Theology 3

Evangelism

I am not an evangelist. I rarely tell people they should "get right with God" or that they should have a "personal relationship with Jesus" or that "God has a plan" for their life and aren't they interested in knowing what it is?

The thing is, though, I really am glad that someone evangelized to me. If someone hadn't told me that God existed and that I could be forgiven of the ways in which I'd done him wrong and have a in-good-standing relationship with God, I don't know if I would have gotten to know Jesus. And Jesus has been worth knowing. There's been a lot of other stuff that has come with my relationship with God. Knowing something about why I'm valuable as a person, which has made me much more comfortable in my own skin. is something I'm not sure if I would have understood without knowing God. Grace would probably not have been something I would have gotten to know, which means I'd still be starvingly hungry for it. But all those things or none of them, Jesus, the Father, and the Spirit have been deeply, deeply worth getting to know.

Which leaves me in a weird position of being grateful for something I have but not really doing much to help others have it. At least in a person to person way. I do pray for this for specific people, albeit with some lack in consistency.

One of the reasons I'm not fond of evangelizing is that I've met a lot of people, including myself. who have been wounded in some way by evangelism. A lot of the ways that people talk about
God, talk about Christianity, and try to get other people to become Christians has damaged a lot of lives.

I think a big reason for this is because Christians have lost sight of (if in fact they knew) the whole purpose of evangelism: introducing Jesus to people and helping people see what the reality between God and man is. And from a pragmatic standpoint, I think simply introducing people to Jesus would suffice. I'm not sure you can actually make a good introduction to Jesus without naturally including any other pertinent details. And as I talked about in a different post, one of the key things here is that you're introducing a person. Is it really that dissimilar to saying "Hey, John, I like you to meet my friend Dave. He's a really swell cat and I think you two would get on together well."? Granted, there's more to the whole situation than that, but I think that is fundamentally what the purpose of evangelism is.

It's God that we're after. It's knowing Jesus, knowing the Spirit, knowing the Father that matters. Introducing people to everything but the actual person of God seems...pointless. And it seems to me that a lot of people don't actually hear that when they listen to Christians. The moment you mention Jesus people respond very defensively, as if you're going to hurt them.

What I really want people to experience, what I want people to know in a definite, living way, is what a great thing it is to know Jesus, to know all of God. To know that God loves them, to know the wonderful peace of grace, to have found something solid upon which to live a life. To that end I could really care less about the religion of Christianity. I don't care if anyone becomes Christian from a religion standpoint, I just want them to meet and be friends with Christ.