The Miracle of Evangelism

I want to bring to conscious awareness what our hearts already know. We need to pull our minds into alignment with the Spirit. For Americans, that’s rarely simple. Our culture is so alien and hostile to the work of God that we require a substantial amount of help throughout the whole range of our basic assumptions.

Once again, let me as you to think for a moment about the implications of the Doctrine of Election. We don’t know who they are, so it’s a matter of shooting in the dark. However, the issue is not accurate aim, but using the right ammunition. We need to insure that our evangelism targets the Elect, not those whose spirits are dead.

We need to ditch the concept of “outreach” as a combination of charity and evangelism. Those two activities are distinctly different in purpose. Charity we should engage; that’s a fundamental requirement of divine revelation. But we know it won’t change their eternal destiny in any way, and we should shape such work accordingly. Evangelism is specifically targeted work of touching the Elect, and it calls for a different approach.

It’s not that the two cannot be combined, but that our basic assumptions should be quite different from what most churches hold. What draws the Elect does not work for the rest of humanity. People coming into the Covenant is a miracle, 100%. It’s not a human decision. Joining your particular community is a human decision, but the awakening of spiritual awareness is not.

We don’t need people joining the community just so they can eat. While it is well nigh impossible to prevent that, the issue is our expectations of how charity works, and how evangelism works. A single meal now and then is one thing. Taking family ownership of a life is another. The minimum standard for extending covering to someone is their contribution to the family structure itself. It’s not so much human productivity we seek, but the edification of the body through love.

The mission of the community is teaching how to love. That is the whole thing. We have a very strong body of teaching on how to handle the inevitable conflicts that arise; that’s the bulk of what we should be teaching. There is no real distinction between doctrine and behavior in Scripture. Doctrine is the frame of reference, but the objective is how to get along as a family.

The church sales pitch is an abomination. We should make it a tad difficult to join so that we keep out those who offer only an empty belly. We can find plenty of those everywhere. What we seek are our eternal brothers and sisters, hoping to bring them home. Evangelism should be tailored for that kind of search.

The way to reach them is not advertising the results of our covenant obedience, the miracles and blessings. Rather, it’s the challenge of that obedience. The Elect will be drawn to the high privilege of enduring testing. It’s martyrdom, not marketing.

Stop and think about this for a moment: There is nothing at all humans do in this world that matters beyond pulling together the Elect into their native agape community. Every other endeavor is a waste of time and resources. This is what God says. The greatest human or artificial intelligence is of no significance. The only thing God will care about on Judgment Day is whether you embraced your divine privileges or not.

The key to divine privilege is to walk in the Covenant, to observe the moral boundaries. We should maintain a good-natured distinction from the world. We are called to dis-assimilate, to pull out of the world around us. Whether or not we also go into hiding would be a function of divine calling and conviction, of prophetic guidance in the context of the times. But the utter necessity of distinguishing ourselves from the world is no joke. The rest of the world should think we are strange and generally not like us.

This is how we evangelize, how we call out to the Elect.