We all agree that evangelism is good. This question is about method: HOW should we go about it?
Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody. This is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: We welcome you back to our podcast, The Towel & The Basin.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. Today, I'm asking Jamie another listener question. A listener wrote in and they asked us, "What is the best way a church should engage in evangelism?" For instance, a programmatic approach, door to door or setting numerical goals for certain time periods, things like that, or a more grassroots approach, a day-to-day relational kind of evangelism. What is the best way? How should we think about this question?
Jamie Dew: That's definitely a hot topic in our convention right now. There's a lot of debate over evangelism. If I can just use these categories, they're the older school, maybe older guard type of concern that we're not doing things like door-to-door evangelism anymore. Perhaps you could say younger Baptists may be a little concerned about those methodologies and things of that nature. There is also some debate over the theological side of it as well. I tend to not think that that's really what's driving the status of evangelism today.
I think that there is errors on both sides. This is just me speaking here. I think that there is the error on the one side when churches and believers in those churches fail to be intentional about evangelism. By that, I mean they may say, "Oh, you don't need a program. Oh, we don't want to set numerical goals," and things like that. While I think it's certainly true to some sense that you don't have to do it that way, I do think it's a very, very typical slide from there that, if you don't set goals and if you don't set some kind of programmatic effort, then, from that, inevitably it seems to me like churches will become very non-intentional about evangelism. At the end of the day, whether you have an official program or not, the bottom line is we've got to be very intentional about evangelism. Because of that and because programs and things like that and goals do help us to be intentional, I'm inclined to think that those are good things and things that we should be doing.
Now, having said that, I think we've got to adjust and calibrate what kinds of goals that we are setting. For example, I would be reluctant to set a goal of a number of baptisms, per se, simply because I think, obviously, the conversion of all of this is something that God does and the Holy spirit does. I don't do it, you don't do it. What I'm responsible for is praying. What I'm responsible for is sharing the gospel. It is the Holy Spirit's job to actually bring conversion in a person's life.
What I would do is set a goal perhaps, maybe not so much of this number of salvations or baptisms, but I would set a goal in terms of this number of gospel presentations. Let's set a goal for the parts that we can handle and trust God to do the rest, and let's celebrate the things that we can do. We can share the gospel. When you have people that are doing that in your church, let's find ways to celebrate that, lift that up, praise God for it and let Him bring the work from it. Set goals, yes, but maybe set goals about what we're responsible to do. We're responsible to share the gospel, so let's set the goal of everything we can do to share the gospel. I think when we're doing that we're still being very intentional, but at the same time, our heart before God is postured the right way recognizing that He's the one that brings conversion, not me or you or anybody else.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. I think that's a really helpful way to look at it because, when I think about, as a church member, if someone asked me to do something that I couldn't do, I might be all on it and I might really want it to happen, but I'm really just willing it to happen, like I can't actually move that needle forward. And if we're called to be faithful, then it's a frustrating position to be in because I don't know what I need to do to be faithful in that case.
Jamie Dew: Right. Yeah. This is one of the things I like about the new who's your one initiative coming out of NAM and other groups, is that, look, this really sets that structure up nicely. You've got these three glass jars up in front of your church with orange ping pong balls in them, and the one, every time somebody commits to a one in one bucket, every time a member commits to having a who's there one, they put a ping pong ball in there. Every time they share the gospel with that person, they move it out of that bucket into the middle bucket, and then every time somebody comes to faith in Christ, they move it out of that middle bucket into the last bucket. I think that's a good visual way of celebrating this, so I'm a big fan of that initiative.
But at the end of the day, what I would say is I do think that there has to be goals for us. I am a fan of programs and things like that to the degree that they really help us to be intentional and they give our people pathways on how to do this. I think those are all really good things.
In terms of methodologies, do you go door to door? Do you do events at your church? What have you. Honestly, I think that that's entirely dependent on your context in many ways. If you were uprooted from where you're at today and you were placed in, say, Japan or China or Brazil or something like that, you would pay a lot of attention to the cultural cues of that place. If there were ways of doing things that were actually offensive to people, you'd be very careful not to do those things. I think anybody would do that. That's just good missiology at that point.
I think we've got to be good missiologists about our own culture, too. Are there places in our country that door-to-door, culturally speaking, would be embraced? Absolutely. I think you should do that. Are there other places in the country where doing that could get you shot? Yes, there are. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily don't do it. If you feel like you need to go out there and do it and get shot, then you know what, then I guess that's between you and the Lord. My point is simply this. Study your culture, find the best way to engage them. Maybe it is through door-to-door. Maybe it's through a program of some kind where you...
When I was a pastor, I remember we started... This was 2004, and when I became the pastor, one of the first things I did is I went down to the White County Register of Deeds and I got this enormous map. It was a six by six map. It was a map of basically my community. Right dead center in the map, it had my church, it had every road around it, and I had them draw a big three mile radius all the way around the church with the church in the dead center. I said to our church, "Hey, over the next two years, we are going to knock on every single door in this community. All we're going to do is we're just going to ask people if we can pray for them and invite them to church. If, from that, we get an opportunity to share the gospel, we will." And we did that. We actually knocked on every door twice over a three-year period.
Joe Fontenot: Wow.
Jamie Dew: There were lots of times we got to share the gospel. There were some people that came to faith in Christ. Can it work? Yes, it can. But here's what was interesting. After about three or four years of doing that, again, we'd gone through the whole map twice, at the end of that time, I began to notice that there was a shift in the way people would answer the door. Whereas, before, they'd just come to the door. Towards the end of that period of time, they were coming to the door much more reluctantly, much more as if I'm bothering them or maybe I've made them feel unsafe and things like that. As I began to pick up more on that, we did shift our strategy. We had done it twice, we had knocked on every door, and so then we shifted to different programs on Wednesday night with things like Awana and other things like that.
We shifted to a program in the summertimes called WOW, Wednesdays of Wonder. On Wednesdays, we have a nice little gradual hill on our property. We set up this giant tarp and turned it into a slip and slide and did crafts and slip and slide. We'd have 100, 150 kids come out on a Wednesday night and we'd have time to share the gospel with those kids and all the parents that were there.
Bottom line is find what works well in your community and do that, and then don't judge other people and other churches because they're not doing it your way. That's not fruitful. That's not fair. That's not godly. I think, at the end of the day, churches just need to be very intentional about sharing the gospel, and they need to think collectively, as in the whole church. What can we do together to share the gospel? And then find, given your context, what works.
Here's an example of finding your context. Right now, as we record this, we're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic where none of the churches are meeting face-to-face right now. What we noticed at the charts where I'm the interim pastor, First Baptist New Orleans, on a given Sunday face-to-face, we would normally have 400-ish people in attendance. But we began to notice a couple weeks ago that, within two hours of the sermon ending on Sundays, we would have 1500 views, and by a couple days later, we'd have 3000 views sometimes of these sermons. Now, some of that is just people sticking their nose in and then dipping right out. But there is a good number, there's a lot of those numbers there that they actually watched the whole service, or at least they watched all the way through the sermon.
What we noticed was, as soon as the sermon was over, even if there was another song or some announcements still to come, there's a pretty big number of people that, once the sermon's over, they just stop it and they move on. Early on, we said, "Well, we need to make sure we present the gospel every single week." At first we were doing it at the end of the service. But because they would drop off at the end of the sermon, they weren't hearing the gospel presentation. So we shifted a couple weeks ago and said, "Let's stick the gospel presentation right smack dab in the middle of the service. Let's put it right before we do the sermon." We rebuilt the order of service, there's the gospel presentation right in the middle while we got everybody on there, and then we said, "And then the sermon's going to come up here in just a second, but for now we just want to say this to us." That's making sure that the vast majority of the people that are tuning in, by the way, way more than would be on a normal face-to-face service without the COVID 19 pandemic. It's a way that we've just found that we can present the gospel to people. Anyway, find what works in that context and be faithful to do it. Be very intentional to do it. I think that's the way we've got to frame our minds.
Joe Fontenot: That's really interesting to me. I think one of the things that was very helpful that you just mentioned was essentially that things change and we have to be able to adapt to them. I think the positive example of that positive and an active change is the whole COVID-19. None of us saw that coming and it changed, and now we have to actually make a difference and change all these things, like you talked about with the Facebook Live.
I remember this story that Rick Warren told one time. He got this little crack in his mirror, and he's like, "Oh, man, it looks terrible. I got to fix my mirror. I got this crack in it." Then he put it off, and then after a while he's got this big old crack, and after a year he didn't even know it was there anymore. He had seen it so much that he just got tired of seeing it and his brain just ignored it. To me, that's the other side, the passive side of this whole thing. Where you talked about when you were doing this door-to-door strategy and you were engaging these people, but then you started to see this diminishing return. I think that's something that we have to be aware of, too. Just because it worked then doesn't mean it won't diminish in its effectiveness, and so we have to constantly be willing to change.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, you have to be willing to change, but I would say change can be an excuse to just now start doing a thing and become apathetic. You do have to maintain the intentionality. Look, my point is to say, find what works in that context, and then be very intentional about doing that. Now, are there times and places to do things that seem unorthodox or a little outside the box, so to speak, or maybe even, in the eyes of the world, ineffective or foolish? Yeah. Could it be that going door-to-door is foolish? Well, maybe, but here's the thing. There are times and places in the Old Testament and in the New where God has His people do some rather strange things, what on the surface seems like it would never, ever, ever work.
For example, I think about the walls of Jericho. My gosh. Who would ever do it that way? Who would ever march around the walls of Jericho with trumpets and stuff instead of attacking them with swords and arrows and things like that? Well, God would. Did it work? Yeah, it did. At the end of the day, let's be intentional and faithful to do it, pay attention to the context you're in, and if there are things that just really are not going to be effective in that place, then adjust accordingly. No matter what, let's be intentional about doing it in everything we do.
Joe Fontenot: Awesome. This has been super helpful. Thanks, Jamie.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, man.
Hey, everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe Fontenot: If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: If you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.