Reprise: The Folly of American Style Evangelism

This actually deserves a book, but we can start here with a rehash of previous material.
Evangelism and False Guilt
Nothing in Scripture obliges you to go out and cold call people with your gospel sales pitch.
The entire notion of activist religion does not arise from Scripture. It comes from people who did not know the Word of God, but did know some Bible verses, and were utterly convinced by what was then the modern cultural mythology of fixing humans. The entire business of what most people call “soul winning” is not in the Bible. That silliness arose after the Industrial Revolution got under way and people began to believe they could solve the world’s problems.
First, we must understand that people who are spiritually dead cannot be persuaded to believe the gospel message. Only the mighty hand of God can work that miracle; people with dead spirits are not even capable of wanting spiritual birth. The Bible says that bluntly in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (especially ch. 8). You and I have no power to change that, nor has God somehow placed upon us some burden of responsibility for making it happen.
Indeed, aside from the basic requirement that you be able to answer simple questions about your faith when non-believers ask, you need not worry too much about what to say. You most certainly do not need forty weeks of classes to teach you various memorized manipulative spiels so people can pretend they got saved.
What you are commanded to do in Scripture, unless you are called to preach and teach, is simply live that message. People shouldn’t have to ask if you are a Christian. Your evangelism is living the truth, speaking the truth as would naturally be the case in your normal course of business. You don’t even have to announce a single thing, just say “no” when someone encourages you to do something you know isn’t right.
More than anything else, people should know you care about them, but not much about stuff. You’ll be responsible with things delivered into your care, but you know in your heart nothing you can see or touch is really worth that much. People matter, but only in the sense they see God’s glory. Not their feelings, nor their knowledge, nor even their sorrows, but their understanding that there is such a thing as sacrificial love.
That’s your obligation. God did not require of anyone to sell the gospel, as if it were some market product. The American delusion with sales and marketing has created a vast collection of spiritually dead religious institutions.
During my ministerial training, a wise old preacher told me, “In every congregation, you’ve got a lot of people who don’t do much of anything. They are members, but it doesn’t seem they are actually born-again. There are a bunch more who do stuff, but try to avoid decision making. They are faithful, but want no part of keeping discipline. They’ll try to go with the flow on voting and such. You have to pastor them, too.” This is wrong. Not that they should not be pastored, but we should not settle for that. It’s wrong on several levels.
First, we have here a reflection of the false model of church structure. This situation assumes a business model, not the proper biblical concept of the family. Too often a pastor refers to his “church family” when it means nothing more than a CEO referring to his “corporate family” — words to justify demanding an organizational devotion. A church has business aspects, but its basic identity is not as a business. Membership guidelines should reflect courtship and marriage, not contract negotiations. It is scripturally impossible to treat each new member the same regarding entrance, because each carries their own baggage, needs, and gifts. We have too hastily drawn each candidate into our churches in the drive for numbers.
Second, that preacher assumes it rests on human power to run a church. A proper biblical church is saved by grace and must continue in grace. While we acknowledge the factors of psychology and group dynamics, we defy them to have the last word. Those behavioral sciences are tools to diagnose spiritual problems, to which the real solution is the Spirit, which may or may not include using standard behavioral remedies. We do not accept the human norms for a divine operation. We do not sit down and calculate an acceptable level of loss, of carrying a certain amount of dead weight, and focusing on simple “smooth operation.” If all you want is organizational tranquility, try a graveyard. People living and growing in Christ is messy, all the way to the top.
Third, this all puts the organization in the center, rather than the individual believer. While we might say good words about individual needs, we don’t act on them. We’ve been conditioned to think quite backwards, because seeking the health of the group should take us through the lives of every individual. The group is not, and should not be, some homogeneous thing, but a collection of unique individuals. Adding or removing any one person changes the character of the group. If we follow the concept of courtship and family, no one can possibly be left to their own devices with some unspoken requirement to fit themselves into the group. We don’t sell our faith as a standard package offered to all candidates. Evangelism is enticing new members by the greatness of our love for them; discipleship is continuing that courtship by pulling them ever closer and more deeply into family involvement.
Fourth, we assume too much a tightly limited involvement, as if church was just one more thing people do. It’s not about scheduling a few hours of each week for something added to a busy life. The Kingdom of God is central to a person’s being, or they have no part at all in it. Faith in Christ is not a selection of minor adjustments to your normal routine, born on a sales pitch offering a better way to do those routine activities. It is a complete disruption of the routine, consuming it and subsuming it wholly under a new and all-encompassing regime. We offer the one thing in life these people really need, regardless whether they are conscious of that need when we encounter them. It may require shedding everything they felt mattered up to that point because it most surely requires we stop caring about this world. We are citizens of Heaven and this world is just shadows and deceptions. We keep alive in this dead world a glorious sacrificial love from Heaven.
Everyone can do evangelism, because everyone knows how to fall in love. Winning souls is more about winning hearts. Perhaps some would say it’s too easy for sinners to mistake what we are offering. Yes, it’s more dangerous than the standard soul-winning approach, but “danger” is one of the primary adjectives of a life following Jesus. Remember that business of bearing your own cross? Part of this risk is due to the Western twisted cultural view of love. We have a mandate from God for redeeming human misunderstandings. Everyone has an almost instinctive grasp of proper boundaries.
Our primary struggle is not against lack of intellectual knowledge about evangelism, nor against the inertia overcome by behavioral conditioning. Even lunatics could be successful with that standard. Our primary struggle is getting people to understand the very nature of sacrificial love, of healing their emotional injuries so they can reach out from their very inner nature. We depend too much on the imagery of soldiers, but have forgotten the chief weapon is the Word of God, a phrase referring to a Divine Person, who personifies love.