This past weekend our church attempted one of our bigger evangelism pushes we have tried in the past few years. Every year our town hosts an event like many other small towns do...crafts, carnivals, street dances, parades. It's a really big deal for people in small towns to have events like this. If you grow up with these traditions, they are important...if not, then they just mean more traffic.
Anyway, we plunked down our $50 and reserved a space and then tried figuring out what to do with it. We wanted to promote the church, but more importantly, to tell about Christ. The idea we settled on was to try and get people to take a simple 10-question 'test' about basic bible knowledge. If they were to take the test, they would get a Bible. The idea was that if we could get them to think about these things then they would be willing to talk about the Lord. We also had plenty of promotional pens, magnets, and fans to pass out as well to people walking by. Then, on Sunday, we had a cookout at the church building and were to spend time inviting people to come and worship and eat with us.
We quickly discovered several things. 1)Most people have no interest in stopping and taking a test, nor do they really want to talk to you. They might be interested in the incense seller on one side of us, or the spice seller on the other, or the candle sellers or the horseshoe art guy across from us, but only for what they could buy. 2)The ones who might be interested in talking already believed they knew everything there was to know about the Bible, even if they took the test and missed quite a few (IMHO) easy questions. If they did not have a church background, taking a Bible test was intimidating to them. And not much fun, either, especially when there was so much other fun to be had elsewhere. 3)In the end, because most people were walking quickly we resorted to passing out stuff. Almost 2000 pieces of material. Many invitations to the cookout. We were friendly and non-threatening...it's true!
And guess what? Not a single visitor, even those whom we talked to and seemed genuinely interested in coming, came to church on Sunday and ate lunch with us. Not a single one. We tell ourselves that we've planted some seeds. Six months from now, somebody will see that magnet or that pen and walk through our door. But deep down I think we know the truth...it didn't really work.
It's hard not to feel like a failure in this job when it seems like nothing we do works. Depressing failure means that most churches give up and stop trying to reach out at some point...some studies show that evangelism stops being a primary focus of a church within a decade after it is founded, and by the time 25 years passes outreach is rarely attempted. I'll give credit to our church (or at least a few people in it)...we don't stop trying. 'Think souls' remains the motto for at least a few of our hearty souls. But yet we continue to lose people more quickly than we gain them. Indeed, even many of those churches gaining in number don't grow anymore, they swell, picking off healthy members from older, dying congregations. Lord knows we've lost enough people that way. Those of us left in smaller, dying churches feel like a shrinking pack of cheetahs waiting for another attack by the lions and the hyenas and the praise bands down the street.
More and more I realize the truth that mass evangelism simply does not work. A number of years ago in another town we knocked on every single door and did not get a single favorable response. Maybe our technique was bad. Maybe (as I've later learned was the case) this church had a not-so-favorable reputation amongst its neighbors. Or maybe then and now we're just not doing what we ought to be doing...we're shooting for the random stranger rather than really doing evangelism. On a larger scale we keep throwing money into mailers (tried it), TV shows (seen it done), pens and magnets and fans (yep), and who knows how many other plans. It makes us feel good, at least for a moment, until nobody new walks through our door. Maybe another technique will try. What's Outreach magazine talking about this month?
Maybe, just maybe, we've missed the point. Maybe evangelism was never meant to be massive. Instead, it is to be as simple as getting to know the neighbor next door, being a friend who continually intercedes before the Lord on their behalf. It is to be as simple as sharing with that cousin who has gone through three marriages and countless bad relationships about what is really missing in her life. It is to be as simple as being an example, but eventually a faithful witness, to the co-worker who spends far too much time worrying about all the money he doesn't have. Maybe evangelism is about just knowing who is the ONE that we can reach for Jesus.
It might even be easy to blame the Bible for our failures. Matthew 28 tells us to go and preach to all nations, and Acts shows Paul as the dynamo who did it. We're inspired by the Billy Grahams and the heroes of faith and the shiny sparkly televangelists who seem to be able to reach millions. And so we think, hey, we can do that too...we have fans and pens and magnets, don't we? We have a great correspondence course that teaches important Bible facts, right? Good for us.
But somehow I think we long ago missed the point. If we're going to reach the world, we need to start one person at a time.
Who's my ONE going to be?
