‘But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist…’ (2 Tim 4)
“Give a person a fish, and they’ll eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and they’ll eat for a lifetime.” It’s a great principle, right? But if you push it to a logical conclusion, if it’s always better to teach than to fish, there would be only talking and no fishing and mass starvation. Someone’s gotta fish!
I’ve been thinking about this as I notice a very encouraging sign in our movement. In times past, we’ve typically tried to address the need for evangelism by doing sermon series on evangelism. It’s been noble in intention, but blind to a significant side-effect: Who’s going to invite an unbeliever to church when the sermon is about evangelism? It had hints of the fishing-lessons-to-mass-starvation vortex.
But more and more churches are investing directly in doing the work of evangelism. Alpha courses are run in Baptist churches like never before – 565 courses so far this year! We’ve just hit the one millionth Australian Alpha participant – and I’m proud to be six of them! Perhaps what excites me most is that more churches now run Alpha (or similar courses) as a matter of course rather than as an occasional special. May that continue until evangelism is completely mainstreamed as the bread and butter of Baptist churches!
The saying above really should be “show a person how to fish.” A highly effective way for pastors to equip the church for evangelism is simply to preach evangelistically. Those that do receive the triple-benefit of encouraging believers in their faith, giving examples of how to share it, and inclining attendees to invite their friends.
Our world is full of vacuous opinions and empty content in a way that eerily mirrors the world of Paul and Timothy. Their contemporary Dio Chrysostom noted, ‘you might hear many poor wretches of sophists shouting and abusing one another, and their disciples, as they call them, squabbling, and many writers of books reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their poems, and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many sooth-sayers giving the meaning of their prodigies, and ten thousand rhetoricians twisting lawsuits, and no small number of traders driving their several trades.’
That sounds as much like the twenty-first century as the first. What’s needed now as much as then are people able to keep their head when others’ are turned by every fad or scare, able to endure hardship when others baulk at mere inconvenience, and willing to do the work of an evangelist. In a world of ideological junk food, those who offer a truly nutritious meal will find plenty of hungry hearts and minds.
*Andrew Turner is Director of Crossover for Australian Baptist Ministries.
Photo by Federico Giampieri on Unsplash
