evangelism on Evangelicalism

As a college student, I was returning to school one year on a Greyhound bus. One of the other passengers was a middle-aged man who seemed to be making the rounds, engaging various people in quiet conv...

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.

Evangelism is finding Christ already present in the world, and inviting the other into the loving belonging of the inclusive family of God.

I once asked a woman if she felt comfortable about evangelism. “Oh, yes!” she responded. “I do it twice a week.” (Somehow it sounded more like taking multiple vitamins.) Evangelism isn’t just somethin...

Evangelism is not a professional job for a few trained men, but is instead the unrelenting responsibility of every person who belongs to the company of Jesus.

Our churches struggle with being evangelistically effective because they are locked into a self-affirming subculture while the larger culture continues to move in other directions.

Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples.

In another day and age, God, religion and church enjoyed the general respect of the culture. Not today. Religion is suspect, church is weird, and Christians are hypocrites. Distrust has become the nor...

The chief agents in the expansion of Christianity appear not to have been those who made it a profession or a major part of their occupation, but men and women who earned their livelihood in some pure...

In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the 'vertical dimension' of faith and the 'horizontal dimension' of love for one's neighbor and po...

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, na...

I think one of the serious breakdowns in modern evangelism is this: it has offered too much for too little. What we do mostly is offer forgiveness. We need cleansing! There is no true conversion until...

When we reach the point where the Creed no longer looks or sounds to Christian people like a declaration of the gospel, there is need, I believe, for some whistle-blowing and reassessment of what goes...

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.

Have you ever put together an "elevator speech" or "pitch" for a job or a project? It's a 30-second (or less) statement of who you are or what you're selling which you coul...

Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes. (For contrast)

As the church get older and older it becomes harder to keep evangelism on the front burner because of all the competing issues that keeps pushing it back.

Evangelization does not consist in proselytizing, but … in humbly drawing near to those who feel distant from God and the Church, those who are fearful or indifferent, and saying to them: ‘The Lord, w...

The church that does not evangelize will fossilize.

The ministry of evangelization is an extraordinary opportunity of showing gratitude to Jesus by passing on His gospel of grace to others.

I remember being with a Christian student on a beach during an evangelism training week. Bob and I met several religious skeptics and began talking about all sorts of things. Eventually the conversati...

Prayer evangelism is talking to God about our neighbors before we talk to our neighbors about God.

The church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.

Some years ago, I was approached by a young man in our church who described himself as an “unfulfilled atheist.” He wanted to know why he should consider Christianity. I responded to him by asking him...

When I was growing up, my dad was a farmer, not a Christian. He had little interest in faith, having been told by his father that the Bible was a fairy tale. But then a local pastor took an interest i...

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.

The Great Commission is an expanding and self-replicating task, not a ticking clock for the end times.

Christians and non-Christians have something in common: we’re both uptight about evangelism. Our fear as Christians seems to be How many people did I offend this week? We think that we must be a littl...

Jesus Christ did not say “Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.”

I can remember that afternoon as if it were yesterday. I (Doug) was standing out in the middle of the green grass of the quad on campus, singing as loudly as I could. Twenty of my Christian friends an...