Our role is not to ‘convert’ people, nor to ‘save’ them, nor to get them into Church.

Evangelism in our world is all about helping people find the courage to begin actively seeking the will of God. We are then to trust God to lead these disciples, in His way, and at their own pace, into all that Jesus Christ taught.

By and large, most people have little problem believing in the existence of God, and almost all have a very positive view of Jesus. Their problem is almost always with the Church. As one woman wrote, "I have huge problems with the Christian Church, but I love Jesus." Most people today don’t believe any longer the Christian Church’s assertion that God can be found only through its institutions and salvation formulas. They love and value Jesus as a mysterious and divine teacher of profound truth, but they hate the Church’s exclusivistic interpretation of him.

The DO’s of encouraging people in spiritual growth

1) DO get delivered from the deadly evangelical ‘spirit of judgement’ virus.

The thing which made Jesus so loved and accepted by the common people, and especially by those outcasts (or ‘sinners’ as they were called) from the Church of the day, was that he did not exude the energy of judgement at either a doctrinal or moral level. Christ was always ‘looking past the hair and straight into the eyes’. He looked past the hair of ‘false doctrine’ or even ‘no doctrine’. He looked past the hair of imperfect theological languaging or muddled sexual morality and connected with people at a heart level. As a result they instinctively felt his strong love for them. This was not to say that he had little regard for the importance of either theological truth or morals, nor was it to say he never taught on such issues. Of course he did, but in most cases his emphasis was on love-based ethical behaviour long before it was ever about correct theology or what we would today label correct ‘Christology’. By connecting at a heart level Jesus was able to pick up instantly the particular blockages in each individual he spoke to and to address those needs.

2) DO stop trying to ‘convert’ and ‘save’ people. It doesn’t work, and it is not our job!

As I have already emphasised, we hate it when anyone tries to convert us to anything, so don’t do to others what you hate others doing to you.

3) DO stop assuming that we Christians always know who isn’t ‘saved’!

On the whole we Christians assume we know pretty much who isn’t in relationship with God and who is. Yet the yard-stick which we use to determine this is seriously flawed, omitting as it does most of the criteria used by Jesus (as the other articles on this website have pointed out).

Have you ever noticed that in the synoptic gospels Jesus doesn’t go around holding evangelistic missions in order to get people to ‘believe in him’ in order that they might be saved? What he does do is to preach that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that people are to “seek first the Kingdom of God”. His emphasis is about people becoming hungry to seek out God’s will for their lives. (Matthew 6.9) “When you pray,” Jesus instructs, “say ‘Our Father who art in heaven…. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’”, the implication of which is ‘and please start by doing your will in my life’. Which leads us to the next requirement:

4) DO assume that everyone you meet has, to some degree, ‘the footprints of God’ in their lives.

They may be conscious or unconscious of this fact. Often divine footprints will manifest as an ongoing commitment on a person’s part to genuine goodness, or as experiences of divine help and guidance at critical times in their lives. Such people may have little if any ‘God talk’ vocabulary as such and may claim that they are not ‘religious’, but remember the answer to the young woman’s prayer, and speak to them as if they know God already!

A man recently shared with my wife a vivid memory of having his car spin out of control one frosty night as he was negotiating some seemingly innocuous bends on the open road. He told of being instantly flooded, in that awful moment, with a great peace and of very distinctly feeling a hand overlaying his on the steering wheel. After three full rotations, during which time miraculously no other vehicle appeared, his car came to rest still on the road and facing in the direction he had been travelling. Enveloped in a cocoon of peace he continued on his way. When asked if he believed in God the man replied that he wasn’t sure about the term ‘God’ but that he did believe in a higher power, and in the fact that that higher power had taken care of him.