pat loughery

God appears to be stirring the hearts of our gathering to evangelism. I’ve had conversations with 3 folks in our church this week about what evangelism looks like for us – we’re really grappling with that.

In case 3 different people doesn’t seem to be all that many, you should realize that it’s 15-20% of our entire church body ;-).

Evangelism for us is interesting. We’re a multi-generational church, out in the suburbs – a bedroom community for Seattle and the tech-filled Eastside. Moderns and postmoderns, young and less young. We’re all trying to understand how we can share our faith walk with our friends, and make it intriguing, and value those relationships by not being into sales pitch or hyperaggressiveness, etc.

Isn’t evangelism really just “Hey, here’s what’s happened to ME because of God’s overwhelming love for me, and my sporadic attempts at holiness and faith and discipleship. Like this one time, I was talking on the phone to a friend who’d been hospitalized 6 times for pneumonia, and he asked me to pray for him, so I did, not really believing anything would change – but his lungs were healed, and his doctor was amazed and he got to leave the hospital. I was amazed.(*) Pretty cool, huh?”

Is it any more than that? That, and being conscious of the leading of the Holy Spirit, the Counsellor, to see what God’s working on in the person’s life that you hang out with?

I think we need to invent a new word to replace “evangelism”. Maybe the process of acting as a signpost to Christ is “blorsamba” or “profishiating” or “glipsch”. Those sound less scary, don’t they?

But then again, maybe our fear about evangelism in this New World is that nobody’s printed up the exactly right 6 Guaranteed Steps to Hope in Christ and Fabulous Riches gospel tract for us to slip onto a thousand cars’ windshields.

(*)True story. Faith-empty prayers over the telephone sometimes work. God’s fantastic.