We have made evangelism into something a Christian can learn to do without learning to live by Christ. We teach a person how to approach a stranger, explain salvation, and obtain a response. If people come to the meetings afterward, we call the work fruitful. Meanwhile, the question of what life produced the activity may never be asked.
That troubles me. We speak of Christ as our life, then place believers under an obligation they are expected to fulfill by their own effort. A brother may be inwardly dry and still be praised because he brings people. Another may be quietly learning to abide and feel ashamed because he has nothing to report.
Making the approach gentler does not settle this. Friendliness and careful listening can come from the same human source as pressure and argument. What matters is whether Zoe, the divine life we have received in Christ, is flowing through us.
The Lord Told Them to Wait
The Great Commission begins with Christ’s authority and ends with His presence (Matthew 28:18–20). We tend to lift the assignment out of that setting. Having been told to make disciples, we suppose we can decide how to carry out the work and ask Him to bless our arrangements.
But His authority extends to the work itself. He has not handed us an undertaking that we can now manage independently of Him.
Luke makes this plain. The disciples had seen the risen Lord and heard what was to be proclaimed. They knew that the nations needed to hear. Still, Jesus told them to remain in the city until they received power from on high (Luke 24:47–49). They had something true to say, and He told them to wait.
We should take that seriously. Knowing the message and seeing the need did not make them ready to go.
Acts 1:8 keeps the same order. The Holy Spirit comes upon them, and they become His witnesses. We often repeat the part about witnessing while treating the Spirit as help for a responsibility already resting upon us. But their testimony was to proceed from Him. No amount of practice could provide what they were waiting to receive.
The Kingdom Is Proclaimed Through the Ekklesia
We have also made the testimony far too individual. I believe the kingdom is proclaimed through the corporate Ekklesia: the people in whom Christ lives and rules together. Each believer speaks and functions as a member of that body. The testimony belongs to the whole.
Instead, we give every Christian a private evangelistic assignment. Each one must find people, speak to them, bring them in, and produce a result. The body becomes a collection of separate workers whose accomplishments can be added together. Where, in all of this, is the life they share?
First Corinthians 12:12–27 describes many members drinking of one Spirit and belonging to one body. They have different functions. The eye needs the hand. A member who seems weak may be indispensable. Why then do we measure everyone by the same ability to approach people and persuade them?
Ephesians 4:11–16 places the gifts within the building up of the body. Its growth comes from Christ the Head, through the functioning of its members. A gifted person serves that life. When his prominence leaves everyone else dependent upon him, something has gone wrong.
Peter addresses living stones being built into a spiritual house. He calls these people a royal priesthood and a holy nation, brought out of darkness to declare God’s excellencies (1 Peter 2:5, 9). This is a people with a common life. We lose much of what Peter is saying when we turn his words into separate instructions for isolated Christians.
Ephesians 3:10 says that God’s manifold wisdom is made known through the Ekklesia to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. Paul is speaking there of a testimony before spiritual powers. Even so, the place he gives the Ekklesia is unmistakable. God makes something known through this people together.
Jesus also connects the world’s believing with His people being one in the Father and the Son (John 17:21–23). Their oneness comes from His indwelling. It cannot be arranged by getting everyone to support the same ministry. The kingdom is expressed where Christ actually has His place among a people, governing their life together.
At Pentecost, Peter stood with the eleven when he spoke (Acts 2:14). In Antioch, the Spirit called Barnabas and Saul while the prophets and teachers were ministering to the Lord (Acts 13:1–4). Paul later told the Thessalonian church that the word of the Lord had sounded out from them (1 Thessalonians 1:8). There are individual voices in these accounts, but the witness comes from within a shared life.
Of course a member can speak when physically alone. Philip spoke to the Ethiopian. He did not become an independent source of life by being the only Christian in the conversation. Neither does belonging to the body mean obtaining a leader’s permission before speaking. Christ remains the Head.
I am not proposing a better coordinated evangelistic team. An organization can call its activities corporate while remaining entirely dependent upon human ability. The Ekklesia’s witness is Zoe lived together. Whatever a member says must belong to that life.
What Happened to Abiding?
John 15 gives us a branch that can bear nothing from itself. Everything depends upon its remaining in the vine. “Without me ye can do nothing” leaves little room for an independent Christian undertaking (John 15:4–5).
Yet the words about bearing fruit are used to send the branch out to prove itself. A believer hears that he must bring someone, that the person must remain, and that he ought to be concerned if he has no result. Before long, his attention is on whether he has done enough. Abiding has become one more means of making the assignment succeed.
I cannot accept that treatment of the passage. Christ is speaking about His life in us, His words remaining in us, His love and joy becoming ours. Fruit comes from that union. We have no right to reduce it to the number of people attached to our work.
Even when someone receives Christ through a member’s speaking, what has reached that person is life from Christ. It is not a product belonging to the speaker. A report may record a name and a baptism. It cannot tell us how much of Christ is being lived.
Nor is abiding merely preparation for a more important task. We have been brought into Christ Himself. To treat that union chiefly as a way to make evangelism effective is to misunderstand what we have received.
The Harvest Still Has a Lord
When Jesus saw the crowds, He told His disciples to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers (Matthew 9:37–38). The need was real, but the sending remained His. We often behave as though recognizing a need gives us authority to fill it.
Romans 10 asks how people can believe without hearing and how they can hear without a preacher. It also asks how anyone can preach unless sent (verses 14–15). That question belongs in the passage just as much as the others. We cannot use the need for hearing to make the Lord’s sending unnecessary.
In Acts 16:6–7, Paul and his companions were prevented by the Spirit from preaching in Asia and entering Bithynia. There were people there who needed Christ. The message had not changed. Nevertheless, they were stopped.
If the general need for evangelism settled every particular decision, that restraint would make no sense. The workers had to remain subject to the Lord, including when He prevented them from doing something they wanted to do for Him.
Later, Paul spoke to Lydia, and the Lord opened her heart (Acts 16:14). We should leave those two actions where Scripture places them. Paul’s speaking mattered. Opening her heart belonged to God.
So much pressure enters when we take responsibility for both. We keep adjusting the presentation or pursuing the person because a response has become necessary to our sense of having done the job. We have crossed from speaking what we were given into trying to secure what only God can give.
Paul’s Burden Was Not a Quota
Paul planted, Apollos watered, and God gave the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). Paul’s point directs attention away from the importance of the workers. Yet we study the successful evangelist, celebrate his methods, and urge everyone to imitate him. It is easy for the man to become larger in our eyes than the life he claims to serve.
I know Paul said that necessity was laid upon him to preach. He also became all things to all people that he might save some (1 Corinthians 9:16–23). Those are strong words. They describe a burden entrusted to him, and the cost he was willing to bear.
But we cannot take his commission and lay it unchanged upon every conscience in the body. The same letter insists upon different functions among the members. Paul’s labor does not establish a uniform requirement that each believer must produce converts.
And his willingness to use every possible means remained under Christ’s law. It did not make a favorable result the justification for whatever obtained it. In 2 Corinthians 5:14, he tells us what constrained him: the love of Christ. We cannot replace that inward working with appeals designed to make people feel more responsible.
His statement about being innocent of the blood of all also belongs to the ministry he had received and faithfully discharged (Acts 20:26–27). It should not be used to leave an ordinary believer afraid that someone’s eternal loss may be his fault because he failed to start a conversation.
A person living under that fear can become very active. We ought to ask what we have done to his relationship with the Lord.
When Gaining People Becomes the Goal
“Compel them to come in” is sometimes treated as permission to keep pressing until a person agrees (Luke 14:23). But this is a sentence within the great supper parable. Elsewhere Jesus tells His messengers to leave when they are not received (Matthew 10:14). Our desire to fill the house cannot cancel His instruction to leave.
Nor can “in season, out of season” be separated from the patience required in the same charge (2 Timothy 4:2). Timothy had already been told to avoid quarrelling, remain gentle, and recognize that God grants repentance (2 Timothy 2:24–25). Persistence by itself tells us very little about whether the Lord is directing a conversation.
Matthew 23:15 is especially sobering. Religious men travel across sea and land to make a proselyte, and their work leaves the person worse off. Jesus does not admire their dedication. Their success in gaining someone exposes the damage they are spreading.
That possibility ought to concern us. We can bring people into dependence upon a speaker, a set of teachings, or a movement and congratulate ourselves because they have joined us. A growing work can reproduce the same bondage in more people.
I want to know whether Christ has gained room in them. Have they received Him only to be taught that their life must now revolve around our meetings and activities? Do they learn to turn to Him, or must they keep returning to us for direction?
Acts certainly records numbers. It also says that the Lord added those being saved (Acts 2:47). Recording what He did is very different from assigning each believer a portion of the increase we expect to achieve. There is no conversion quota in that passage.
The contradiction becomes painful when our message is dependence upon Christ and our practice rests on human effort. We tell people that He will be their life while showing them a religious work that seems to depend upon our ability to keep it going.
Let Him Have His People
I believe we need to abandon evangelism as an undertaking we can operate alongside our relationship with Christ. The Ekklesia bears His testimony through the life it shares in Him. Each member’s speaking belongs there. Communion with Christ cannot be reduced to spiritual support for a work we have already determined to carry out.
For some of us, this will mean stopping. We may have to leave an assignment unfinished or disappoint people who expect us to keep producing. That will expose how much of our sense of usefulness has become attached to activity. It may also give us room to hear the Lord again.
This does not promise an effortless life. Paul labored and suffered. But he also knew the working of Another within him. The amount of effort tells us nothing by itself about its source. We must learn to remain with Christ in the labor as surely as in the quiet.
In John 7:37–39, Jesus calls the thirsty to come to Him and drink. Then He speaks of rivers of living water, and John tells us that He means the Spirit. We keep trying to produce the flow while giving so little attention to receiving from Him.
Dear ones, let us give the Lord room to have His Ekklesia. We do not need another work gathered around a capable person. We need Christ lived among us, with every member receiving from Him and supplying what He gives. Let Him govern our speaking as well as our silence. As His life flows through us together, the kingdom we announce will have a living expression.
