MINISTRY CHOICES AND EVANGELISM

by C. Philip Slate

To pose the challenge on the front end, Why did we cease having the week-long “gospel meetings” in the USA? Did someone decide they were unscriptural? Did we run out of good preachers? No, something else was happening that is well summarized by a comment I heard the late Jimmy Allen make at a preachers’ meeting in Memphis thirty years ago: “Brothers, me and my ten sermons have been around a while, and I can tell you we ain’t gettin’ the results we used to get!” He didn’t bother to analyze the situation, but someone needed to do so.

No, Jimmy had not forgotten how to describe human sinfulness and the good news about what Jesus offered them. Nor had a lot of other preachers. Those series of meetings, called in earlier years “protracted meetings”, were a good legacy from the 18th and 19th centuries in North America. People would come and listen. Many people became Jesus-followers through those efforts. Then they largely ceased to come; the very people for whom the meetings were intended no longer attended in significant numbers. We responded slowly. Some of those meeting lasted several weeks, and then they were reduced to two weeks, then one, then week-end efforts, and finally dropped, appropriately. Whenever a method of doing God’s work no longer achieves the desired end, it is prudent to put something in its place that is more effective.

When he was head of the Church Growth Institute in Houston, our brother John Ellas did many congregational analyses. He used those endeavors to do research, and out of it wrote his helpful Clear Choices for Churches: Trends among Growing and Declining Churches (1994). His research revealed five areas in which ministry choices are important, but the bottom line was and is that churches often grow or decline because of the ministry choices that are made, not so much the doctrinal beliefs. We all know churches that love God and want to serve his purposes but remain small, while some churches hold to few biblical principles grow into megachurches. Size of church is no indication of doctrinal purity, but size of doctrinally sound churches may indicate their level of ministry choices. Let me take this a bit farther.

Of over half a century it has been known that people have a way of escaping messages we want desperately for them to hear. While some people are searching for options because they are empty, many others seek to avoid the gospel. It does not strike them as “good news.” Church buildings do not attract them, church websites must be carefully developed if they are to grab people’s attention within ten seconds, and they may never see our literature. Passing over the known reasons people want to avoid messages from churches, it is known that they may avoid them in one or more of four ways.

1. Selective Exposure. People simply make choices in what they read, watch on television, check out on the Internet, or listen to in person.
2. Selective Attention. At times people are compelled to be exposed to a message—given a tract, be in a room where someone is watching a religious program, visiting a religious event at the invitation of a friend. They may deliberately think about something else, open their phone or tablet, or just let their minds wonder. We all do it, don’t we, when many of the television commercials are on? We have the capacity to “turn them off” inside our heads. It is a matter of interest or not.
3. Selective Memory. This has been going on a long time. Peter mentioned that the people of his day who held that “all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation” held to that view because “they deliberately ignore” (some translations have “forget”) what happened in the day of Noah (2 Pet. 3:4-5). Because of the capacity to forget messages and evidence, Peter “reminded” his readers no less than three times (2 Pet. 3:1-2).
4. Selective Perception. People can twist messages to make them conform to what they already believe. This has been done by even physical scientists for many centuries. That is one reason scientific revolutions come slowly.[1] Even scientists are slow to accept views contrary to what they believe. It takes time to build up a reservoir of tension before action is taken.

The acts of avoidance are not evil within themselves. Some of us would like to be able to forget some things! There is just too much “stuff” to hear and read; we can’t handle all of it. In the case of non-Christians, it is important to make ministry decisions by which they can perceive the important of taking Jesus Christ seriously. Meanwhile, it can be a sobering thing to pull together several members of your congregation and list by name the people you know to have been exposed to the gospel message during the past year—sermon, class, Bible correspondence course, reading a tract, personal study, etc. Of course, we do not know when someone picks up a tract, tunes in to a television or radio broadcast, overhears a Christian conversation, or checks out a church website. When that is done it would be their initiative. What has your congregation done that has resulted in people’s being exposed to the good news? I have had students who preach to do it, and it is usually a disappointing discovery.

Happily, various researchers over the past two decades, and longer, indicate that the bridge most unbelievers cross to become Christians is a bridge constructed by family and friends at a more personal level. Here are a few things that people can do for people they already know in various settings:

• Invite them to an event of interest where they can meet some of your wholesome friends.
• Invite them to your Sunday morning Bible class and introduce them to your friends.
• Invite them to go on a “church trip.” In many congregations, groups will take trips together to see a play, hear a concern, see a display for flowering trees or flowers, go to a zoo--just wholesome events Christians enjoy doing together. It will be good for your non-Christian friends to meet wholesome and joyous people. These are acts of “cultivation” by which your non-Christian friends may be more inclined to hear the message when they see your fellow-Christians are not kooks!
• Enroll someone in a Bible correspondence course, either paper or electronic.
• Following a specific kind of conversation, give a person a well-selected tract or offer to foreword to them a digital article you have found useful.
• Cultivate a relationship with someone by having lunch or coffee from time to time. Pray for wisdom to know when to take the relationship another step, such as, “Would you be willing for us to talk about that sometime?” Then you can prepare what you want to say.

Most of the research books and articles I have read over the past half century indicate that non-Christians are predominately won through the efforts of family members or valued friends. Isn’t there a message in that? Doesn’t that say something about the kind of ministry decisions that need to be made? Avid the gimmicks! Some thoughtless efforts remind me of Martin Marty’s metaphor of “moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic!” Gimmicks do not evangelize. In addition to Bible content classes, is it not appropriate to provide training on how to make disciples? After all, isn’t that what Jesus said to do Matt. 28:18-20)? Is it not wise to provide training to equip people to do what Jesus said to do? There is good material available on how to make disciples for Jesus. Make good ministry choices.

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[1]Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th ed.; University of Chicago Press, 2012), a landmark study by a philosopher of science, first published in 1962 but still valid in its 4th edition.