Keys to Effective Evangelism: Overcoming Today’s Crisis in Motivation and Method

Samuel Ling

Prologue

Most Chinese churches in North America today were pioneered in the 1960's. Those were the "good old days" of student evangelism. A young man comes to America with $20 in his pocket, attends a state college with minimal tuition charges, starts washing dishes in the university cafeteria, and starts up a Bible class on the weekends. Pretty soon his friends become Christians, and they now have a "CBSG" or "CCF." Some of these "gangs" are more famous than others; the "Winnipegers" of Manitoba, for example, have gone on to brilliant ministries worldwide. Others, less spectacular but equally significant, have established dozens of Chinese churches in the U.S. and Canada.

The 1970's, therefore, was a time of consolidation. From a primary focus student work on campus, Chinese Christians turned to finding a suitable place for worship; calling a pastor to shepherd the young Chinese congregation; organizing a board; establishing a budget; staffing Sunday School and fellowship groups; buying land. Now in the 1980's, we can pride ourselves in the over 700 Chinese churches in North America, a community rich with financial, manpower, and spiritual resources.

In the 1980's, the Chinese church is looking beyond the four walls of the church to missions. Cross-cultural missions is getting the attention of an increasing number of Chinese people -- of course, evangelizing the Chinese in China, Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia continues to be a burden on our hearts. Also, the increasingly heterogeneous character of North American society -- which is really a reflection of the worldwide community -- makes the Chinese church think harder as to how to reach the world for Christ in the most effective and efficient way.

From evangelism through establishing the church to missions, we have gone through a lot. This is an exciting look. This is, however, only a superficial look, as we shall see later.

In addition to this "superficial look," we will catch a sophisticated look at the Chinese church today. Twenty years ago I attended an Ambassadors For Christ student summer conference for the first time. In those days we either took the Greyhound bus or found a ride to the conference site. (Many students still do so today.) When you got to the conference ground there was work to do -- bedsheets needed to be distributed, people forgot to bring their soap and toothbrush, the handbook was not yet stapled, scholarship money was not enough... But it was an exciting thing to see Christian students from all over the East Coast.

Today, however, we fly to international airports to attend winter conferences in Toronto, Washington and other places. When we get there, a computer greets us as we whip out our checkbooks and pay the registration fee. We proceed with computerized room keys to our hotel rooms, complete with cable TV (!) and name-brand toiletries. In ballrooms equipped with professional lighting and sound equipment, we listen to speakers who yearly travel the international Chinese conference circuit, and buy tapes, books and videotapes in the display hall. We go home with lots of "literature" (what pastors get in the form of "junk mail" every day) and a few good books. We hop on our return flight, and go home to report our findings at our church or fellowship meetings. Then we move on with life as usual...

Life is more sophisticated as the 1990's approach. But are we any more mature, any more committed to Christ, any more willing to take risks for evangelism, than 20 years ago?

Or are we more calculating, weighing every decision in terms of convenience and personal gain? Are we more like serpents than doves, holding on to personal privilege rather than letting go of life? I wonder...

Thirdly, a sad look at the picture. Often the conference agenda for Chinese churches and Bible study groups are crowded with important, useful and contemporary topics, such as the dialogue between Chinese culture and the gospel, peer counseling, how to organize a missions committee in your church, computers and the church, etc. But evangelism often gets crowded out of the picture. We pay more attention to discipleship, studying the Bible than to evangelism. We say -- as we have always said -- that we need to equip ourselves, build roots downward, before we can reach out and bear fruit upwards. What is this a symptom of?

I believe that in the three areas of evangelism -- the message we proclaim, the manpower that we need to mobilize, and the motivation that drives us on to reach the lost for Christ -- we are facing an unprecedented crisis. Unless we take a good look at our present plight, we will go on in our ecclesiastical slumbers, and cry "Peace!" "Peace!" when there is no peace. In each of ten areas discussed, I will seek to point out what the crisis, or problem, is, and what Biblical principles can be applied. Helpful resources will be cited.

Key No. 1: Repentance Brings Boldness in Witness

We might as well start with a familiar theme -- sin in our lives. We are not effective in evangelism, we lack the motivation to move out into the world, because somewhere in our lives -- as individuals and as churches/fellowships -- we have sinned. What is sin?

1. Sin is breaking God's commands-- doing what God has prohibited.

2. Sin is failure to do what God expects us to do.

3. Sin is the absence of total trust in, love for, and surrender under God.

4. Sin is playing God -- acting as if we hold our own destinies in our hands. It is independent thinking, rather than dependent thinking.

It is interesting that wherever we find sin, we find broken relationships. Because inasmuch as sin does not spring from broken relationships -- it springs from our wrong attitudes about God's lordship over our lives -- it nevertheless results in broken relationships. Gordon MacDonald has rightly pointed out that, if you want to know what condition your life is in, take a look at your car (or your room). Is it in good condition? Is it clean and tidy? It may be a reflection of our hearts!

The problem with sin is we’d rather hide it, or hide from it, rather than face up to it. So we invent all kinds of names to cover it up in the church. When the pastor and the deacons' board do not get along with each other, we call it a lack of consensus on policy, or a communication breakdown. So we find management techniques to maneuver around the problem. When husband and wife do not live in harmony and love, we call it an incompatible situation. When we want to cheat on our bookkeeping and taxes, we call it creative financing or some other name. We find a substitute name to cover up sin. Therefore, we find substitute solutions that do not work -- they only eat away at our spiritual vitality.

If we dare to call sin sin, then we have hope. If sin is sin, then there is forgiveness because God has promised it. If we confess and repent of our sins, God can be counted on to forgive, to cleanse, and to start us off anew again. His Word is dependable (unlike ours)!

What is repentance? It is not simply fear for punishment, or for the consequences of sin (e.g. fear of an unwanted pregnancy for committing fornication). It is not simply trying to do good to compensate for our sins. Rather it is:

1. Confessing, admitting what we have done is wrong in God's eyes.

2. In a godly way, sorrowing, grieving, and hating sin for what it is. Ask God for forgiveness by the blood of Christ.

3. Re-commiting ourselves to obey God in this particular area, and in all areas.

Why is repentance so important? Because the "springs of living water" which Jesus promises in the Gospel of John gush forth from a pure and clean heart. And where there is an open heart before God, there is an open heart before the world. Our effectiveness in evangelism hinges on this!

If we are bold before God to confess our sins, we will be bold enough to evangelize the world.

A final word, what do we do after repentance? I believe a helpful way to keep our course straight in holy living, is to become accountable to a small group of Christians. Accountability is the key. Of course, in order to establish such a group, we must trust each other to keep confidence, and to commit ourselves to building up each other, not to take advantage of each other's hurts and weaknesses for our own gain.

Resources: C. John Miller, Repentance and Twentieth Century Man (P. O. Box 1449, Fort Washington, PA 19034: Christian Literature Crusade); John White, Flirting with the

World (P. O. Box 567, Wheaton, IL 60187: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1982).

Key No. 2: Evangelism is Caught Rather than Taught

Eight and a half years ago I began to plant a church in the city. I tried everything in the first year. I went to the subway and bus terminal and passed out tracts on the street. We opened our home and invited people to come to Bible studies. I did advertising. I asked my Christian friends for contacts. Boldly we started worship services with 15 people. We continued onto about 25 people a year later. Then it dawned on me that, after all the seminary training and preparation for church planting, I had never been trained in evangelism! I even gave a seminar on evangelism. I dug out the best books I knew on the theology and method of evangelism, and gave a solid course to about 18 people. But things did not change.

I remember a trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to visit my supporting churches. There, a fellow Presbyterian pastor picked me up at the airport, and at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, drove me straight to the hospital, where he proceeded to visit a sick elderly gentleman and expressed his concern. That evening I met dozens of young couples with young children, most of whom found the Lord Jesus in their 30's -- in other words, recently! The next morning that pastor took me to his office, and there two ladies were ready to go on evangelistic visitation. They reviewed a few Bible verses and points on an outline. The pastor took me in his car, and knocked on the door in a new apartment complex. A young lady who have recently visited the church opened the door. We chatted;

the pastor shared the gospel; challenged this young housewife to commit her life to Christ; we ended in prayer. My life has never been the same again! I finally did what many friends had been suggesting for a couple of years. I signed up for an Evangelism Explosion clinic. It was held in a Baptist church in Virginia. There we met for six days. In the evenings, the laypeople of that church who have had previous training, took us (pastors) out to do visitation evangelism. We learned gospel outlines and Bible verses, we wrote testimonies and took quizzes during the day. I came home ready to go!
For the first time, someone actually took me by the hand, and showed me, as a pastor, how to do evangelism and how to implement an evangelism program in my church. I started, despite opposition from church leaders, with 4 trainees. Each of them got 2 prayer partners. We worked together for 16 weeks. Then, half a year later, I had a group of 7 people. To this day I consider that year of EE training to be a real highlight in my six-year pastoral ministry. There was something electric and exciting in the church ... people were praying for the trainees ... newcomers to the church were visited promptly ... people began to see their own lives change because God was working ... a few people did come to know the Lord ... people who didn't want to accept Christ right away were contacted nevertheless, and communication was kept up ... a lot of people talked about evangelism in the church.
Today, I am no longer afraid to talk about the gospel. I have had the joy of leading a hitchhiker in Vancouver to accept Christ in my car; a lady in the Baltimore airport was challenged to look up a church (I gave her the name of the pastor and the location of the church) when she settled down in her new home in Orlando, Florida; a successful business in Los Angeles asked me the question in his luxurious home, "What is the meaning of life?" to which I was only most happy to give an answer; a waiter in a Chinese restaurant came up and asked if I was a Christian, talked about his personal needs, developed a friendship with me, accepted Christ, and is today a member of a Chinatown church. I tell these stories not to boast of what I have done, but what the Lord has done through Christians -- laypeople, not pastors! -- who demonstrated right before my eyes how to actually share the gospel and lead someone to Christ.
We need to look up people (and organizations, such as EE) and ask them to take us along, teach us by example, and experience how to witness for Christ. I must confess that I used to resent Campus Crusade for Christ, and I developed theological reasons for doing so. Today as I look back, I can see why I resented them -- they were so bold and effective in evangelism, and I was not!
Evangelism is caught more than taught.

Resources: Evangelism Explosion III International, P. O. Box 23820, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33307. Order the book Evangelism Explosion by D. James Kennedy, and ask for a schedule of EE clinics. Chinese materials are available from Hong Kong; the Florida office can give you information. Also CRC Home Missions, 2850 Kalamazoo Ave. SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49560 - ask for the evangelism resources catalog.

Key No. 3: We Must Believe That The Bible Is The Inspired Word of God
I grew up in a Bible college in Hong Kong in the 1950's. In those days there were very few books on theology, evangelism, and ministry -- in English there were few enough, and in Chinese the situation was even more serious. So I watched (as a child) how the students took notes in class and read and read the Bible. They prayed a lot, memorized the Bible a lot, and went out and did a lot of evangelism. I remember one day I went to one of the seminary students during lunch hour. He was my Sunday School teacher at the time. I couldn't find him in his dorm room, so I went to the rooftop. And there he was, pouring his heart out before God, remembering each Sunday School student by name under the hot sun. I also remember when I was 12 years old, we went to the resettlement estates (low income government housing projects) and walked up the 7 flights of steps to the rooftop Christian school. The smell of urine and trash was evident at every turn. When we got up there we told Bible stories and sang songs with children who were wearing hardly adequate clothes and shoes. And so I spent the first 14 years of my life -- watching people reading the Bible and going out to do evangelism.
Today, "things are different now, something happened to us." Except that the difference is not so much a greater sense of confidence in the Bible as the power of God unto salvation, but exactly an eroding confidence in the Bible as the inspired word of God. We are more sophisticated today, using historical and critical methods to study the background of biblical times (all this can be very helpful, of course). But we are seeing a whole generation of young pastors come through seminary, who no longer can affirm that the Bible is inspired, true and inerrant. People are preaching in our pulpits today as "evangelical" pastors who do not believe in the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture.
Why is this important for evangelism? Because if we don't have an inerrant Bible, we cannot possibly have an inerrant gospel message. Our salvation is built upon facts recorded in an inspired book. And look at it this way: there are many Christians today who once upon a time were skeptics. So what did they do? Some Christian gave them a book, citing evidence that "demands a verdict." Whose verdict? Their verdict, as independent, autonomous minds judging whether God's word is true. So they read about all the convincing proofs that the Bible was historically and archaelogically dependable, and they accept Christ. Three years later, during a Bible study discussion, you discover that they do not believe in the Trinity, they do not believe in the Virgin Birth, they think that heaven is only a state of mind, and there is no physical heaven and no physical hell... many of the miracles in the Bible can be explained in a different way... We are breeding a generation of skeptic Christians whom we still call "evangelicals!"

Somewhere along the line, we have missed something. We do not train our Christians to put their confidence in an inerrant Bible; so they do not go out to proclaim God's Word with confidence. Today we live in a world of uncertainties -- people are not sure about the economy tomorrow, nuclear warfare, the environment, population explosion, their own job security, their own marriages ... They long to hear a strong, sure word of mercy and hope. Only a God-inspired and totally truthful Scripture can offer such a strong message.

We must believe that the Bible is God's inspired and inerrant Word, and therefore the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for every one who believes.

Resources: J. I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God, Eerdmands. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy (The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978).
Kenneth Kantzer, "Why I Still Believe the Bible Is True," Christianity Today, October 7, 1988. Thomas A. Thomas, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company (P. O. Box 817, Phillipsburg, NJ 08865), 1972.
Key No. 4: God Saves Sinners - That's Our Message