If you want your evangelism program to fail, read this.

If you want your evangelism program to fail, read this.

Programs with a focus on converting the lost, however well-intended, are going to fail.

In our post-modern culture (and all around the globe where pre-modernism and modernism is still in vogue for that matter), recipients of evangelistic efforts are savvy enough to know when they are being targeted for conversion. And the natural impulse will be to run! Far away! 

No one wants to be a project, a notch on the back of someone's King James Bible.

If you want your evangelism to succeed, stop counting nickels and noses.  Stop keeping records.

You mean my goal shouldn't be to convert the lost?  

RIGHT!  

EXACTLY!

I can hear the criticism:  but Jesus commanded us in the Great Commission to make disciples.  Go into all the world!

I get that.  Believe me, I do. I've been there, working on a foreign soil. For years.

And I'm all for the Great Commission. 

What I'm saying is that our goal shouldn't be to convert the lost.  Our goal should be to LOVE the lost.  And if we do......guess what? Conversion will follow.

When Jesus talked about love, he instructed us in the strongest language:  "A new COMMANDMENT I give to you."  (Capitalization is mine.)

This is the missing ingredient in failed evangelism programs. If our goal is simply to love (work benevolently on behalf of someone else for their benefit, not yours) the lost, they will be closer to conversion than if they heard a set of four spiritual laws or the Roman road. 

I've come back to 1Corinthians 13 over and over and over.  You can do everything, even give all your money away to the poor, work tirelessly walking door to door, preaching a message, but if you do not love, your words and actions will not sound a clear message. It will be as effective as a cracked cymbal.  

I know from personal experience that especially in cross-cultural, cross religion (Muslim) evangelism efforts, love in deed will carry your message much farther than a factual word alone.

I'm not against evangelism programs. I'm only saying that they must be grounded in a heart of love for the lost or all program efforts will be ineffective.

OK, I've vented now. I'll get off my soapbox and go back to writing.

        And I hope, loving my readers well with a good story. 'Cause if I'm not loving them with a good story and only "messaging" them with the Gospel, my communication will be ineffective, see?

Grace,

Harry Lee

PS:  The picture is a friend of mine, Mark Newton, MD, showing love in ACTION. I've been with Mark on numerous trips into a country closed to open evangelism.  But guess what? No country is closed to love!