Evangelism Handbook

Once upon a time (about AD 1959) in a land called America there lived a group of people who banded together with a common faith, a common culture, and, in so many ways, a common aesthetic. This group proved to be a growing population in numbers and in influence in the land of the free and the home of the brave. If you know much about them and their time, you will recognize them. Here are a few shared features from back in their day:

• morning Sunday school, worship service, Sunday evening Training Union and evening service, midweek prayer meeting followed by choir practice, Vacation Bible School in the summer, revival in spring and fall (i.e., a four-day to one-week-long meeting);

I am referring of course to the Southern Baptist Convention, my tradition. In the year 1959, however, I could also have been referring to most Protestant churches, from Baptist to Methodist, from Pentecostal to Presbyterian. While some details would have been different, this was the monolithic appearance of the church. This heritage has shaped me, and for that I thank God.

I was born in 1959 in a culture shared by 90 percent of churches, at least in the so-called Bible Belt. Yet it extended further. I realized this more when I served as a home missionary in Indiana. I saw church building after church building (not to be confused with the Church) in the northern part of the state that appeared as if it had been transplanted from the South as southerners had moved north to work in the Rust Belt and took their culture with them.

We had somewhat of a shared faith then. We certainly had a shared aesthetic. Worship services copied one another in style. Just look at the architecture of church buildings and how we programmed our churches. We had a shared life in many ways. And so did America. Life seemed simpler then.

And then along came . . . rock and roll, my generation (those nasty Boomers) who protested just about everything, a huge influx of ethnic friends from many nations, the influence of television and other media like never before, and before you knew it, culture had changed. The nation had changed. The world had changed.

Things have changed. We will never go back to that day again. But if the 1950s ever come back, a lot of churches are ready.

We must have a common faith. Truth does not change. God’s Word will do. But truth changes us. It must. And culture has radically changed. The United States of America is an international mission field. We are a nation of subcultures. We must “break the code”² in the various places we serve to discover how to apply the message to the culture. Too many believers confuse truth with personal preference. There will always be a place for the type of church I described above. But there will increasingly be a need for many others—those who affirm a common faith, once delivered to the saints, and who likewise take that faith to various subcultures in the same way a missionary overseas would take the gospel to a foreign land.

Every day each of us puts on lenses. I am not referring to the glasses I wear but to the worldview that gives all of us a template through which we live our lives. A few years ago I had to admit I needed new glasses. I had to don bifocals to be able to read easily. I am convinced the church of today, for all of her successes, needs a serious trip to the spiritual eye doctor to look at the way we see the world. In this chapter I hope to show a few examples of changes necessary in how we see the world.

Let’s remember that the New Testament teaches this not only in the narratives of the Gospels and the Acts but in the very way it is arranged. We have one message, one time when Christ walked on the earth, was crucified and raised from the dead, and commissioned His followers to reach the world. This happened one time in history. Yet we have four separate Gospel accounts to tell this one story. Three are quite similar (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) because their accounts are close, thus being called “synoptic,” which means to “see together.” Still, each of those three is written to a different audience, so the same message is applied differently. Then we have the Gospel of John. Same life. Same story but quite different in specifics and focus. Is it not interesting that we tend to present a Gospel of John to people as an evangelistic tool, but so many of us act as if we must all line up together like the first three accounts when many feel a call to be a Gospel-of-John-type witness to the world? Each Gospel writer recorded the story of Jesus from a unique frame of reference.

I am weary of churches fighting over secondary issues like whether or not to clap in church or changing Wednesday night schedules (real examples) as if we are changing the New Testament. By the way, for the most part we got midweek prayer meetings from Pietists on the European continent. I am not opposed to prayer meetings, but I am opposed to the hypocrisy we demonstrate about prayer. Do we have to gather once a week to have an effective prayer ministry? Is that the only way? I know a church with hundreds of weekly small groups praying all week long. Not a bad strategy either. This reminds me of how we complain about prayer being taken from public schools while surveys show only about 12 percent of believers pray with their families in a week.

I saw this illustrated recently. I had the honor of preaching in a wonderful church in Springfield, Missouri, at a statewide evangelism conference. This church’s pastor not only has shown himself to be an effective preacher and leader, building a wonderful ministry there. He has also, to use the parlance of Stetzer and Putman, “broken the code” for his area. The pastor, along with his family, is a wonderfully gifted singer in the bluegrass/southern gospel tradition. They sang for us. It was wonderful. Not my preference personally but very nice.

This pastor understands the bluegrass, hillbilly culture (that is not a dig; that is an observation) of the area, maybe 35 miles from Branson, and is thus able to reach that culture. If you took that same church and moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the shadow of the University of North Carolina, you would find such growth the church has experienced much more difficult. Why? Chapel Hill has little resemblance to Springfield, Missouri. If the bluegrass culture of southern Missouri, or the southern gospel culture of the rural south, becomes the dominant aesthetic in America, we are ready to reach the whole nation.

We must affirm the truth more than ever. We must teach our children the best of our heritage, including great hymns and the best of our past—how God has moved in mighty awakenings, how Christianity has influenced society for the better time and time again. We need to keep a love for preaching the Word and a love for the Word and a passion for souls. But we must also be the people of God for this time, in this culture, in a way that brings glory to God and makes disciples of men and women. Here are some key paradigms we must shift to see more clearly how to reach our world.

Throughout this book I have argued that evangelism means we are advancing a movement of God, a movement of good news to those in great need. For the church to recover that view we must admit an obsession with institutionalism.

Institutions are not the enemy but excessive focus on them can be. God has given us several, including the home, the local church, and the state. We need institutions to serve as the boundaries of the river of God’s movement, keeping us from the excesses of heretical teaching on the one side and ineffective practice on the other. But we have tended to make the institutions the point, with the result of substituting a passion for advancing a movement for the duty of maintaining an institution. Look at how much energy we put into buildings, to getting people at church on Sunday, to convincing people to give up spare time to do church activities. Some churches have become programmed to destroy their families! We need a return to what Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger call a “simple church” with a focus on things that truly matter.³

How many people in your church awaken daily thinking something like this: Today, in my workplace or at school, and in my neighborhood, I get to be a part of something so much bigger than I am! By my character, my words, my deeds, I get to help advance the movement of God on this earth. On the other hand, how many think something more like this: I need to be sure I am at the church on time, have my lesson studied, and have my clothes picked out. Stark difference, I would say.

How do I know we focus more on institutions than on the movement? Because we do not go to church; we are the church. If every church building in the U.S. burned to the ground today, the church would still be here! Church buildings can be helpful, but our obsession with buildings hinders the movement. We focus far too much on getting people to our buildings and not enough on getting our people into the culture with the gospel.

The local church is not a hotel for saints; it is a hospital for sinners. Do you see your local church as a birthing center, a spiritual maternity ward? So many youth groups are just that, groups. They should be a youth ministry, focusing on discipling their students so they can go into their schools and reach more who need Christ, instead of planning events to placate the church youth (or more particularly, their parents).

How much of your life do you see as given to advancing a movement? Does that concept appear in your children? Reggie McNeal has given a sober warning for the church:

The current church culture in North America is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order. The plug will be pulled either when the money runs out or when the remaining three-fourths of a generation that were institutional loyalists die off or both.⁴

We use the term church as an adjective instead of a noun. We speak of wearing “church” clothes, of doing “church” activities, or of doing “church” work in a way that separates our Christian lives from everyday living (I am still looking for that concept in the book of Acts).

Please do not hear what I am not saying. The death of a church culture as we know it will not be the death of the church. There are more than a few today who spend most of their time talking as if the church no longer matters or that the Evangelical Church has only caused harm the last generation or so. The church Jesus founded is good; it is right. The church established by Jesus will survive until He returns regardless of what the pundits say. The revolution we need will involve a return to a biblical understanding of the church in culture not an abandonment of it.

But when “church culture” becomes so inward, so separated from a gospel impact in a community, and has become confused with biblical Christianity, it must be challenged. In reality, the “church culture” in North America is a vestige of the original movement, an institutional expression of religion that is in part civil religion and in part a club where its religious people can hang out with other people whose politics, worldview, and lifestyle match theirs.⁵ We should be a genuine counterculture, distinguishable from the world not by the clothes we wear on Sunday or our customs but by the character of our lives, the message we share, and the movement we advance.

Steve Addison studies movements. He identified five phases through which ideas spread in missionary movements:⁶

White Hot Faith—Leaders have a direct encounter with God that leads to social change. John Wesley, William Booth, Martin Luther, and others who led movements that lasted, all met Christ in a powerful, life-changing way. In his book Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell makes a similar observation of those who lead in times of sudden change, referring to such leaders as Mavens.

Commitment to the Cause—People give their lives to the cause as the center of their lives. This is not only true in Christian movements but also can be seen in movements such as car bombers in the global terrorist network. Similarly, in his watershed book on leadership Good to Great, Jim Collins argues that one of the marks of a Level 5 leader in “good to great” corporations is a deeply imbedded commitment to the company.

Contagious Relationships—Ideas become viral expressions traveling rapidly. Networks already existent become the means by which such ideas spread. Again, Gladwell refers to those who have the ability to communicate an idea quickly to many others as “connectors.”

Most of the evangelism in the current, conventional church has been attractional. This grows directly out of our institutionalism. We have created institutions and thus believe that since we love them so much, if we can only get the lost to them, they will likewise love our institutions and what they stand for. We spend so much time with one another in our institutions that we too often forget what it was like to be lost ourselves. As I said in a previous chapter on mass evangelism, we need not stop our attractional events and equipping. We should not make either-or what is both-and. We can add without subtracting. We do not need to burn down our church buildings and meet under a tree. But we must become living witnesses in the culture. Yet we also must be careful not to depart from the New Testament in our efforts. Show me one place in the book of Acts where a meeting was scheduled and people were invited to attend. That may have been implied at times, but what is obvious in the Acts is that the early church reached people not by attracting them to events but by sharing Christ where the people lived.

When we only focus on attractional witness, we can unexpectedly add an unintended consequence—our witness is not only attractional; it is also extractional: when someone is evangelized in the attractional mode they are more quickly pulled from their own culture which they are most effective to reach! So, while we win the person, success in this approach to the exclusion of a missional witness can over time also undergird a Christian subculture more interested in distancing itself from the world than actually reaching it.

Driscoll contrasted the “routine” approach of attractional evangelism, in particular mass meetings and weekly personal outreach, with a more missional approach, one he calls “reformissional”:

In both options, the emphasis is on eliciting a swift decision for Christ without taking time to build a friendship. In both versions, those who walk forward, stand up, raise their hand, pray a prayer, sign a card, or indicate by some other means their decision are deemed converts and told to assimilate into churches. Whether they were truly converted is debatable, and the odds of them assimilating into churches are uncertain, unless they already have trustworthy friendships with someone in the church who can serve as a tour-guide, introducing them to the language, values, and systems of the church. While Scripture gives examples of the routine model, the mission model of Jesus may prove to be more faithful to God, more fruit for the lost people, and more appealing to Christians. . . .⁷

Attractional churches need to transform their people from being consumers in the church to being missionaries outside of the church. Missional churches need to gather crowds into their church so that hard words of repentance can be preached in an effort to expose people’s hearts.⁸

I still knock on doors and preach meetings, but I also seek with my family to reach our neighbors and others in our world with whom we can serve as missionaries. We must admit that we have too often created a culture that encourages believers to share Christ with others without getting truly involved in their lives. It is much easier to invite a person to an event at a church or to go out on weekly visitation than to spend the time needed to cultivate relationships with lost people to see God work in their lives. We have taken the path-of-least-resistance approach to evangelism. We can continue to use such approaches, but we must not settle for them or for a paradigm that reduces evangelism to a weekly or annual event.

We must instead take the stance of a missionary in our culture. What if every believer in the U.S. was commissioned in a massive ceremony to live as missionaries in their communities. No one need quit their job or relocate; they would simply live as missionaries, living and sharing the gospel in the workplace and neighborhood, in the marketplace and the school, as if no one else was there to share Christ. We would do more than verbalize the message; we would seek to incarnate it in how we lived in our communities, seeking to live justly, loving our neighbors as Christ loved people.

Well, that will never happen. The massive commissioning thing, that is. But what is clear is that the Most High God of creation has already commissioned us to do and be just that! I am not advocating an abandonment of attractional evangelism. But I am arguing the long-term trajectory of the church, if she is not to become increasingly ineffective, is to move to a more missional posture.

I have been a part of one of the most intense, widely utilized, and extensive efforts to train believers to share their faith in the history of the church. From the 1960s to now, personal witness training through the vehicle of programs in the church has been a hallmark of the conventional church. From Evangelism Explosion to Faith Evangelism, probably millions have been through a class, and hundreds of thousands have taken what they have learned into communities to share Christ. Some have even taken what they have learned and put it into practice in their daily lives. I have a confession to make: while I have personally benefited from such training and helped write some of the training, I think an honest evaluation would have to say that the long-term result has not been to create an army of soul-winners. No doubt many have been helped. No doubt many have met Christ through this effort. But what it has failed to do is to create a culture in which church after church became ignited with an evangelistic passion as a result of the training. I have seen churches become ignited for the gospel where witness-training programs were used, but in every case the leadership of a passionate, evangelistic pastor has been key.

The very approach we used in such training sowed the seeds of its own demise. We pulled out individuals, taught them a specific method, gave them a certain time (usually weekly visitation) to implement what they learned, and awarded them when they finished the course. We expected the minimum of commitment and attempted to make witnessing as painless as possible. But except in those churches where the pastor’s leadership led the church to adopt an evangelistic culture, for the most part those trained never spilled over into a movement of personal witness in the congregation. And many I have talked to still never actually think about intentionally speaking to their neighbors about the very things they learned to share one night a week to strangers.

The witness of the early church was viral—it spread like a really good plague. That is the description you get when you read accounts of the great awakenings in history and of the church in China today. I am not opposed to witness training. I hope this book helps to train the readers in witnessing. I would utilize training extensively as a pastor. But I am concerned that we have made evangelism a separate program so that it no longer is seen as at the heart of the church’s mission—it is merely one more program we push in our institutions. I know several pastors who regularly offer practical tips on witnessing to the whole congregation on Sundays. I also know some who take their entire message once or twice a year and give instruction to all in attendance on effective witnessing.

By “incarnational” I do not mean we are to be Jesus embodied in the culture. Jesus Christ, the Incarnate One, came to earth once. But as He is the head of the church, we are His body. And as His body, we are to incarnate the reality of Christ’s change in our communities. You see this in 1 Thess 1:8–10:

For the Lord’s message rang out from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place that your faith in God has gone out, so we don’t need to say anything. For they themselves report about us what kind of reception we had from you: how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait or His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.

The Thessalonians’ witness was more than the speaking of a verbal witness, though it certainly included that. The people whom they lived among saw the gospel “ring out,” or “thunder,” in their culture. As my friend Charles Lyons, longtime pastor in Chicago, told me at lunch recently, “The incarnation is not only theology; it is also strategy.”

Bob Roberts described an incarnational church:

Missional churches become deeply involved in their communities. They are not focused so much on their buildings as they are on living, demonstrating, and offering biblical community in a lost world among a lost people. An incarnational church functions as the “Body of Christ” because it represents the presence of Christ within a community.⁹

This shift ties very closely to the preceding one, as programs tend to separate aspects of the faith that more rightly should be held together. It could be that one of the worst things you do in your church is have a missions committee that separates missions from the rest of the church. I asked J. D. Greear, lead pastor of Summit Church and a former student, what he thought had to be in a book like this. He answered immediately: “We have to move beyond our understanding of evangelism, community ministry, and church planting as separate ministries to see how they work together.” His vision for Raleigh/Durham is preeminently evangelistic. But his method is a church-planting movement incorporating community ministry at the heart. Indeed, his church annually has a weeklong “at home mission trip” called Hope for Durham, where hundreds of church members paint middle school classrooms, help with home repair, and a myriad of other ministries, sharing Christ in the middle of them. Remember the earliest summary of life in the church (Acts 2:41–47) included witnessing, community concern, worship, and instruction all together in a daily context.

Once upon a time life was lived by most in a more holistic manner, where people lived and worked in communities all interrelated. In a more agrarian culture today we see that same integration, in simple villages in the African bush or Amish communities in the West. But with the rise of such things as the 40-hour workweek and urbanization came a separation of life. The result: five-day workweek, one day of worship, and further separation into times for vacation, sports and leisure, and various “times” that vie for attention—work time, family time, church time, leisure time. As a result we find it harder to see our world from a larger, holistic view. “We succumb to the kind of compartmentalization over against an integrated worldview that addresses the entirety of life,” James Emory White writes, adding:

Our thinking about one area never informs our thinking about another. So one can be a Christian and not reflect—or worse, never even think of reflecting—about science and technology in light of the Christian worldview. So issues related to bioethics are seldom met with serious reflection on the nature of humanity and the sanctity of human life in light of the Scriptures. Instead, we let CNN tell us what the scientific and technological breakthroughs will mean for the quality of our life; we marvel at progress, then we privately ponder whether we will be able to afford the procedure. The world of science becomes distinct from the world of faith.¹¹

The danger from this separation is we begin treating Christianity as a checklist rather than a worldview by which we interpret all of life. As long as we have believers who do the big three (attend, give, and serve in the church building), we assume they are integrating faith into life. As long as churches have the big three (buildings, budgets, and baptisms), we assume our church is influencing culture. Yet many of our churches could vanish from their communities without being noticed.

The saddest part of this for me is to see the impact of this on young people. Because we have not demonstrated to youth the vigor, the risk, the excitement of living out our faith in a culture often opposed to it, in order to connect them with a sense of excitement we take them to theme parks and to play paintball. We see their need to be challenged, but because we have compartmentalized the faith, too many times we separate “fun” from faith. I have seen youth serve and share Christ in their communities who found that such activity was more exciting than playing video games. Thankfully more churches are taking students on mission trips and to places that integrate ministry with life. But these short-term trips, if not wedded to ongoing ministry in their home community, may actually foster further compartmentalization.

The danger of becoming more holistic is the loss of the intentional edge of evangelism. Without care the focus of reaching people for Christ can be lost in the middle of other things. While this is a real danger, so is the danger of separation of our witness to the point that many around us may never hear the gospel because of the way we present it.

The other day I received a postcard from a new church. It said in bold words, “Church Like You’ve Never Experienced Before!” It had a big bag of popcorn on the front and a subheading “100% boredom free.” Really. Seriously? You are guaranteeing you will have such a church that everyone involved will never get bored? Never? No, that church is lying to me. But that is not the real problem. The problem is it appeals to the most base of motivations, consumerism. Church is about me, pleasing me, affirming me. No doubt that approach can draw a crowd. But is that really the point?

What if someone put together a new church advertisement that said, “Becoming a part of this could cost everything you are and would bring with it immense sacrifice, complete surrender, and total devotion, but could also provide for you joy not of this world”? What if we stopped appealing to the consumerism of our culture? What if we boldly declared that a gospel that can be preached in rich and free America but cannot be preached in China or Iraq is a false gospel? What if we proclaimed not how to find “your best life now” but challenged all to lose their life in order to find it in Christ?

Too many churches spend far too much of their money on their church plant. How many times have I met with leaders in cities who could do more with the leftover money of many suburban churches than the latter do with their entire budgets?

“I wonder about our marketing efforts in selling the church rather than lifting up Jesus,” McNeal noted. “It seems in the New Testament that Paul’s strategy was to preach the gospel. He formed the church as a result of harvest. His goal was converts; the church was the natural byproduct.”¹²

Hirsch has observed the consumerism of the Western church:

Church growth exponents have explicitly taught us how to market and tailor the product to suit target audiences. They told us to mimic the shopping mall, apply it to the church, and create a one-stop religious shopping experience catering to our every need. In this they were sincere and well intentioned, but they must have been also totally ignorant of the ramifications of their counsel—because in the end the medium has so easily overwhelmed the message. . . . Consumerism has actually become the driving ideology of the church’s ministry.¹³

Amazingly, as I write this a number of churches are springing up across America, but not just another generation of the megachurch. These are church-planting churches, large to be sure but focused on getting the gospel to the culture more than building an empire. These churches are led by pastors who preach expositional messages of an hour or more in length—hardly giving in to the narcissistic consumerism of our time. And the churches they lead are large, growing, and multiplying, from Summit in Raleigh/Durham, to Harvest Bible Chapel in the Midwest, to Mars Hill in Seattle.

Consumerism in the church has created an entire movement of church swappers, or “church hoppers” as I call them, as they are actually pests. These are professing believers who go from church to church looking for the one with the best approach to meeting their needs. How many times have I met someone like that who says, “I am just looking for a place to get fed.” If you have been saved for more than a couple of years, take off your bib and put on an apron and serve! My family moved to Wake Forest in 1995 and joined the first church (a new plant) we visited. In the West far too much church growth comes from these church switchers. But the reality is one cannot consume one’s way into discipleship.

I have tried to be extremely clear throughout this book that we will not advance the movement of God on this earth by changing the message. But there are those, and the older we get the more of us are like this, who think that the way we do things is about as inspired as the Bible itself. Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but I actually meet people on occasion who believe changing the way a worship service is conducted, or changing dress codes for Sunday, actually means a change of conviction about doctrine. The institutional church confuses outward forms with unchanging doctrine at an alarming level.

A few years ago I spoke at a sweet country church with an emphasis that Sunday on inviting unchurched friends to the service. A sweet, elderly lady came up to me and said, “I knew this was a special day with a special preacher, so I went out and bought a new dress.” A new dress? No one brought an unchurched friend. But ladies spent hours the day before or early that morning cooking food for the potluck at lunch, and some bought new dresses. I could have brought 10 unsaved people and all of them could have been saved, but if I had preached in jeans and a tee shirt (as I do often at youth events), that is what would have been the talk of the town. I am not at all saying every country church is like that. I am saying that the institutional church has become too much like that too much of the time.

Over time even the most dynamic movements, from the rise of Christianity to the great awakenings, become more focused on secondary issues, losing their attention on what caused the movement in the first place. This is seen in the rise of Methodism, for example. Birthed in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, Methodism spread with great vigor through the work of circuit-riding preachers in the American frontier and missionary preachers in Europe. But today, Methodism is marked far more by decline than growth.

I would argue that discouraging creativity can actually hinder the work of the gospel. So many times in history the fervency for mission came from those pushing the envelope creatively, from the almost scandalous practice of field preaching in the Great Awakening to the novel idea of Carey that believers should take the gospel to the nations. Hirsch argues that effective movements continue to receive energy not from the center, which tends to focus on consensus, but from the fringes. “In the study of the history of missions, one can even be formulaic in asserting that all great missionary movements begin at the fringes of the church, among the poor and marginalized, and seldom, if ever, at the center,” Hirsch wrote.¹⁴ I would add that while this is true, movements that move too far from the center might end up undermining truth. “Innovation, when not tethered to the truth of the gospel, leads to heresy,” Driscoll warned. “Every heretic in the history of the church who took relevance to the culture beyond the bounds of orthodoxy did what Paul, in the opening chapter of Romans, calls exchanging the truth of God for a lie.”¹⁵

There is a tension between living on the edge and standing in the center. But too many churches huddle in the center and have lost the gospel in the process. Hirsch argues, “It seems that when the church engages at the fringes, it almost always brings life to the center.”¹⁶

We walk a tightrope between holding to unchanging truth without reducing truth to formulas or legalism on the one hand and pursuing creativity and encouraging antinomianism on the other. Conformity in essential doctrine, creativity in the application of those truths in a given culture, is the approach we should pursue. In the church today such a pull toward conformity has affected so much of what we do, from discipleship to evangelism.

We have had a tendency to make people clones rather than Christ followers. The Twelve Jesus called could hardly be seen as a monolithic group. Ministry is made easier if we tend to dress alike, act alike, and like all the same things. But that is more of a blueprint for the creation of a cheesy Christian subculture than growing the body of Christ. McManus added: “Christianity as a civilized religion claims to have a group plan negotiated with God. Everybody gets the same package.”¹⁷

A focus on conformity in nonessentials, from clothing style to musical interests, is an easier way to live, but it is also a small way to live. In his fascinating book Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Gordon MacKenzie made an observation of elementary school children.¹⁸ MacKenzie worked for decades as a creative expert for Hallmark Cards. His book examined the problems of bureaucracy, in particular the tendency of bureaucracy to suck the creative energy out of people in an institution (in other words, it is must reading for pastors and denominational workers!). In his role as an artist who sketched designs for Hallmark cards, MacKenzie regularly spoke to elementary school classes about art. He developed a simple evaluation that provided a telling insight into how parents in particular and culture in general raise children to seek conformity over creativity. As he spoke to students in each grade, he asked students to raise their hand if they considered themselves an artist:

—First grade: All the children jumped from their chairs, arms waving wildly.

—Second grade: About half the kids raised their hands no higher than their shoulders.

—Third grade: No more than one-third ever raised their hands, and those who did were cautious and self-conscious about it.

“The higher the grade,” he observed, “the fewer children raised their hands.” He called the pattern “the suppression of creative genius.”

Our culture, he observed, categorically raises children to pursue a safe, secure, and sensible path to a career. That has been more pronounced in the church. We have created a culture that celebrates the duty-driven churchgoer and raises eyebrows at the passionate witness on the streets. Every year I take a lot of teens out witnessing in various settings. How many times have I met condescending adults who see the enthusiasm of youth after spending time sharing Christ retort: “They are excited, but they will get over it.” That is our problem; we have met Jesus and we have gotten over it. Certainly as we grow older maturity calls for wisdom, restraint, and even silence at appropriate times. But have we so anesthetized the church that outbreaks of creativity, even those consistent with Scripture, are considered scandalous?

I thank God that as a child about 11 years old, at the time caution begins to overtake enthusiasm, I saw young adults radiantly and unashamedly passionate about their faith. I was a typical good little church kid who knew the right answers in Sunday school and had ribbons for attendance at Vacation Bible School. But I did not know Jesus. Suddenly, the Jesus Movement invaded our church. In 1970 I witnessed many hippie-looking youth become passionate for Jesus. Their passion became mine, for their testimonies helped to lead me to Christ. Our church began creative ministries: a “One Way Christian Night Club” (a converted skating rink for unchurched youth to have a place to gather and meet believers off the church campus, serving only Kool Aid for strong drink), a drama ministry, and ministries at Panama City and other places. I recall one thing in particular about these ministries: they focused particularly on reaching the lost.

We have domesticated the faith. We have turned evangelism into a course, discipleship into a curriculum, and our devotional life into a checklist. Can we recover a Christianity that sees no disparity between biblical conviction and creativity? Can we say to the coming generation that following Jesus does not mean you have to surrender your creative energies and passions for the service of the institution, but that following Christ means unleashing all God has made you to be in service to the Most High?

McManus would agree: “Somewhere along the way the movement of Jesus Christ became civilized as Christianity. We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live.”¹⁹

What are ways we can encourage creativity in the cause of Christ without sacrificing the message of the cross? It may be simpler than you think. It starts with a change of mind-set. What if every member of your church thought of himself or herself as a missionary? What if every family in your church saw their neighborhood, their workplace, and their school as a mission field? That simple shift in thought could generate many creative ideas.

Here are a couple of rules I follow in thinking creatively as it relates to witness. First, anything, yes, anything in culture that is not intrinsically evil can be used for the gospel. We tend to think like Gnostics, who considered spiritual things good and material things evil. Such a mind-set (which is not biblical) leads to the idea that only that which is explicitly spiritual (or “churchy”) can be used for spiritual purposes, and anything “secular” (read, “worldly”) cannot.

I sat with a group of students once and began to ask them what hobbies they enjoyed. Cooking, running, sports, crafts, and video games were named. I asked the students how they had used such interests for the gospel, whether as a means to build relationships with unbelievers or as a means to share Christ directly. Most had never even thought about doing that. We have so separated our spiritual life (and thus our approach to sharing Christ) from everyday life that we have few creative ideas.

Here are a few examples of everyday interests used for the gospel:

• Crafts—My family lives in a neighborhood with several unbelieving families. It is our Jerusalem. The greatest impact we have made for the gospel in two families does not come from my great eloquence and wisdom. No, it comes from my wife Michelle, who annually makes a nice craft item as a gift for our neighbors each Christmas. More gospel conversations have come from those gifts than anything else we have done.

Of course there are those who would not enjoy hunting. Not everyone would agree that every issue is “not inherently evil.” There are gray areas and some subjects that would vary in a given culture. That being said, I submit there are a multitude of ways Christians can use everyday activities in a more creative way to share Christ.

A second conviction about creativity in witness is this: do not let the gospel be lost in your creative efforts. Some who use drama, for example, love the art form so much that the gospel gets lost in it. Be intentional in bringing creativity and Christ together. Christ must be exalted in all things. And that is exactly why we must sometimes change our paradigms to be effective in a given culture and day.