Experiential Evangelism

In the last month or so I have been engaged in several conversations centered around the methodology of evangelism. Should one preach fire and brimstone? Use the four Spiritual laws? Preach the Law and Gospel? Reach people through developed relationships? Do I just invite people to church and hope the pastor preaches a good message? Do you have to use scripture in order to evangelize? Is the doing an alter call true evangelism? Once they raise their hands then what?

This past saturday kind of bought the conversation to a head for me because I came to the conclusion that the best way to evangelize people is to not treat them like a system, or try to apply some kind of technique in order to save them. This is something that I already knew but just had not found away to vocalize the way I see evangelism being effective in today's society. I asked one of the students at Thrive, the High School ministry at my church, to be part of an experiment. With all the debate about what is the best way to evangelize? We figured we would ask a few people to go out and try to reach people with a variety of "techniques" and then share their experience. It was after asking this one student that it dawned on me that Evangelism was not a system or a technique, but rather it is an experience.

Experiential Evangelism, ask one question of the person person evangelizing, "Why do I love God?" It is out of this question that one's experience with the divine starts to unfold. There is nothing more appealing or sincere than someone sharing their experience with you. No sales pitches or piffy slogans, just raw and brutal honesty.

The next day at my friend's birthday BBQ we started conversing about the idea of evangelism and in the dialogue we began to share our experiences with evangelism. Some positive, some negative, but all of them revolved around the idea of forgetting the systems and techniques and just sharing our lives with others.

One thing that I brought up was the fact that Jesus didn't try to develop a system of reaching people. The commonality that binds the many experiences we read about in the gospels is that Jesus engaged people in their lives. He took the time to converse, share, tell stories, and love people where they were. It was not about a system, it was about genuine and sincere interaction with people.

The sad thing about evangelism today is that most Christians have reduced it to a formula that they swear works every time. When did we replace genuine fellowship with systematic approaches? When did we start caring more about the method used to reach a person with the gospel, than the person themselves? Evangelism is a shared experience that has the potential to greatly impact the lives of everyone involved, both the engager and the engaged.