Unevangelistic Evangelism

Dangerous Theology, Dangerous Compromise

Some who lack a proper understanding of God’s electing and effectually calling grace will grow discouraged in evangelism and fall into pragmatism. They will initially preach the gospel boldly, yet might not see much fruit at all. Someone will get offended at them for saying Christianity is the only true religion or what-not. ‘Is the gospel failing?’ they think to themselves. ‘Surely it is not the gospel, but my methods that are failing! Time to adjust my methods! Time to tone down my message!'

This is how many evangelists fall into the snare of pragmatism: they don’t see the big numbers that they expected, so they adjust their method and message based on what will yield more immediately visible results. However, this is rooted in a failure to grasp the fact that God has not determined to save every human being, but the elect alone, and that He expects us to be faithful and not compromise even if we don’t see big results.

The first thing these discouraged evangelists might abandon in order to improve their ‘success’ rate is Hell. Then they might exchange the biblical “repent and believe the gospel” for the unbiblical “pray this prayer to invite Jesus into your heart.” Then they might notice that the lost are still not fond of their evangelism so they stop talking about sin and salvation altogether. They will no longer say that sin is our biggest problem, but rather, our “woundedness”.

This kind of compromise for the sake of numbers, inoffensiveness, ‘decisions for Christ’, and church growth is out of line with the biblical picture of evangelism. And the scary thing is that it doesn’t stop here. Some will just try and make the lost feel loved until they ask for the gospel, which sometimes never ends up happening. Some will gut their gospel presentation into this: “God loves you so much and has a wonderful plan for your life, did you know that?” But it doesn’t even stop here.

An Army of Naked Warriors

Have you noticed that young Christians are charging out into the world to tackle unnumbered physical and social problems, while there is relatively zero interest in the greatest spiritual need of all? As one song writer put it, “social justice without the gospel is a counterfeit, merely a band-aid to a gun-shot wound.” Physical needs and actual, biblical justice issues are important and ought to be addressed, but can we pretend that souls on their way to eternal misery are not?

This army of relevant evangelicals joins in with almost every charge for social justice that the culture tells them to. Not only are they often unguided by God’s word, but they are often butt-naked and unarmed for the battle against the kingdom of Satan. Why are they naked? Because so many of them have monstrously abandoned the sharing of the gospel, the only hope for a broken and wicked world. Yes, many have decent intentions, but they sabotage themselves and sin against the oppressed by leaving the gospel at home for the sake of political correctness, wokeness, or whatever convenient excuse they can find to escape the culture’s disapproval.

Some will abandon sharing the gospel altogether because they want to “show the love of Jesus” through their good deeds in a hurting world, and they think that this will bring people to Jesus. But the thing is, truly showing the love of Jesus got the early church slaughtered. That is because it involves preaching. True love rejoices with the truth (1 Cor. 13:6), rather than hiding it under a bushel. The lost may appreciate us now for refraining to proselytize and joining in their movements, but they will hate us and gnash their teeth at us forever once they enter Hell and realize what we have done! The blood of the oppressed will drip from our hands if we address their physical needs while letting them plummet unevangelized into eternal ruin. This is not loving. This is not justice. This is not evangelism. It’s treason.

The Bad type of ‘Friendship Evangelism’

I run a street evangelism ministry which has received a decent amount of criticism from students at my Christian campus. Many critics point to a kind of misled ‘friendship’ evangelism, (which will often not end up with much real evangelism, since that can risk the friendship). They point to Jesus eating and drinking with sinners to justify their approach to ‘evangelism’ yet ignore what Jesus said he was doing: calling sinners to repentance, (Lk.5:32), not just ‘shooting the breeze’ with the lost.

If we refuse to trust the sufficiency of God and His gospel in soul-saving, we will almost inevitably compromise our message and method. While evangelism ought to be practiced in all of our relationships with the lost, and this is no excuse to not live righteous, loving lives, we must understand what is true evangelism and what is compromise: Without the gospel shared with the lost person, there is zero evangelism. Without the Holy Spirit causing people to be regenerated through the preached word, there is zero salvation. Indeed, “how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rm.10:14). As the missionary Daniel Courney says, the kinda nonsense where you wait years before considering sharing the gospel is neither friendship nor evangelism.

It is unloving to not share the gospel. It is manipulative to befriend people with the secret agenda to wait until their guards are down before we pounce on them with the gospel. We know that missionary dating is bizarre and deceptive. However, what about missionary ‘friending’ where we wait months and months before slipping the gospel into a conversation at ‘the right time’? Oftentimes those ‘friendships’ get so pleasant that we end up not even wanting to bring the gospel up because we don’t want to ruin the ‘friendship’!

If I was that unbeliever, and you befriended me and waited months to evangelize me, I would probably think, either: a. ‘You believed I was going to Hell this whole time and didn’t say anything?’ Or b. ‘This whole friendship was just a big fake ploy to convert me.’ I want to make sure that I am honest with people early on in friendships, and even in certain conversations, especially those that I consider friends, and I want to tell them the truth early on. People pour out their hearts to their friends about stupid stuff all the time. Often people cannot seem to contain their political opinions inside their heads. So why not pour out your heart for something that is the most important thing in the world?

Now sometimes I develop relationships with unbelievers a little bit before evangelizing, such as a coworker on my first day on the job, or a new roommate. But when I am sitting down and actually getting to know people, why would I hide the One I love more than life itself? The gospel doesn’t need to be the first thing that comes out of your mouth all of the time, even before you say ‘how are you doing?’. But I am guessing that this is not the prevailing problem that most of us have, and rather a straw-man that we conveniently attack. Our prevailing problem is that the gospel rarely comes out of our mouths at all, and we need to flush our convenient ‘friendship evangelism’ excuses for silence down the toilet and repent before our ‘friends’ die without knowing the gospel.

Part 1 of 2.

For more on evangelism, I highly recommend reading Even if None, by Ryan Denton, along with A Certain Sound: A Primer on Open Air Preaching, by Ryan Denton and Scott Smith.