Three things to make evangelism easy

Scary, daunting, challenging, tiring.

These are common words associated with evangelism. It seems nothing strikes fear in a Christian quite like the e-word. I’m here to suggest that evangelism is in fact, easy. This has been our experience on campus, both doing evangelism and training students to do evangelism. Oh, and it’s incredibly fun too.

Three things have shaped our evangelism over the years:

1. Read the Gospel stories

2. Recognise the key actors

3. Remember the main issue

Read the Gospel Stories

Without a doubt, the best evangelistic tool we’ve come across is the four gospel accounts themselves. It seems to me counter-productive to bypass the biblical gospels and turn to gospel outlines when attempting to share the gospel with others. Semantics aside, gospel outlines are a great training tool for Christians but often times are incredibly tricky as evangelistic tools. This is because it presents concepts which invite debate.

If, like me, you don’t feel quite the raconteur (or even know what that means), evangelism will simply lead to an argument at worst or at best a perhaps this is true for you, but not for me. Personally, I could never remember the six squares of Two Ways to Live, which I do think is a great tool btw.

What we are suggesting is simply invite someone to read the Bible with you. More specifically, to read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. By doing this, 4 things will happen:

1. You avoid controversial issues or feeling like you need an answer to every possible question. Your conversation is naturally limited by the passage in front of you as opposed to an outline where you might have to defend your theory of the origin of the universe before you even get to Jesus. Who wants to do that?

2. You won’t risk offending people as you might if you were presenting an outline which by nature is cold logic. Instead of us vs. them, it’s us reading the Bible together.

3. You don’t have to worry about what to say since it’s God’s word that is doing the talking. No more awkward silences.

4. Jesus becomes the focus. This is the point of evangelism. The gospel is about a Him, not an it. It’s an account of His life, not merely a record of His teaching or principles to live by.

That said, what do you actually say after you’ve read a passage? That’s the next tip: Recognise the key actors. We'll look at that more next.