evangelism on Persuasion

A wealthy Dutch collector was searching for a rare diamond to complete his collection. When a renowned New York dealer located the perfect stone, he invited the man to come see it in person. The Du...

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

Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

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...

Lee Strobel tells an amazing story about the power of the Holy Spirit to act apart from our own knowledge. Well, one average and routine day I was packing up my briefcase and getting ready to leave ...

Setting the Context:  After the introductory tag from 2:14a this week’s text begins with “therefore” in 2:36 (Greek oun , which is the second word in verse 36 in the Greek text), making it especially...

Here is my grid for how I think of what to say when given the platform by a friend out of trust – a friend who is not following Jesus: I want to honor the friendship by doing exactly what he’s asked ...

Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.

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...

Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not 'How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?' but 'How...

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...

Jesus said, "you will receive power, when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Holy S...

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...

When God is seeking a person, he will not allow my fear, my feeling of intimidation or my lack of knowledge or experience to prevent that person from finding him.

"What you have heard from me In the presence of many witnesses in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will be able to teach others also." Lord, as we worsh...

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

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

Trust is sweet. It is better than gold. Trust is always a gift of the heart, and therefore it just may be the most precious thing in life, next to love. Trust between two people is so valuable and pre...

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...

If my testimony of the gospel revolves around a plotline of, “I used to struggle with this, but God gave me the victory and now I’m free/healed/saved/fill in the blank,” I have immediately distanced m...

George MacLeod of the Iona Community related a conversa­tion that he had with a Marxist who had never heard an explana­tion of basic Christianity. The man listened with wonder and sur­prise. Finally, ...

The Transitive Property of Welcoming In elementary school math you learn various basic principles of working with numbers…the commutative property, the associative property, the distributive property...

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

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.

Merciful God, you have moved and changed our lives in amazing ways, yet we have kept these stories to ourselves. We confess the times we have kept these stories to ourselves out of fear of rejection a...

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...

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...

May the Holy Spirit empower you now and always to speak and live the Good News of Jesus for you and for all. Amen.

It was impossible for me (Doug) to become Mark’s friend. He always avoided eye contact with me though I would smile and say hi as I passed him in the dorm. I had no idea what was going on in his heart...

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...