My column for the In Port News, to be published September 12, 2014:
It's a dirty word to a lot of people. Even to a lot of Christians it's a dirty word. “Evangelism.” I think we shy away from it so much because of some of the excesses we see among many of the better known “evangelists.” Let's just say that I shy away from some of those as well. I've always believed as a Christian that our model in everything is to be Jesus. And what I see from Jesus (and from those who he had the change to engage with directly) is a kind of evangelism that's a lot different from our usual image today.
For some reason in recent weeks the story of Jesus encountering the Samaritan woman at the well has been coming to me a lot. I'm not sure why, but I've found that the Holy Spirit works that way. Some things just keep coming up for no obvious reason. It's God trying to get our attention perhaps. This morning I read that story over again and realized what a wonderful teaching passage it is to help us understand evangelism better. There's two examples of evangelism in the story, which is recorded in John 4. One type of evangelism is shown by Jesus himself; the other type is demonstrated by the woman herself. They're different approaches, but what they have in common is that neither resembles at all what we commonly think of today as evangelism.
Jesus doesn't even begin the encounter by talking about God or faith. The woman is at a well drawing water, so Jesus starts by talking about something the woman is well able to understand – the important of water. He needed water at that moment; he asked the woman to help him. Lesson 1: the evangelist can be as blessed by the evangelized as the reverse. We need to approach evangelistic opportunities ourselves with open hearts and minds. And Jesus didn't try to force anything on the woman. There were no threats; no statements of “you have to believe this or that or else.” After a bit of conversation, he simply got her attention by asking her if she would like living water that would satisfy her forever. And that provided an opening for Jesus to go deeper. And the woman was amazed. Jesus' evangelistic technique got her attention. And it pushed the woman to engage in her own evangelism.
She ran and talked to the people she knew about Jesus. Like Jesus, she doesn't seem to have forced anything on anyone. She simply explained what she had experienced. Jesus had touched her deeply, and people were amazed and curious. They wanted to experience this for themselves. That's also evangelism. We don't really have to tell people what to believe or convince them of anything. We invite people to experience Jesus. After all, we're not the ones who are going to “convert” anyone. That's the Holy Spirit's doing. We just want to invite people to experience Jesus – through the Scriptures, through the church, through our personal testimonies. That's evangelism too.
It's an important topic at this time of year. Most churches are shaking off the summer doldrums and getting things up and running again. And we have a lot of good news to share. If we pay attention to this story, we might learn how to share it better. Not by being pushy; not by threatening people with what will happen if they don't believe as we believe. Just by inviting them into the experience. That's what the Samaritan woman did: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could he be the Messiah?” It's what Jesus did. He found a connection that the woman could relate to – and he invited her into the experience rather than trying to force anything upon her.
Evangelism isn't a dirty word, and it's not hard to do. We have two great examples from this story of how to do it.
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