I’ve been working through the Bible Society’s report on what they are referring to as a !Quiet Revival.” As well as noting increased church attendance amongst younger people, the report also observed that a significant number of people expressed willingness to either attend church or read the Bible, if invited to.
I think this should help us to think about Evangelistic strategy. The presumption in many Evangelical quarters for some time has been that people are not interested and are unlikely to respond to a straight Gospel interaction. The result is that we’ve created all kinds of strategies including events and activities where we hope to hook people in with the offer of x or y then once we have connected with them, our hope is that this will lead to Gospel conversations.
Now, if it is true that 36% of 18-24 year olds are interested in discovering more about the bible, then that still leaves 64% who presumably are not just as whilst there are a lot of people who would consider attending church if invited, the vast majority still do not show much inclination. The likelihood then is that if you start offering to read the bible with friends and neighbours or invite them to church, most of the will still say no. The point though is that if you want people to come with you to church then you need to start asking. If you ask 10 people then 7 of them are unlikely to have any interest but 3 of them might consider it. Remember, considering doesn’t always equate to following up but if 100 people are invited to your church and if that means 31 of them are open to the idea of saying yes. Even if not all of them will attend , there is a good possibility that some will. Similarly, if I take 100 Gospels to give out, there is a good chance that 18 people will not only say yes to taking a copy of Luke but would be interested in reading it and finding out more.
I remember that a few years ago, I worked with OM teams. The team members were keen to do things to connect with people and one thing they wanted to do was to go and pick up litter in the hope it would lead to conversations about why they were doing this. Another thing they tried doing was offering free cups of tea, Some people would stop and ask the litter pickers what they were doing and some people did accept a free coffee or tea. However lots of people passed by both situations without engaging. As many people declined a free cuppa as accepted one. At the time, I was also discovering that if I simply walked up and down the high Street with a handful of Gospels, people were just as likely to accept a copy of Luke as they were to take a cup of tea, Indeed, I was probably just as likely to get into conversation as the litter pickers.
This doesn’t mean that things like community cafes, toddlers Groups etc don’t have their place. However, we shouldn’t think of those things as necessary warm up to get to the Gospel. Rather, they are simply ways of making friends with people who may not know any Christian friends. Furthermore, there may be other good reasons to do such activities in order to love our communities.
However, I have long been convinced that the best evangelistic tool we have is to simply invite people to come to church or to read the Bible. We don’t need the fancy gimmicks to hook them in.
Faithroots 