Determine Your Starting Point
The starting point is our experience of God’s goodness. None of us has to remain a Christian, but we do. Why? To find your starting point, ask yourself: “What is so good about Jesus Christ that I remain publicly committed to him? What is the good thing Jesus Christ provides that I would not be able to live without if I renounced my faith?” When we answer these questions, we have our starting point.
In determining our starting point, we also gain two important insights into our personal faith. First, it gives us our motivation for evangelizing. We have something that is so good that we cannot live without it. This is surely also good enough to share with others. Second, we have found our vision of the ultimate good we expect to gain from following Jesus (e.g., resurrection from the dead, abundant life, heaven). This is also something worth sharing.
Reflect on Your Experience Theologically
To avoid becoming idiosyncratic about our view of God and God’s goodness, we need to put our starting point in conversation with others. We do this through theological reflection. Theological reflection allows us to flesh out what we believe around our starting point.
Reflecting theologically involves asking three questions: 1) Who is God in my starting point? 2) What does God do to bring about the good in my starting point? 3) How should people respond to God based on the good God offers them?
In considering these questions, we should listen to other Christians, too. The church has a deep heritage of faithful people who have thought carefully about God, and we do well to engage with their thinking. Often, these people had different answers to these questions that gave rise to the different theological perspectives within the church today. Interacting with these perspectives helps us recognize blind spots in our answers and prompts us to develop a more full-bodied theology. We also learn how to better verbalize our faith by discussing what we believe with other Christians.
Develop Awareness of Context
We will have substantially grown in our own faith once we have a) determined our starting point, and b) learned to articulate our beliefs about God through reflecting on that staring point theologically. However, if we want to share that faith we need one more piece: contextual awareness. Without this awareness, we end up sharing the gospel in a way that is authentic for us, but not meaningful for those we want to receive it.
Contextual awareness means that we listen to the people we want to evangelize. We learn who the people are as individuals, and we learn about the cultural and social settings in which those individuals live. In doing this, we gather important insights into how we should approach those people with the gospel. This is not just an issue of technique, but of our guiding people to find how the Christian story intersects with, resists and sanctifies their assumptions about how the world operates.
Adding these three pieces together—our experience of God’s goodness in our starting point, our articulation of the faith through theological reflection and our contextual awareness of the people we seek to evangelize—we can develop creative ways of practicing evangelism. These practices do not have to replicate our stereotypes of what evangelism looks like, but can be anything that faithfully embodies the good news we believe in a way that is meaningful for the people encountering it. Evangelism is defined by its content, not by the mode of its presentation.
Unexpected Benefits
By navigating evangelism with this equation, we strengthen the faith of the evangelist as well as provide a motivation and method for evangelizing others. This is exactly what mainline congregations need today.
Working through the equation also allows evangelism to become a bridge-building activity within the church. Along with poor catechesis, disunity is blight on the church’s public witness today. If we take the time to reflect on what we believe, as well as to listen to what other Christians across the theological spectrum believe, we may find new ways of understanding and appreciating each other. More than that, we might find ways of complementing one another’s ministries rather than competing with each other.
This brings us back to our local mainline congregation. The answer may not be in any one congregation surviving as a stand-alone entity, but in several Christian communities working together to be a public witness within a neighborhood. As the 100-plus-year-old congregation works through the formula and opens up to conversation with the new church plant, which also is taking time to work through the formula, the capacity opens for far greater sharing of the gospel.
Mark R. Teasdale is professor of evangelism at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and is the author of Evangelism for Non-Evangelists: Sharing the Gospel Authentically. If you are interested in your congregation participating in a free webinar on these ideas, hosted by Discipleship Ministries of The United Methodist Church, visit MarkTeasdale.net and click on “Evangelism Online” for information.