A couple of years ago, a family who’d been journeying with our church for a few years suddenly stopped attending. They weren’t raised in the Seventh-day Adventist faith and we’d met them in the community, becoming fastfriends. When they decided to start attending our church each Sabbath, we got really excited and quickly drew them into church life.
Sadly, after about 18 months, they stopped coming. After several emotional and tear-filled conversations, they shared with us how they felt they needed to go in a different spiritual direction.
Though we got the feeling that their departure would perhaps be temporary (it wasn’t), we were absolutely devastated.
And we were devastated not simply because we felt they were turning away from truth, or because they were giving up on God’s remnant people.
We were devastated because we had really come to love them.
That is, after all, the grand purpose of evangelism—at least as I understand it.
To be sure, in evangelism, we share biblical truths with people. We introduce them to our convictions about where we believe we are in earth’s history, and what they can do to align with God’s principles. But more than anything, we extend and draw people into love. We give them our hearts, our emotions, our affections. We give them our vulnerable selves.
They’re not simply a statistic on a membership ledger or a notch on our baptismal belts. They’re not objects of our evangelistic conquest or “souls” we’re merely trying to win. They’re multidimensional people who bear God’s image. They’re people worthy of love, care, and commitment.
That’s the type of evangelism—the type of “good news”—I aspire to and want to participate in.
Paul’s approach
It reminds me of how Paul described his approach with the believers in Thessalonica, people for whom he’d labored after being driven out of Philippi. Though he was able to stay in Thessalonica for only three weeks because of persecution (according to Acts 17), the Thessalonians apparently very quickly endeared themselves to Paul and he noted in his first letter to them how he desperately wanted to return to them, but Satan had hindered him (see 1 Thessalonians 2:18).
The reason he desired to return, he explained a few verses before, is what grabs my attention. “So, affectionately longing for you,” he explained, “we were well pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God, but also our own lives, because you had become dear to us” (v. 8).
In this, Paul explains that he wasn’t simply trying to transfer information to the Thessalonians. He wasn’t simply trying to get them to accept “truth.” He poured out his very life—indeed, his “soul,” or his “psyche” (the Greek word is psuche)—on behalf of these people. He had given them his affections, his heart, his everything. And thus they had become “dear” to him.
This is what we do in evangelism. We share truth with people, yes—but more than that, we share our lives with them and thus draw them into the bonds of affection. They become family to us, with all the ups and downs that that entails, and we bind our hearts to them with chords of love.
It’s costly
I could cite example after example of what this has looked like in my family’s life. I could talk about our next-door neighbor, Richard, who was a cranky old man in a strangely endearing way, for whom we baked cookies, drove to dialysis early in the mornings, had at our Thanksgiving table, and whose death felt like the death of our own grandfather.
To be sure, we shared the gospel with him, which he felt was too good to be true (and he felt he was too broken to be worthy of), and he occasionally attended our church. But more than this, we also shared our “own lives” with him—which is actually much more costly and will exact a much greater emotional, financial, and social toll than simply sharing a few facts about the Bible with people.
I could talk about our friends Shivani, whom my wife met at a library story-time when our kids were young, and her husband Manish, with whom we’ve spent many hours—on the ski slopes, at their lakeside camp, at the dinner table. We’ve talked about God, and they’ve attended our church a few times, but we’ve also simply shared life with them and processed what it means to be parents, what it means to be spouses, what it means to be human.
That’s because, to return to my original point, in evangelism, we’re not simply sharing with and inviting people into truth. We’re sharing with and inviting them into life, into love, into our deepest affections.
In short, we’re inviting them into the inner workings of the Trinitarian God Himself, whose being is defined chiefly by love, and who most poignantly expressed this love in the person of Jesus—not simply by announcing a few facts about His character to the world, but by pouring out His life unto death on our behalf.
And that’s the type of evangelism—the type of “good news”—I aspire to and want to participate in.
