A note of explanation:

In this article I am arguing for a way of evangelism based on the broader and more generous understanding of divine relationship discussed fully elsewhere on this website. In so doing I am not for a moment denying the validity of coming to God via Christ as taught in John’s Gospel and other parts of the New Testament. Indeed this is the way most Christians have come to God, myself included. The great problem, however, has been that as evangelicals we have mistakenly understood the Johannine/Pauline way as the only permissible route taught in scripture. This fundamental error has resulted in a particularly powerful ‘blinkered’ approach to evangelism which unnecessarily and dramatically reduces Christians’ ability to effectively share the good news of Jesus and his teachings in our world at the onset of the third millennium CE.

“Talk to them as if they know me already.”

Not long ago I read the true story of a young woman who had recently become a Christian. With great zeal she set about trying to share her new faith with everyone in her world, but her only achievement was to alienate people and create resistance in them toward the Christian message. Sound familiar! Finally one day in desperation she cried out to God in prayer asking to be shown how she could witness more effectively. The answer she received was instant, and far too revolutionary to find a place in any evangelical book on ‘evangelising the lost’. What she felt God say to her was this, “Talk to them as if they know me already.”

The traditional evangelism model: three major problems

1) The traditional evangelism model works on the assumption that non-Christians know nothing whatsoever of the love, presence and power of God in their lives.

The very language we use sets us up for this assumption. We talk in terms of ‘the saved’ and ‘the unsaved’. We say Christians are the only ones ‘in the light’ with God; the rest of humanity live ‘in darkness’ without God. We define our evangelism in terms of bringing people out of this total darkness into the full light of Christ. For all practical purposes we refuse to believe that God could or would ever be in real ‘saving’ relationship with anyone who does not subscribe to our salvation formulas.

Some evangelicals would admit that, yes, God could be in a type of relationship with the sincere seeker after truth, but only in so far as this is intended to draw them to the point of accepting Christ in the manner prescribed by the Church. They would hastily assert, however, that while in this limited sense the person ‘knows God already’ such a relationship must not be confused with a ‘saving’ relationship. Sadly, such special pleading comes from those desperate to avoid the clear implications of Jesus’ synoptic teachings regarding the variety of doorways into genuine human-Divine relationship. (See the other articles on this website.) In these three gospels Jesus makes it abundantly evident that people do enter into eternal life despite their having no specific commitment to himself in the way that either the early Church or later evangelicals were to claim is mandatory. An example of this can be seen in Luke 10.26ff.

If ‘relationship’ is defined as God taking the initiative and connecting with a person at a heart-to-heart level (whether the person is conscious of this or not), I would contend that there is no such thing as a relationship with God that is not a ‘saving’ relationship! Most fortunately for humanity God refuses to obey the Christian Church’s salvation edicts and moves potently in his world regardless, relating in love and power to all who in any way, no matter how slight, lift their heads and aspire to goodness and God as they understand him.