Six Priorities for an Evangelizing Church

by   Victor Lee                                                                                                                                           Vol. XII, No. 2, February 1999

Dr. Tom Eliff spoke on John 20:21: "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." (NIV) Eliff, immediate past-president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is pastor of First Southern of Del City, Oklahoma, where he estimates he has seen more than 10,000 people come to Christ, and about 5,200 baptized, in the past 12 years. Clearly, he is a man who knows of what he speaks. His comments, edited for space:

"There is a great difference between an evangelistic church and an evangelizing church. I have gone to churches where everything they did had an evangelistic tone to it. But if you would look beyond the services, you would discover that it was not an 'evangelizing' church. That is, on a day-by-day basis the people within the church were not evangelizing, they were not sharing the Gospel.

"The issue for us as pastors is to develop evangelizing churches. I want to draw from this passage six statements relevant to the Pastor and evangelism.

"One: Whatever else evangelism is, it is ultimately my response to the Lord (not to the lost).

"I hear a great deal of talk about being burdened for souls, but evangelism is not about a burden for souls. Evangelism is not determined by whether I have a burden for the lost. If it is, then that means I have no compulsion to share Christ if I don't feel a burden. It means, 'If you can't move me by my emotions, I don't have to share Christ.' It is irrelevant when I meet an individual whether I feel a burden. A burden is always subjective. If I reduce evangelism to a subjective, experiential issue then I'm not going to be a very good evangelist. Though he was burdened for the lost, Jesus did not come here because he was burdened for the lost. He said, 'I came here as a response to the Father.'

"Two: As a pastor I cannot do evangelism unless I get where the lost are.

"Let me tell you where the lost are. Generally they are not in your church on Sunday morning. So if you think that as a pastor your biggest goal is to bring a message that will bring a harvest on Sunday morning, and you're thinking your obligation is complete and you're going to be effective, then let me tell you this: if you try to do your evangelism from the pulpit, then all of your Sunday School teachers are going to do their evangelism from the classroom.

"Jesus got where lost people were. That is incredibly important. That means your church needs to see you out visiting. But the truth of the matter is evangelism is more than visiting. Evangelizing is an activity that, if you do it, you will talk about it. If a preacher goes very long without telling the folks of the people he has had the privilege of leading to the Lord, it's because he hasn't led people to the Lord. You lead somebody to Jesus, you're going to tell about it.

"Three: True effectiveness in evangelism requires that I die to self.

“Why don't people evangelize? It's fear. It's ego. It's p-r-i-d-e. Why else would you not do it, unless you're afraid you're going to be rebuked, mocked, or made to look silly. You've got to die to self.

"Life for you will become very simple once you remove your ego as a factor. And evangelizing becomes so much easier if you'll remove your ego. The bottom line is you have got to die to what is convenient to you. It was not convenient for Jesus to come to this earth. True effectiveness in evangelism requires that I die to self, to my ego, to my convenience, to my schedule, to all these things.

"Four: The time for me to evangelize is limited.

"Jesus had a limited time. The time is limited! Why are we not out evangelizing. Somebody says, ‘Well, if I don't do it today I'll do it tomorrow. I'll make up for it.' It won't work. You don't have all the time in the world. How many of you will admit that there is somebody you intended to evangelize that died before you did it? We don't have time. Do it now.

"Five: Many of the people I evangelize will reject both the message and me.

"A lot of people Jesus evangelized rejected Him and the message. So people are going to do that to me. I knew a successful insurance salesman once, and I asked him one time what was his secret of success. He said, ‘This is what I've built my whole business on: When I get to the end of the day, and I make my very last call and I've been turned down and turned down, I make two more. When I got over the fact that most people I tried to sell insurance to didn't want it, I began to realize that didn't mean nobody wanted it.’

"Six: When I evangelize, I must place my faith in the One who alone gives eternal life.

"This is the most important thing. I must not place my faith in a system, in myself, in the circumstances, in the eagerness of the sinner to receive the message. I don't place my faith in any of that.

"If I put my faith in the system, if they don't get saved, I'll blame the system. If I put my faith in myself, that means I'm not going to evangelize very much because after a while I'll get tired of being a failure and I'll decide they're going to hell because I'm not a very good soulwinner. If I put my faith in circumstances, I won't evangelize very much because it's never the right time to evangelize. I've just got to put my faith in the Father."

[Reprinted from The Conservative Record, newsletter of the Conservative Carolina Baptists, P.O. Box 3001, Boone, NC 28607. Victor Lee is editor.]