LOCAL EVANGELISM

“You have a horrible job. You go to work early and come home late. You rush around everywhere. And when you are home there are always people coming over at all hours. You have a beautiful yard, too bad you never get to enjoy it. I don’t know what kind of church you work at but I’d never want to be a part of something like that. My life is way better than that.”

Talk about letting the air out of the balloon. I’d spent a couple years waving and trying to make small talk with my next-door neighbor and this is the first serious conversation we ever had.

Of course he was right. If all he knew about my family was what he observed through his kitchen window his synopsis was dead on. Everything he said was true. I was working like crazy at the church, but in three years, had done little more than shake my neighbors’ hands and exchange names.

This story by Doug Fields is challenging and convicting. It forces you to ask the question, “am I doing all I can to live like Christ did or do I just simply go to church?” If you allow it, it will make you do a self-check on the way you have been living. Has it looked like Christ or have you just branded the cross and called it good?

The amount of Christians in America is dropping, I believe it is because we are no longer looking like “aliens” (for a reference, please consider your Bible, not a study on UFO’s).  The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity.

Some Statistics on Christian Evangelism:

-          Ninety-five percent of all Christians have never won a soul to Christ.

-          Eighty percent of all Christians do not consistently witness for Christ.

-          Less than two percent are involved in the ministry of evangelism.

-          Seventy-one percent do not give toward the financing of the great Commission.

Another denomination did a survey on its leadership ministries. The results are as follows:

• 63% of the leadership in this denomination, including deacons and elders, have not led one stranger to Jesus in the last two years through the method of “Go Ye” evangelism.
• 49% of the leadership ministries spend zero time in an average week ministering outside of the church.
• 89% of the leadership ministries have zero time reserved on their list of weekly priorities for going out to evangelize.
• 99% of the leadership ministries believe that every Christian, including leadership, has been commanded to preach the gospel to a lost world.
• 97% believe that if the leadership had a greater conviction and involvement in evangelism, that it would be an example for the church to follow.
• 96% of the leadership believe their churches would have grown faster if they would have been more involved in evangelism.

I wonder if our denomination would be too far off? We can’t just simply be Christians we have to win others!

Sources :

Fields, Doug “Street Level Evangelism, Where is the Space for the Local Evangelist,” by Michael Parrott, Acts Evangelism, Spokane, WA, 1993, pp. 9-11.    ARIS 2008 Survey

John Zick

Youth Culture Specialist

NCN Student Ministries