Simon Cox Blog: Evangelism: Just Do Something

Friday, 20 July 2018

Evangelism: Just Do Something

It’s high time we started sharing the gospel with the people around us.

Sometimes, when people read the word evangelism, they stop reading. They think it doesn’t matter to them and they move on to doing something else with their day.

Below I want to highlight a few things to help you, especially if you are a pastor or church leader, to find new, intentional ways to prioritize evangelism in the life of your church and ministry, as well as in your own personal life.

Decline in Evangelism

The major problem with evangelism today is that we have seen a bottoming out of interest on the subject. There are a few reasons for that. Reason number one is that older methods of evangelism have lost credibility. That’s not always a good thing. I can see how people might think a different method would work better, and that’s great—if you’re actually doing it. But what I hear is people more likely to make fun of evangelistic methods than engage in evangelism.

What we have today is that most of the old evangelism methods, such as Spring and Fall revivals for evangelism or door-to-door visitation evenings, are not being used as much today. People say they’re too obtrusive or ineffective. Again, I’m not 100% sure that’s helpful. I’m for any means of evangelism where the gospel is shared.

Instead of people replacing older evangelistic strategies with new strategies that they feel better fit our time and cultural context, we seem to have replaced these old strategies with a new level of angst.

Ultimately, that means evangelism doesn’t get done.

For example, evidence of lessening interest in evangelism can be seen in the huge decline in the number of evangelism conferences that are hosted and attended. We just finished hosting the Amplify Conference, which is now ...