Evangelism

We're in the crossroad of how we should run evangelism. After all, is it something which we 'run' and 'do', or something that we 'are'? Whatever our conviction is, everyone agrees that it is important, it is central to our christian confession and some may go as far as to presume that the church exist for evangelism, and not otherwise.

Every week, some of my good friends would gather around and go for what we call GST, the gospel sharing team, which shares the black book/red book with strangers around university. It is like Mao Tse Tung's communist Red Book, but this one is a silent revolution, which calls people to repentance to the holy God. They are great selfless men and women who put away their comfort, time, energy, security, political correctness and popularity, to share 'this great story' of the saviour Jesus Christ. Like Paul in the book of Acts, sometimes their message was accepted with openness and kindness, sometimes tolerated and sometimes reviled, but nevertheless this bunch of radicals affirm what they believe, not by lip service, but through words and deeds.

But many a times their effort are being challenged by different people with different opinions and ideas. Some people critically dismissed their work, as being fundamentalist in such highly plural and post-modern setting. Some challenge their definition of evangelism as merely a system of getting people into heaven. Some challenge their authenticity and integrity in loving people, since stranger evangelism hardly builds authentic relationships. Some challenged the usage of highly offensive concepts like heaven and hell, sin, judgement and morality.

They defended their position saying, "Despite of the many flaws of our evangelism, its better than your no-evangelism", "Despite of the lack of authentic relationships, those who do it are the most selfless, the most loving, friendly, caring, trustworthy, emphatic people around", "true transformation come from true repentance and agony from sin", all which are absolutely true! We can spend conferences after conferences, forums after forums, books after books on evangelism, when it is simply "go and preach the good news". We can talk about being nice, building bridges, being authentic, but all these do not dismiss the importance of delivering the message itself!

The pressing questions which I think ought to be considered are:

1) What is the Gospel, Salvation, Faith and Evangelism? And where does it stand in priority compared to other tenets of the evangelical faith?

2) What is the content of this "Gospel"? The 4 spiritual laws? The 10 commandments? The "Story"? The Proclamation of the Kingdom? Jesus Christ? The Trinity?

2) What is a framework of evangelism that can be practically adopted by the christian community, taking into the account the different levels of commitment towards evangelism? How do we determine whether a community of faith is doing well in evangelism? How do we measure our effectiveness? How can we improve our effectiveness?