Define what is evangelism part 5

What is Evangelism? — Part 5

This entry is part 5 of 10 in the series Define Evangelism

I appreciate some of the comments received so far.

I’ll wrap up the discussion on our evangelism definition by simply highlighting the last part of the definition of evangelism that I use.

Joyfully sharing the good news of the sovereign love of God,
and calling people

to repentance,
to personal faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord,
to active membership in the church, and
to obedient service in the world.

A Fourfold invitation

There is a four fold invitation described in this definition: Calling people to

to repentance
to personal faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord
to active membership in the church
to obedient service in the world.

Most models of evangelism that I’m familiar with focus almost exclusively on 1 and 2 above.

Evangelists and missionaries hit the streets with their tracts, acts of compassion, drama teams, go door to door, to the parks, and then record “decisions for Christ” on their papers somewhere and send their supporters the good news.

Sometimes, a name or phone number is collected with the idea being that it’ll be given to a local pastor and hopefully, there will be some integration into a local church. I don’t know if anyone has ever done a count of those that never got connected to a church.

I’ve been around long enough and done this long enough to see that such methods focus so much on the decision, instead of a more holistic approach of integrating a person into the fellowship of a church and renewing them to serve the world.

I’ve been guilty of focusing on decisions without the integration to a local church in the past, and now I prefer to do church based evangelistic events or to work with a church that is doing evangelism.

Calling for repentance and decision to accept Christ is part of the process of evangelism. Thus begins the disciple making process, and it begins or continues with getting connected to a local church for service to the world.

Let’s not forget that as we do our evangelism.

Active membership is a theological term from our form of government (PC USA), but the idea is clearly active involvement in a local church.