Not clear why you hear that considering that I said my pastor does open air preaching every week.
What I am concerned about is what sort of evangelism we call on ordinary Christians to do, and how they are equipped.
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Maybe this will get me into trouble, but I think it’s pertinent to ask how the gospel itself is being articulated? What does a typical summary look like?
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The distinction you imply here between preaching the gospel by an ordained man and personal evangelism by the layman is an important one. I don’t remember ever hearing anybody else make it, though. I became aware of it slowly by running into a group of college kids that believed all Christians need to do evangelism daily. However, their definition basically meant that they wouold walk up to a stranger, preach a gospel message to them, and walk away. Without going into details, I had some real concerns with what I was seeing, especially as I was the pastor of a couple of them. As I began to study, I realized that the NT speaks almost exclusively of ordained men preaching the gospel (including some ordained deacons).
Whereas the general command to all Christians is to always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is within you.
I don’t think the lines are super clear, but I do think there is a distinction between personal evangelism and preaching the gospel, and that personal evangelism is almost by definition “friendship evangelism.” I think that many Christians are quite unprepared and unwilling to actually speak to the people they know about spiritual things, but I suspect that part of the reason is because we have been unwilling to distinguish between the two things.
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I am aware that you said your pastor open-air preaches, but perceived that a main point of your post was to question the effectiveness of it. Forgive me if I misunderstood.
This is where we better focus our attention, now. It is evangelism and there are many changes of thinking we need to make to accommodate this fact. One of the most frequent problems the dividing of the church today brings on is the hostility of parents to their child’s conversion from decaying Christendom to Christian faith. This opposition shakes these converts to the core just as it shakes Asians to the core when they face spiritual departure from their ancestors. Pastors today who are unaware or unwilling or opposed to doing and saying anything that will alienate other (especially Reformed) pastors in the process of evangelism and discipleship are going to be largely fruitless. They’ll be limited to low-hanging fruit. Love,
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I share Bnon’s concern here. It seems to be in all what’s been said above that “the gospel” is a discrete and altogether agreed upon thing. Here are a couple of NT data points, however, which I’m trying to find in what’s urged (by anyone!) in the posts above:
Peter’s first sermon in Acts 2 opens with an OT prophecy of the Day of the Lord, when the Lord (among other things) returns (as my Marine Corps drill instructor would put it) “to kick ass and take names.” In his “preaching” to the fellows in Athens, Paul also drills down to this: " 31 For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising Him from the dead.”"
For what it’s worth - excepting for those few who are scorned for being “hellfire and brimstone” preachers - I don’t hear this theme of the coming judgment when reading or listening to evangelists from time to time.
Maybe I should get out more? Or is that theme missing? Or deliberately avoided?
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I think this typo needs correcting to “kick ass.”
Funny how some typos reverse the meaning completely.
Indeed! I’ve made (and double-checked) the typo. If, indeed, it was a typo. Is there auto-correct on this platform?
Anyhoo - my drill instructor (to whom I’m eternally grateful) never made that sort of mistake!
I think there is a certain small subset of people that are willing to address the issue of judgment, but obviously many are shy of mentioning it.
On a related note, and connecting back to the main topic of conversation, I’ve told people that the best thing they can do to strengthen their evangelistic muscles is simply to practice answering hard yes/no questions without embarrassment or compromise. In other words, practice saying “Yes.” Practice saying “No.” Here is one example question I’ve been asked more than once:
“But you’re not one of those Christians that believes that people who are gay are going to Hell are you?”
Granted, there are a lot of ways to say, “Yes.” One time I said, “I believe what the Bible says. Let’s see what it has to say.” I then read a couple of verses to them. “So yes, that’s what I believe. Homosexuality is a sin, and sinners that don’t repent go to Hell.” After answering a couple of other hard questions I invited this woman and her children to church. Although I didn’t know it, the teenage daughter who was listening was in a homosexual relationship. She gave me her dad’s phone number and asked me to call and invite him, too. All of them came to church. I believe my straightforward, unembarrassed answer to the question was a large part of why she was open to coming.
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This immediately brought to mind the conversion of my brother. I had either (1) become a believer recently, or (2) gotten genuinely “woke” in the Ephesians 5:14 sense. I was 22 years old and recently returned to undergraduate studies after a sobering-up sojourn in Viet Nam in the United States Marine Corps. I had been attending a Bible Church, pastored by a DTS grad, who was the first pastor I’d ever ran across who expounded the Scriptures in the pulpit.
So, I was sort of feeling my spiritual oats, when coming home for a Thanksgiving break.
Two of my Mom’s siblings had married Mormon lassies. Somehow they came up in the conversation, and I opined that it was too bad they were all going to hell. This rubbed Mom’s fur the wrong way, and she indignantly challenged my impudence to say such a thing.
Knowing from long memory that an ebullient bug tussle was in the offing, I made a strategic correction. “Well, you’re right - I can’t see their hearts. But, I do know this: if the only thing they believe is what the Mormon Church teaches them, they’re gong to hell.”
Mom didn’t know much about the gospel herself, and so she didn’t recognize the correction for what it was. And, so, off we went for the next couple of hours - a vigorous challenge/counter-challenge sort of debate, where I was laying out the gospel, including our Lord’s and the Apostles’ warnings about false teachers, damnation of such, the coming judgment, and so forth.
All this transpired in our family den before dinner. What I did not notice was my 11-year old brother, sitting in a corner on the floor, taking this all in.
Fast forward another decade . . . my brother and I are reminiscing about various things, and the topic of our conversions came up. He related to me that he’d actually trusted Christ within a few hours after this debate between me and Mom over her Mormon siblings.
“I was terrified,” he recalled. “I thought the floor was going to collapse under me and I’d fall down into hell. After supper I went to my room, while the rest of you watched football on television. I pleaded with Jesus to save me from hell, to forgive me my sins.”
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A bit more, w.r.t preaching the judgement to come.
This is Ray Comfort’s main point, that and preaching the Law, so he has inspired many along those lines. I have two questions in this respect:
- Preaching the Law and Judgement needs to be done, but is it, in our setting, the best place to start?
- Also, Ray does not do anything, as far as I can see, with respect to telling people to “count the cost” (cf. Bonhoeffer - “when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die”). Maybe he thinks that if the proper conviction of sin is there, that this does not need to be done? I don’t know. Anyway, I am sure that this does need to be done.
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Just picked it up off the book shelf to re-read it.
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So often it is the case that Christians think some variation of “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” is the best method of evangelism. Or maybe the only way.
7-8 years ago my pastor taught an evangelism class at our church that was very helpful, at least for me. I’ve thought back on it numerous times when explaining Christianity, even when talking to my kids. It is really easy to remember too.
The name of the material is 2 Ways to Live. Here is a brief excerpt from the website:
Jesus himself is the focus of the Christian message or ‘gospel’. However, Jesus does not arrive in a vacuum. He arrives as the culmination of God’s plans, and their outworking in history. He comes and dies and rises, “according to the Scriptures”. He arrives in the context of all that God has already revealed about himself and humanity.
All this is part of the background or ‘worldview’ that the biblical authors took for granted, but which many modern (or postmodern) people do not share. If we are to know and tell the gospel in a world where these basic assumptions about God and human guilt are no longer shared, or even common, then we need to fill in some of the rest of the story. We need to provide some of the background.
This is what Two Ways to Live seeks to do. It fills in some of the wider story of the Bible, some of the biblical theology, so that the message about Jesus makes sense.
If you are completely new to Two Ways to Live, you may like to pause at this point and read through the basic text of the outline, as found in the online presentation of Two ways to live. You will see that the six points not only provide a brief summary of the whole story of the Bible, but fit logically together as a coherent set of propositions.
- God the creator; humanity ruling under his authority.
2.Humanity rebels, wishing to run things its own way.
3.God judges (and will judge) humanity for this rebellion.
4.In his love, God sends Jesus to die as an atoning sacrifice.
5.In his power, God raises Jesus to life as ruler and judge.
6.This presents us with a challenge to repent and believe.
Edited to add: Earlier I posted this comment without realizing that most of it was somehow cut off. I added the rest of what I originally intended to comment.
This is an aspect about evangelism that is so often overlooked. Often, the person you’re talking to is resistant and shows no fruit… but the people standing around listening and watching without speaking are deeply affected.
We have to remember that when we do our work and are tempted to be discouraged. You just don’t know the effect that your words will have.
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In open air preaching my pastor starts with a discussion of some ordinary concern or situation likely faced by the people walking by and uses it as a springboard to describe sin and our transgression of God’s law, judgment, and the offer of salvation in Christ. On the one hand, he’s not a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but on the other hand, I’ve never heard him speak the phrase “human flourishing”. All of his messages are short because he preaches during the ten minute period between class times.
Let me clarify. Note that I also said: The church should continue to preach God’s law and Man’s accountability, but with the strong cultural conditioning against a sense of sin, we should not be surprised by the lack of response, humanly speaking. By “church”, I was referring to those licensed to preach. It is true that I think my pastor’s open air preaching is demonstrably ineffective at bringing unchurched Americans to faith, but it is also true that I am glad that he continues to persevere.
Additionally, I was curious to see how typical my pastor’s experience is, and hearing from @tbbayly, it seems rather par for the course.
Yes, I agree. It seems to be (or perhaps used to be) a common expectation among Evangelicals that ordinary Christians should be “witnessing” or “sharing the gospel” frequently, thus driving the behavior of those college kids you describe. Or alternatively, Christians feel guilty because they are not doing what those college kids are doing. Recently, I heard it said, “If everyone around you was suffering from a horrible fatal disease and you knew the cure, wouldn’t you want to run around telling it to everyone you saw?” And yet running around and telling everyone the Gospel is not what we see Christians doing. Why?
One reason might be that Christians do not understand the depth of their sin and therefore are insufficiently excited about the cure. Another reason might be that they are insufficiently equipped to tell people what the cure is, therefore motivating training programs like Evangelism Explosion. A third reason might be fear of hostile responses. But what I am thinking (and perhaps am relying too much on my personal feelings) is that the predominant reason is that ordinary Christians find it difficult to go up repeatedly against persistent indifference. How long would people continue to run around eagerly telling the cure to a horrible fatal disease if every person they met had zero interest because they didn’t realize they were sick?
If ordinary Christians are unwilling to talk to people they know about spiritual things, how much of that is caused by lack of preparation, etc., and how much is caused by the perception that the person they would talk to wouldn’t be interested?
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Doug Wilson had a very helpful article addressing some of these evangelism issues in Credenda Agenda.
I can’t seem to find it online at the moment, but it is this one:
Volume 14 Number 6
Presbyterion: Guilt-free Evangelism
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Well, Bnon - I’m gonna join you in stirring the pot. 
A typical summary of the gospel - there’s one right there in the beginning of the 15th chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians:
Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel
which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. 6 After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. 7 After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. 8 Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.
In recent comments, I and others have noted the absence of the theme of the coming judgment from modern evangelism, and the much higher profile of this theme in the preaching of John, our Lord, and his Apostles.
Is that theme present in Paul’s succinct statement of what he calls “the gospel” which he preached, by which the Corinthians were saved if they believe it? Possibly so, if one were to unpack that pregnant phrase “died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”
But, there’s more here! Paul says that the gospel WHICH MUST BE BELIEVED IN ORDER TO SAVE A MAN includes a belief in our Lord’s resurrection!
Again - along with the theme of judgment, I almost never hear the resurrection of our Lord from the dead as an idea to be embraced when the evangelist is preaching. Moreover, those who name the name of Christ and deny his bodily resurrections . . . well, that sounds very much like believing in vain, don’t you think?
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Fr. Bill, it’s interesting you say that. I’m fairly sure my pastor thinks I believe a false gospel, because I have criticized the idea of preaching Jesus’ death for atonement in favor of his resurrection for enthronement.
But every time the NT summarizes the gospel for us, the fundamental element which is always explicit is that God has now established his kingdom. In fact, I believe this is why the Greek word euangelion is used in the New Testament: the term had already acquired the technical meaning in classical Greek of a message of victory. By the time of Jesus, the terms “gospel” and “savior” were used together commonly to refer to the (ostensibly) glad tidings of an emperor establishing his rule. A “gospel” was a message of triumph proclaimed on behalf of a “savior” who had brought order, harmony and healing by taking dominion upon his shoulders—what in Hebrew you might call a…sar shalom…
In the gospels themselves, this is primarily anticipatory; the message of the kingdom being established through the ministry of Jesus. After the cross, though, every time the gospel is summarized it is specific on this central point:
- God has now established his eternal kingdom through the vindicating resurrection of his chosen king, Jesus.
Two other elements are also always implicit on the surface, and often completely explicit:
- Every person is required to turn to King Jesus from their previous loyalties to escape his judgment;
- When we do, our sins will be blotted out and we will inherit eternal life in his kingdom.
But the key point is that when the NT abbreviates the gospel holistically—unless I have missed some place—it always does so by presenting Jesus as the risen and reigning king, and demanding a response to his impending judgment. It is then generally the effect of our response, and because of his kingly right to judge, that we receive and have confidence in our personal vindication before his Father. In Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 15, justification—but also glorification—is presupposed as the result of the gospel rather than an element in its message; in Acts 2 and 17 it is omitted entirely, pending the audience’s response; in Acts 13 it is a more central benefit of Jesus’ kingship. Justification, in other words, is the result of Jesus’ triumph over every other power, and often is the solution that Peter and Paul offer only once their audiences have declared their loyalties—whether to Jesus, or whether to themselves and their gods.
And Jesus’ death receives even less focus. I’m not suggesting that the atonement doesn’t underwrite our justification, but in the Bible’s own gospel summaries, our salvation is not generally framed within Jesus’ death for sin. Jesus’s death is not even always mentioned explicitly. It is only linked to atonement once (1 Corinthians 15), and is half the time omitted entirely (Acts 17; Romans 1). Rather, it is the resurrection which receives focus.
So here’s the worry that prompted me to raise the question of how the gospel is preached:
Whereas the apostles front-load the gospel with Jesus’ resurrection for worldwide kingship, evangelicals front-load it with his death for sin. Thus, whereas the New Testament’s gospel is a message about all-encompassing cosmic restoration through Jesus’ resurrection and enthronement, today’s gospel is a message about individual moral restoration through Jesus’ death and atonement.
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Hi Bnonn. How about Galatians 3:1? “Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.”
This was in the context of comparing “believing what you heard” with works of the law.
Whereas the apostles front-load the gospel with Jesus’ resurrection for worldwide kingship, evangelicals front-load it with his death for sin. Thus, whereas the New Testament’s gospel is a message about all-encompassing cosmic restoration through Jesus’ resurrection and enthronement, today’s gospel is a message about individual moral restoration through Jesus’ death and atonement.
- I’m not convinced that these approaches are mutually exclusive, in that you cannot have cosmic restoration without individual restoration, and possibly vice versa.
- The views you are putting forward seem to be like the view of the atonement sometimes known as Christus Victor, but would welcome confirmation or otherwise from people who know more about this than I think I do. That said, interesting post!