Have you ever get a telemarketer call trying to sale you something? Annoying? I know it is annoying, I worked in sales myself, and I called some of you selling something. I think that lots of our evangelism methodologies are no more than a sales pitch. One thing that I don’t get it is why we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? I am talking about evangelism and discipleship. I still don’t get it why the church o f Jesus keeps using and emphasizing methodologies of evangelism that the main objective is for the customer to agree with the vendor.
First of all, sharing the gospel is not a demonstration of knowledge, and just because someone says yes to all the questions on a track, it does not means that the Holy Spirit has transformed that life, and that that person is willing to not only take Jesus as the only way to go get to heaven, but to consider Jesus more important than family, friends, children, work, richness, and his own life. Sounds familiar?
Second, I really think that it should not be a division between evangelism and discipleship, because our main task as the church of Jesus is to make disciples, but some how we emphasis so much the “initiation rituals” of those who want to follow Jesus that we end up with a bunch of proselytes (Mathew 23), and few disciples. We celebrate the beginning of their new lives in Christ, but don’t care if they grow to maturity or not, don’t care if they ever reproduce other disciples, as long as they keep coming to church on Sunday, we think they are growing. Evangelism is the first step of discipleship, and our methodology, whatever it is, should lead people from day one to become followers of Jesus, and not so much become proselytes. We need to ask ourselves, are we making disciples, or making proselytes? What is the fruit of our evangelism? Disciples, or people who are more religious than us?
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