ARME 2: Canby, OR - May 2010

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ARME Bible Camp

Daniel Vis

The Engine of Evangelism

Lots of great seminars, I've been enjoying the meetings myself, it's been a blessing.

What I'd like to talk about this afternoon, I kind of changed my topic just a little bit, I'd like to talk about evangelism and Why many times it's not effective in our churches.

We all have a burden to see evangelism happen, and yet many times we've tried it in our churches, different projects, seems like nothing works except for maybe just get a few people, but very, very limited results.

I personally have come to the conviction that the reason evangelism isn't working very well is the same reason our training isn't working very well.

The reason our training isn't working that well is because we've not followed the foundational principle of training.

If you heard my presentation on Friday, I talked about the 1 thing Jesus said we should teach every new believer, to observe or keep or guard His Word.

And we're not teaching people how to lay up the Word of God and hide it in their hearts.

We're not teaching our new members how to memorize Scripture and internalize it in their own personal experience.

As a result, our training programs are not as effective as they could be.

When people start memorizing the Word of God, it has a change, it makes a change, it produces a change in people's lives.

Well, the same thing has happened when it comes to evangelism.

I'll just mention that by way of introduction.

The Bible gives us a specific methodology for evangelism, a specific foundational methodology for evangelism.

And we use all kinds of different approaches and we neglect the 1 approach that Jesus said would give us true success.

And so we're going to look at that a little bit here this morning.

But before we begin I would like to have a word of prayer.

So let's bow our heads and ask the Holy Spirit to guide our thoughts.

Father in Heaven, thank You so much for each person that has come out here this morning and to this whole camp.

We've sensed your Spirit speaking to us at different times and different ways.

And we want to hear your Spirit speak to us once more.

So please come close to us, draw near into our midst right here in this little cramped room Lord, that we would hear Your voice speaking to our hearts.

And we thank You and pray this in Jesus' name.

Let's talk about how we normally do evangelism right now.

If I were to ask you, what do you usually think of when you think about evangelism.

Probably most of you would say something like, well, an evangelistic campaign, some kind of evangelistic meetings.

And we'll bring in a speaker, we'll get a conference room, we'll mail out thousands of brochures, and you know, the kind of routine.

And certainly public evangelism is a valuable and important method for doing evangelism.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but to be honest, there are some real limitations with public evangelism.

And if we're serious about finishing the work, we need to be realistic about some of these limitations.

For 1 thing, public evangelism can be very expensive.

It can cost thousands of dollars in terms of brochures.

When we would do evangelism up in Michigan, we would rent a conference room at a hotel and it would cost us $800 just for 1 night.

You know, for a meeting location, you're talking about a couple weeks of meetings, you know, even before you switch to the church.

It can run thousands of dollars And most small churches just don't have the kind of budget to just be running evangelistic series after another series.

Most of the members of your churches have 40, 50, 60 hours a week.

They're working and commuting and they're busy with this and that project.

And then you ask them to come out 4 or 5 nights a week for 4 or 5 weeks in a row, just every night come out to the meetings.

By the time the whole series is over, your church members are just like so exhausted they're saying, let's not even think about evangelism, give me at least a year or so to recover, Maybe we'll do it again later, but right now I'm just burned out.

Another problem I think is that, by the way I have some little brochures, maybe we could just pass those out.

I won't say too much about them, just some information about our ministry.

Take 1 of those and take it home with you.

Public evangelism, I believe, sometimes tends to convey the idea that evangelism is a spectator activity.

In other words, the way you do evangelism is you go out and watch the evangelist do his meetings, rather than evangelism being an active activity that we individually participate in.

And another thing right along with that, sometimes public evangelism, We don't do this intentionally, but sometimes without realizing it, we're reinforcing the idea that evangelism is a seasonal event rather than a lifestyle.

And so, we're going to do evangelism in the fall, we're going to do evangelism in the spring, as if there's only certain times of the year that we do evangelism.

And Another really, really big problem with public evangelism, I'm not trying to be negative, just realistic about some of the limitations of it.

1 of the big problems with public evangelism is we have very little plan for follow-up in place for the new members when they join the church.

Now they've come out to the meetings and there's been a dynamic speaker and they've listened, they've connected with that speaker and they make a decision for baptism.

They show up on Sabbath morning and guess what happened to the speaker?

Well he's already gone and they're looking around at all these strange people, they don't know who they are, strange worship service, they don't understand what's happening.

We're losing a large percentage of the people that come into our church through public evangelism.

Many of them are just gone within months.

You know this, you've seen it in your own churches.

And here's 1 last 1 maybe you haven't thought about, but public evangelism tends to be vulnerable to the enemy's attacks.

Because we've invested so much time and money and effort into 1 big project, the enemy is looking for any little way he can to throw a wrench in it.

And I know of evangelists where they would plan on mailing out thousands of flyers and the post office would deliver them 2 days late for whatever reason.

Or there would be a problem with the meeting location.

Maybe there's a concert going on in the hall right next door and you can't even hardly hear the speaker.

I know 1 place where they did a major statewide evangelistic series and they had billboards and television radio spots encouraging everyone to call into this 1-800 number.

The only problem was they had failed to get the rights to the phone number.

And so they printed like 400, 000 brochures.

Well fortunately God intervened and they were able to rent that number just temporarily, just in oversight.

But you know the enemy is looking for those opportunities to throw a wrench into these big projects, these big productions and try and mess things up.

Well, God is greater and we're thankful for that, but we have to be realistic that there's some vulnerabilities to these big kinds of evangelistic efforts.

The other thing that usually comes to our mind when we talk about evangelism is personal Bible studies.

And maybe in your church you've had a personal ministries leader, your pastor has offered to do a series of training workshops on how to give Bible studies, how to knock on doors, do a survey, get in someone's home, and how to present a simple Bible study.

And you may, you know, when the pastor gets up and says, how many of you want to learn how to give Bible studies, go knock on doors and whatever?

How many people usually come out to this thing?

You usually get just a handful of people come out.

And even if they go through the training workshop, how many of them are likely to actually go out and start knocking on doors?

And even if you can get them to go out a time or 2 just to try their skills, how many of them are consistently doing it, say, 6 months or a year down the road?

See, there's some real limitations with this.

You could probably come up with your own.

But 1 thing, most church members are deathly afraid of knocking on a stranger's door.

We're talking about a lot of fear that prevents people from engaging in this kind of event.

Not everyone, some people love it, But a lot of people are terrified at the thought.

Some of our members, many of our members are lacking in Bible knowledge, to be honest.

We don't really know our message that well ourselves.

And so if we were to go out there and maybe we knock on a Dover Witnesses door, maybe they're going to do the same thing to us that Ivor Myers was doing to them.

They're going to ask us questions, they know just how to point out problem verses we've never heard of before and we may be confused because we don't know our Bibles that well.

Or maybe we're struggling in our own spiritual life and we're caught up in worldly kind of things all week long and say, ìI'm going to give 1 night a week to Bible study, the other 6 nights of the week I'm going to be worldly or whatever.î Well, it doesn't work that way.

Bible work is a spiritual activity and there has to be a spiritual level of maturity before we're going to be effective.

Another thing is just a lack of training.

I mean there's all kinds of different theological viewpoints out there.

It takes time to know how to answer different kinds of questions.

It takes time to know how to recognize when someone's under conviction, how to deal with objections, how to make appeals.

I mean it takes time to learn those skills and a lot of times our training programs are 6 Sabbath afternoons.

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The Engine of Evangelism

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