change; but currently identity groupings are much more around other traits than



6 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

culture of origin and geography. They’re typically around the traits of macro-structural groups, identity found in groups which cross over common structural boundaries. They find their center of glue in wealth, power, and prestige and small social groups; groups built around a common lifestyle and occupation. For example, in the past, your father may have played softball. It was probably with the church team, culture of origin, an ethnic church or with the people from the neighborhood, geography. Now it’s most likely with a corporate team.

Since people have changed how they identify themselves, how are we going to reach them? Our strategies in the past were basically centered around culture and geography as a basis for reaching people. But now that macro-structural groupings and small social groups around common lifestyle and occupation are how people identify themselves, we as evangelicals need to rethink many of our evangelistic strategies.

How about the Boomers, the “Me Generation,” now middle-aged workers, now beginning to realize that that which they put everything aside for so that they could achieve in work, they have not gained what they wanted? The postponement of marriage, the postponement of children, the limiting of the number of children, the frequent moves, all the things the Boomers did for career advancement has not given many of them the satisfaction they want. In some cases, they realize I’m 45 years old. I’m 50 years old now. I want to be at a certain level in the company. And the ongoing work of older adults who no longer have to retire at age 65 has made it impossible for them to move up the corporate ladder. So they either stay in the company and get very, very frustrated, or they spin off and try to start some entrepreneur job of their own, a new little company, many of which, of course, do not succeed. It’s a generation that focused on “me” and has realized that “me” has brought very little satisfaction. How are we reaching this generation with the gospel? What strategies are we using in the local church that you attend to reach that generation?

The Busters, of course, were the “Us Generation,” constantly thinking in terms of group. Individual achievement, but always, always, always conscious of where the group is. The Busters are those who didn’t put off marriage until age 30 to establish my career, but put it off because I’m not ready for it yet. It amazes me when I meet someone who’s 30 or 32 years old, who’s not married, and gives me as the reason, Oh, I’m not really ready for that yet. My generation doesn’t understand that. My generation



7 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

said, when you finish school, high school or college, you’re ready for marriage. Get married and work out the problems. But this generation sees it differently, very differently. One of the reasons they see it differently was the high failure rate of their parents’ or their friends’ parents’ marriage. They don’t want to risk failure. One of the reasons they put so much effort into having fun now is because they don’t believe things like Social Security will be there in the future, so the basis of hope for the future has been eroded to a degree with them. How are we going to reach this generation that’s grown up largely unchurched, this generation that doesn’t know what we mean when we say, “God loves you?” This generation that has not seen stability of family; and so when you pray, “Our Father who art in heaven,” thinks of Oh, the person that uses you and deserts you, because that was their experience.

Another force reshaping culture has been social action: the integration of faith and lifestyle. Typically, what happens after a period of revival is that there is initially a strong, ongoing evangelistic emphasis in the culture; but then, as those people who were converted during the revival begin to grow in their faith, they strive to integrate faith with other areas of life. And the strong evangelistic outreach begins to shift to a strong social action or social ministry emphasis of some nature. The last strong spiritual revival in America occurred in the 1960s and into the 70s, mainly among the younger people of America, often called “The Jesus People Movement.” For a number of years, there were strong evangelistic ministries in many churches, largely staffed by these people. Then they began to grow in their faith, and the emphasis of ministry began to shift more towards social action.

As we do this tape, we’re beginning to see the ending of the social action emphasis in the evangelical movement and the beginning of a return of an evangelistic emphasis. Promise Keepers gave some hint of that, as they’ve worked very hard to try to avoid becoming a social action ministry and worked hard at trying to retain emphasis upon evangelism. Those two factors, the Christian’s response to the world by being involved in the world for change, and the Christian’s response to the world by proclaiming to the world the gospel, which it assumes will change, tend to work like two curves, where one is high, the other is low. And when the other curve is high, the first one goes low. They tend to offset each other. One of the dangers for us as evangelicals is that offsetting, because we can then be found to be guilty of not doing something that we’ve been commanded to do.



8 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

Geographic population shifts are another factor which has had a tremendous influence upon the need for relevant evangelistic strategies. The Sun Belt and the Western United States have been the areas of growth. The Northeast to Midwest, the old Rust Belt, has been an area usually of decline or stability. Certainly there are pockets in those regions where there is rapid demographic growth; but, generally speaking, they’re fairly static or declining regions. Many towns and many counties of rural America have fewer people now than they did at the turn of the century.

How do you reach out in those communities, when so much of our literature as evangelicals is built upon the assumption of bigger churches, of reaching more people? What do you do when your town doesn’t have more people? What if God takes you to a rural ministry where it was a town of a thousand in 1950, serving an agricultural community of eight thousand, for a total regional service area of about nine thousand people. And now, in the later 1990s, the town runs about 650 – 700. And somewhere around fifty of those people commute in to the city an hour and a half away and live out here for quality-of-life reasons. And the farming region that surrounds no longer has about eight thousand people in it, but only has about 6,500 or seven thousand people. That means you’re going to have churches that are a lot smaller in attendance than they were years ago. Certainly, there are many non-Christians that need to be reached, but the strategy of bigger, larger churches basically is a strategy that works well in areas of rapid demographic growth. And it’s not the kind of strategy that works as well in areas of stable or declining populations.

How will we meet their needs? What do we do in a town where the bright young people generally leave, as is the case for much of rural America? What is our strategy for reaching these people? And those that remain are those that have extremely strong family ties. Changing churches is, in many ways, changing families in rural America. So how are we going to reach them so that we aren’t asking them to break with all of the things that they love and hold dear? It creates quite a problem, doesn’t it; quite a tension for evangelistic ministry in this new society.

An eighth force creating change is this changing minorities, which gives us many new opportunities. The stabilization of the Black community with its rise of middle class has become much more stable, has meant that increasingly, within the Black community itself, are adequate resources to do the different ministries that in times past had to be dealt with and resourced largely from



9 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

churches outside of the community. There is still, of course, a great need for healing between the Black and White church in North America: a great need for interaction, for learning to love one another. But one of the great opportunities that’s rising is the rise of Hispanic communities. The Hispanics are projected by many demographers to become the largest minority group in all of the United States in the near future. In many areas of the country they already are the largest group. The only difficulty with these statistics is undocumented aliens, and that’s why you have to be careful as you quote the stats. Are they or are they not including undocumented aliens, which is usually being included or excluded for political reasons, not religious reasons.

What’s happening with the Hispanic community is very interesting. When a community immigrates to the United States, it tends at first to stay together, to huddle up, to try to preserve its ethnic identity. That’s, of course, what many of the Hispanics that have immigrated have done. They’ve moved not just to the United States, but they move to the same city as people from their village moved to. And then in that city they’ll move to the same neighborhood as people from their village moved to and sometimes take over an entire apartment complex. You’ll discover that, of the several hundred people in that complex, nearly all originally lived in one small village somewhere in Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador or some other Latin or Central American country.

After a generation, though, those family ties begin to weaken. The children go to public school, they learn English. English eventually becomes the first language, and Spanish second language. They begin to raise questions, and there’s a generational-wide window of opportunity within the Hispanic community to answer questions, to show that you can be Hispanic and not necessarily be Catholic, to show that you can be Hispanic and truly be a Christian in our evangelical sense of the word. It’s going to take some very dedicated people to do that. Some denominations have been very, very effective in showing us how that can be done. The Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptists, in particular, have done some very amazing things in reaching Hispanics on a wide level across the United States. But all of us need to be examining this area, a group that needs to hear the gospel, that often becomes a hidden minority. In many towns you’ll find a pocket of Hispanics of several hundred to a thousand or more people, and no one knew that they even lived in the town. And yet they do need to hear the gospel.



10 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

A ninth factor is the declining American influence abroad, which spells big changes for missions and money. There was a time when to have an American passport meant entry into virtually any country of the world. It meant special privilege, it meant opportunity. Now to have an American passport is, in some regions of the world, a decided debit, a decided difficulty. And in few regions of the world is it the kind of opener of doors that it once was. American missionaries have become very expensive to support overseas. The amount of support that it takes to send a family varies widely from country to country, but it’s unlikely to be much less than sixty or seventy thousand and maybe somewhere near a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in certain regions of the world.

How are we going to approach that, as the older generation of post-World War II missionaries is now in full-scale move towards retirement? Who’s going to replace them? Well, to a degree, they need to be replaced by people from our churches. For, if our church sees evangelism as just what we do locally, then it has lost sight of part of the Great Commission. But perhaps there’s another source for these missionaries. In 1800 less than two percent of all evangelicals worldwide were from outside the Western world. By 1900 that percentage was only 10 percent. Now, as we near the year 2000, that percentage is well over two-thirds. Depending on who you read, perhaps it’s three-quarters or four-fifths of all evangelicals coming from the non-Western world.

As the ability to send the American missionary overseas becomes more and more difficult, for financial and geopolitical reasons, the evangelical church needs to look seriously at sending non-North Americans. Why not? Wouldn’t you consider supporting a missionary who came from a church thirty miles down the road? Why not consider supporting a missionary who comes from a church three-, six-, ten-thousand miles around the world? Hopefully, in your seminary, there are a significant number of international students. Befriend them now. Understand them, learn about their culture, learn about their nation and their people, and then learn how you, in your future ministry, can partner with them in their future ministry for the task of evangelism.

For example, I have a friend who was a pastoral leader, came to a seminary I was teaching at. He comes from a region of Southern Asia. In that area, primarily tribal peoples, he started a small college in which he trains young men and women to be evangelists and to work on church planting teams. He can train



11 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

one of those individuals with outside support of about five or six dollars a month. Five or six dollars! That’s just barely enough to buy an inexpensive lunch at a fast-food restaurant! Yet for that much, in a month, I can prepare a full-time missionary who doesn’t have to go through language school, who doesn’t have to do cultural adaptation, who never gets sabbaticals, who will stay there and work for his life. That, to me, is a wise investment. And, as American influence changes, our commitment to evangelism must not lessen. Certainly, we must never cease being a sending nation or a sending church. For the day we cease to send is the day the gospel begins to dry up and die within us. But perhaps we can also see the decline of American influence abroad in some areas as an opportunity for us to have even a more significant ministry, for us to partner with our international brothers and sisters and, with them, prepare people for ministry.

A tenth factor is the education boom. This, in particular, has provided great opportunities to reach seekers. As our country continues to see some form of continuing education as a normal behavior, and amongst the college-educated and professional classes as almost a necessary behavior, the Church has opportunities in education. Have you considered a class at a community college on the history of the New Testament or a Survey of Christian Doctrines? You say, “Oh, that can’t happen!” It has happened all over the country. Community colleges often are open to any course that a qualified individual can teach, which would draw an adequate number of students. This past term at the seminary I’m at we had a student who taught New Testament Greek at one of the local community colleges in the Chicagoland area. Those give us opportunities to build relationships with non-Christians, to come alongside of them as friends, to find a context within which we can give the gospel relevance to their life and so that they can understand it. I’m not arguing that the Church should become primarily a community college. I’m simply recognizing that the education boom gives us one opportunity for outreach that we perhaps have not thought of and have not seen in the past.

Finally, factors which will have little effect upon the sharing of the gospel. The computer revolution and the Information Highway. A lot of people talk about this constantly and think that it’s going to change everything. I think we’re going to find that computer revolution and the Information Highway will change everything when it changes nothing. By that I mean, when those machines and technologies become so simple to use that you don’t have to be



12 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

technically skilled to use them, then they will change everything, much like the automobile. A hundred years ago when automobiles were first introduced, they all were sold with toolkits, large spare tires, sometimes many spare tires; because they were constantly needing to be fixed and repaired. When that was the case, only the mechanically minded bought them. When cars reached a level of reliability and ease of use that all you basically needed to do was put your key in, turn it, put the car in Drive and go, then the masses started to buy them. The same is true with other technology, such as computers and Information Highway. As they continue to achieve ease of use, and thus change very, very little in how we do things, then they will be much more involved. But I think we will find that the computers are much more of a vehicle, like the telephone or like TV, than they are actual transformers, like the content of TV was.

Another factor which gets a lot of attention is the medical revolution, and the economics are simply going to limit that and what can happen. The involvement of the Church there, I would hope, would be one of the area of ethics. We need to address the issues that older adults are asking. When does life end? How should it end? Why should it end? What is the point of it? And I think we will find that the gospel answers those questions. Just as for the young person who looks at life with basically a blank slate and asks, “Who am I, and why am I here?”, so the older person looking at the infirmities of old age is asking the questions, “Who am I, and why was I here?” And many of them, especially those who take the Kevorkian option, the option of assisted suicide, are those that conclude: Who am I? Not very much. And why am I here? For no good reason. And so they opt out of life. That’s the audience that needs to hear the gospel. That’s the audience who needs to understand that God loves and cares for them, apart from what they can do or not do; that God values them apart from their abilities or loss of abilities; that they have been created in the image of God and so are a person of an infinite worth.

We could talk at great length of other factors that are changing the American scene. We’re in a culture of dramatic change. The old ways don’t work as they once did. Programs for youth that assume high adult-to-student ratios, perhaps two or three youth for every adult, don’t work like they used to work; because the adults aren’t there. Dad’s not working forty hours a week; he’s working sixty hours a week. Mom isn’t a stay-at-home mom; she’s working ten, twenty, or maybe even full-time forty hours a week. Parents simply can’t participate as they once could. And so our



13 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

programs will have to change, or we will reach an increasingly smaller percentage of the population of our community. Some of our traditional programs,Sunday night service, Wednesday night service, and a home Bible study, simply require too much time. People don’t have that much free time. Many surveys have indicated that the typical person will commit to coming to church Sunday morning and one other thing a week. What will that “one other thing” be? And where will evangelism fit in that “one other thing?” Will the need to sustain the programs of your church be such a powerfully felt need that what is cut is the evangelistic outreach, the systematic proclamation of the gospel to the community, the creative presentation of the gospel in attractive ways that draw non-Christians to the church to hear the message and to find the place of salvation?

There are many factors changing America. The task before your generation is not an easy task. The pace of social change has meant that you’ve had to take what was once, say, for example, an oil tanker, and while the ship continues to be under steam, continues to move through the ocean, you have to rebuild it into a completely different kind of ship. It’s going to take great wisdom for your generation to know how to lead the Church so that evangelism is not lost as the Church moves forward in a rapidly changing society.

And yet there is great opportunity. When we look at the paradigm for truth and how it’s shifted for knowing from truth to experience, we see the potential for an audience to understand biblical narratives which are, after all, basically image or story; but which, after all, are not designed to communicate experience, as much of contemporary use of image is, but were designed to communicate truth, but in a different way than the logical, propositional form of the Epistles.

We have the resource in the Bible to preach to these people, but will we do it? We’ll look at that as we go through the course. We have the resources to reach our youth, but how can we organize those resources so that we don’t sacrifice every other program in our church? We have a large group of aging adults that have been largely ignored in the evangelical movement. How will we reach them with the gospel? How will we show them that a life that cannot perform and cannot do, that is, therefore, judged by society to be of very little value, in fact can be a life of great value and significance before God Himself?



14 of 15

Lesson 03 of 23

As we struggle with how to integrate faith with ministry and social action, can we do it in such a way in our churches that we don’t lose the presentation of the gospel or lose the relationship of the Church to society as salt and light, as a city set on a hill?

For those in the areas with geographic decline, building up a church where there is no sense of anticipation and of hope and of new greatness in the future, it’s a much more difficult task, and many of our evangelistic strategies will have to change to accomplish it.

To reach our minorities, to build the bridges between the Black and the White community, to establish relationships and bridges between Blacks and White communities with the Hispanic communities, to share the gospel during this generation-wide window of opportunity with Hispanics so that a rich harvest could be found amongst these people that God has brought to us. To think through our evangelistic strategies for reaching the world, to recognize that the economics of sending American missionaries overseas basically means we’re going to be sending fewer missionaries, but to firm within our Church a commitment so strong that we will not shrink from being a sending Church. And yet also to create within our churches a vision so strong that we will send not just North Americans, but members of the Body of Christ who come from any place in the world.

To use the educational boom as opportunities to reach out, to have ongoing seminars, to have what we will call later in the course “salt-and-light talks.” These are important things that we as evangelicals can be doing as we strive to reach a generation with the gospel who is growing up in a post-Christian society.

Next, we’re going to begin looking at the gospel message. Before you listen to that tape, you may want to retrieve for yourself any gospel presentations you’ve been trained in, or review them, because we’re going to challenge your thinking in several areas. We’re going to suggest that perhaps some of us as evangelicals have not fully understood what the gospel message is. We’re going to try to define the gospel message in such a way that we can understand what to say to these post-Christian, non-Christian, pagan, sometimes neo-Pagan people who surround us in our society. How can we communicate the message to them so that they hear Good News? It’s going to take some work, it’s going to take some thought, but we can do it. May I pray for you now?


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

15 of 15

The Need for Relevant EvangelismLesson 03 of 23

Father, as we launch into this course in this time, as we’ve thought through the biblical mandate for evangelism and the tremendous changes within our culture, I pray You will guide and direct the men and women taking this course to understand how it applies to them; that You will help them to see that which must be done if the Church is to continue to be fervent in fulfilling its ministry of an ambassador for Jesus Christ; that You will help them to see how we can communicate God loves the whole world to a world that doesn’t know what love is anymore. We ask this because we are Your children, and You are our God. Amen.

Documents

The Need for Relevant Evangelism...You can share with someone the gospel, and they’ll say, “Oh, well that was true for you, but it’s not true for me.” In other words, that