Church at Sojourners this morning. I would hyperlink to them, but they never update their website. I know this because I’m in charge of their website—or at least my job title says I am. Except I’m not. You can’t be in charge of something if you’re never given the passwords to the server. But I’ll save that rant for another time.
The sermon this morning was on evangelism. Brian, our pastor, has been speaking a lot on evangelism lately. Mainly because Sojourners consists mostly of Bethany University students. And if it’s going to have any viable future, it can’t consist mostly of students. Students come and go with every new semester. They have “home churches” in their hometowns they have more allegiance to. And most of their focus while in college is, well, college. Thus you can’t base any long-term stuff on college students.
And I say this, ironically enough, as the church’s small groups leader (and tech guy; I have lots of titles) who also happens to be a student. Come May 2006, I’ll graduate, God willing, and then what happens? I don’t want to leave Sojourners in the lurch, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that I’ll still be living in the Santa Cruz area after that point. My family will likely want me to move back to Vacaville. But I have no idea where I’ll get hired to teach—anywhere in California, I suppose—so if I’m being realistic, part of my job is to find my replacement. (Heck, if we’re all being realistic, the church is supposed to replace itself every generation or so. I know this puts a lot of older leaders into great fear, considering the fresh young idiots who will be doing the same things they did back when they were fresh young idiots. But it’ll do fine without us, so long as Jesus is still around.)
So Brian talked about evangelism, and about how our usual expectations in evangelism involve the dramatic instant conversion—someone whose life is crap, who turns to Jesus, gets “saved,” and turns completely around. Except that isn’t ordinarily the case. Most people come to Jesus through a lifelong process of recognizing they need to follow him… then then don’t, then something happens where they follow him a little more, then a little less, then a little more, and so on. We might call them wishy-washy, but such people do make up the bulk of the church. I’m one of them. And that being the case, why do we spend so much time in evangelism aiming for the dramatic cases?
There’s all types of ways to evangelize, which I know full well. My usual way is through service; I’m not a door-to-door guy, and I think apologetics only good for convincing Christians they already made the right decision. Not for convincing others Christianity is true. (The stats back me up on this; very few people come to Jesus for anything other than emotional reasons. That too is another rant.) Some prefer street preaching, tract-passing (always a great way to annoy people on Halloween night), or interpersonal contact—which was Jesus’s method, which we don’t try enough.
Brian encouraged us to pray about which way we might evangelize. “The only problem,” I told him afterward, “is that people will now probably avoid praying, because they know what God’s gonna tell them.”
Of course there’s another problem: The listeners were mainly college students. They have no interest in the long-term growth of Sojourners because they’ll be leaving; and thanks to midterms they’ll be “too busy” to start. They’re already “too busy” to show up for worship practice…
Obviously I have way too many side rants that I want to get out of my system. Better stop now.