Simon Cox Blog: Evangelicals Still Want to Evangelize Jews, But Not for the Same Reasons

Wednesday, 28 February 2018

Evangelicals Still Want to Evangelize Jews, But Not for the Same Reasons

Survey finds sharing the gospel with God’s “chosen people” is less tied to the end times.

The overwhelming majority of evangelical believers in the US today still see the importance of sharing the gospel with the Jewish community. But they’re less likely to agree on the relationship between Jewish evangelism and the end times, which once was a significant motivator of such outreach.

In a survey released today at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville, LifeWay Research found that 87 percent of Americans with evangelical beliefs agree that “sharing the gospel with Jewish people is important,” with just 3 percent disagreeing and 11 percent unsure [infographic below].

“According to the Great Commission, Jews need the gospel as much as everybody else and therefore should not be excluded from evangelism,” said Tuvya Zaretsky, president of the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism (LCJE) and a longtime leader with Jews for Jesus.

As CT previously examined, the Lausanne Movement and the World Evangelical Alliance in 1989 endorsed the call to evangelize to Jewish people, rather than supporting a “two covenant” theology that views God as having his own covenant with the Jews, who therefore do not need to claim Christ. Many denominations agree, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

“The gospel is the only hope of salvation for all people, first proclaimed among the Jewish people, and nothing’s changed about that,” said Zaretsky, a Messanic Jew who came to faith in 1970.

“When Jesus spoke the words recorded in John 14:6—‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’—he was speaking ...