Onward, Forward, Toward…

J Lee Grady’s latest “Fire In My Bones” column:

Whatever Happened to Personal Evangelism?

By J. Lee Grady

We are not anointed by the Holy Spirit simply to have visions or feel spiritual goose bumps. It’s time for us to re-embrace soul-winning.

My heart sank two weeks ago when I heard that Dr. D. James Kennedy had died at age 76 of complications from an earlier heart attack. Knowing that Jerry Falwell died in May, and considering that Billy Graham is not in good health, I wondered who could possibly replace these stalwart Christian statesmen.

The congenial Kennedy, who usually wore an austere clerical robe when he preached on his popular television broadcast, founded Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale 48 years ago. Yet his formal appearance was misleading—since his life’s mission was to train the average layperson to share the gospel.

Indeed, Kennedy’s most enduring legacy was Evangelism Explosion, a training course he started in 1970. Used in thousands of churches, it has helped Christians develop a confident approach to personal witnessing. Countless people have been trained to ask a simple question—“If God were to ask why He should allow you into heaven, what would you say?”— to jumpstart conversations with unbelievers.

It was that trick question, overheard on a radio broadcast, that led Kennedy to Christ in 1953. He gave the rest of his life to help people find the right answer. Now that he is dead, I pray his passion can be ignited in our hearts.

It seems as if personal evangelism is a dying art. Fewer of us are taking our faith beyond familiar circles of friends and family. Witnessing has become intrusive in a culture that demands tolerance and diversity. Knocking on doors is illegal in most neighborhoods. “Soul-winning” is an outdated term. Polls show that few Christians today have ever led a person to faith in Christ.

As our society has become more secular, our faith has become more timid. It is no longer cool to declare Jesus is the only way. So we don’t say it—we just hope people will figure out our message by listening to our music or by wandering into our churches at an odd hour on Sunday mornings.

I am especially disturbed that personal evangelism has lost its importance among those of us who call ourselves Pentecostal or charismatic. Many of our best evangelists have also passed into glory or are getting feeble. Yet when I look at the younger generation, it seems many leaders are focused on the inside of the church rather than the harvest fields.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I know we need prophecies, visions, dreams and spiritual experiences. We also need solid Bible teaching, powerful exhortation and the inspiration that comes from praise and worship. But it seems today our focus has turned totally inward. The church is ministering to the church. The pastor is preaching to the choir. And our message isn’t reaching beyond the vestibule.

When Jesus began His earthly ministry, He read from the book of Isaiah about the promise of the Holy Spirit. The passage in Isaiah 61:1 says: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted …” (NASB emphasis added).

This verse, which so dramatically captures the essence of Jesus’ ministry and ours, clearly lists evangelism as His priority. The Holy Spirit’s anointing does a lot of things—but we are told here that He clothes us with divine power so we can announce good news. In other words, we are not anointed simply to prophesy, receive revelations, experience spiritual goose bumps, shake, quake, rattle, roll, shout, raise hands, take offerings, receive offerings or obtain blessings and breakthroughs. All those things are great, but if we have them without evangelism then our faith becomes inverted and self-absorbed.

I’ve been in some great charismatic meetings where everyone falls on the floor at the altar. Some get up and go back for more anointing. In fact, we are known to pray: “More! Lord, give them more fire!” Then the people swoon again, roll around and act drunk. And they come back three more nights to have hands laid on them again.

We’ve become like actors in a perpetual dress rehearsal in which we repeat our lines over and over but never actually perform for an audience.

What good is the anointing if we just wallow and splash in it like hungry hogs at a slop trough? I love the anointing as much as the next person. But when will we actually open our mouths and use it to preach to unbelievers? I want to stand up and scream, “Get off the floor and do something with this power!”

D. James Kennedy was an evangelical brother who did not preach about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, yet he taught people to pray for boldness and to look for every opportunity to share their faith. What would happen if churches that fully embrace the Spirit’s anointing broke out of their self-imposed isolation and started preaching to everything that moves?

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma.

In reference to Grady’s statement:

Indeed, Kennedy’s most enduring legacy was Evangelism Explosion, a training course he started in 1970.

I would like to respectfully disagree with him on this point. I believe that when history looks back on Kennedy, he will be remembered more as a pastor turned politician [similar to how we will eventually view Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, Wildmon (to some degree) and others...] than the creator of the Evangelism Explosion training course.

Bible Scholar outside politics - excellent example of classical old school Presbyterianism. However, I got to where I couldn’t watch the man any more because his sermons (in his later years) did sound more like a professor lecturing a class on political sciences than the Scriptures.

However, it became increasingly evident that Kennedy became more and more convinced that God could only move in this country when a certain political party was voted into office desiring to fuse church and state together making government the evangelist of the church by passing laws and repealing other laws. This led to a mindset that government, instead of the church, would be the Christian evangelist and all the ’sinners’ (now classified as lawbreakers) would eventually be ‘forced’ to get ’saved’ and we would live ‘happily ever after’ in our modified Leave It To Beaver World with Ward, June, Wally, and Theodore (Beaver) Cleaver redefined with additional children Sarah, Joseph, Matthew, Bethany and let’s not forget Scruffy the dog.

In fact, the mindset of expecting government to be the Christian evangelist helped contribute in many ways to the killing off of personal one-on-one evangelism. We expected a ‘one-shot / mass saving’ to take place instead of being content with one soul at a time. Also, we got so used to the Billy Graham concept of holding citywide mass crusades where thousands of people got saved that it became ‘normalized’ to expect mass savings and we became ‘conditioned’ to believing that God works in the evangelical area only in this way.

When the ‘mass savings’ started to decline, many churches started ‘guerilla tactic evangelism’ where a team of Christians would find the lonely and unsuspecting person who exhibited body language of low self-esteem, intimidated, and lack of confidence walking at the mall. The team would then ‘gang up’ on the unsuspecting person being forceful, pushy, and rude while witnessing via ‘guilt trip’ methods until the person ‘cracked under pressure’. When this failed, the church then became pragmatic and seeker-sensitive and some churches resorted to giving away gas cards, cash, gift certificates, etc. just to get people in the door while preaching a ‘gospel-lite’ sermon never mentioning the word Jesus.

Worse was when a person started off doing one-on-one evangelism but something happened that caused them to make national news by getting arrested thinking that by getting a news segment on FoxNews and an interview with Hannity & Colmes that they would be interviewed in their Christian clothes and answer every question with the ‘theologies from Christian t-shirts’.

One person getting saved in a church service on Sunday morning is considered by many as ‘falling short’, ‘lacking faith’, and ‘failure’ when compared to a mass crusade rally in a big city or a mass crusade rally in an African soccer stadium.

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Right now on Survivor: China, there is one contestant that is listed on their web page as being a Christian radio talk show host. When Survivor: China is over and that person can start accepting media interviews, will the Christian public unfairly expect her to be the ‘champion’ of Christian ‘pet’ causes and expect her to give the plan of salvation during every interview with major media outlets?