Friday Finds

From Chuck Lawless, Billy Graham School of Evangelism

• Evangelism in many churches is about believers responding to a guest who first visited the church rather than their proactively sharing Christ.  If the non-believer (whom we may not know personally) makes the first move, we are then ready to respond with the gospel.
• Evangelism is sometimes reduced to “invite others to church, where someone else (the preacher) will tell them about Jesus” — and even then more corporately than individually.  In that case, nobody does personal evangelism.
• In some congregations, evangelizing takes place more on the international mission field — as essential as that task is — than in a church member’s neighborhood.  The same believer who travels overseas to speak of Christ through a translator often leapfrogs his own unbelieving neighbors who speak the same language.
• Despite the New Testament emphasis on laity, many churches still relegate evangelism to hired clergy.  As one church member told me, “We pay them to do that because they’re the ones trained for it.”  Personal involvement in evangelism is thus equated with putting a check in the offering plate on Sunday.

Michael Spencer, in a post from May, writes:

“Neither do I condemn you. Now go, and sin no more.”

When the quality of God’s mercy in the Gospel no longer amazes you, you will begin to justify the dilution of amazing grace into religious grace, or moral grace, or grace in response to something.

Real grace is simply inexplicable, inappropriate, out of the box, out of bounds, offensive, excessive, too much, given to the wrong people and all those things.