Evangelism doesn’t scale

I came to Jesus through a Mormon missionary.

I was raised in a Christian home, but by high school I wasn’t reading my Bible and wouldn’t have understood what having a “relationship” with Jesus meant. I was 16 when I met a Mormon boy at school who was charming and smart, and he started inviting me to his “church.” He insisted he was a Christian—that his Jesus was mine, but that my church wasn’t telling me the “whole” story.

I started reading his literature. It was strange to my ears, but then so are the stories of men surviving a fiery furnace and demons who fly into pigs. Eventually I took to reading the Book of Mormon with a Bible open next to it, looking for the connecting dots and secret harmony my friend promised was there. Instead I found these books weren’t merely different, but opposite to each other. Deep into my investigation, I threw the Book of Mormon in the trash. And I met Jesus.

Evangelical Christians have always taken seriously Jesus’ command to spread the gospel. Individual churches and ministries do it differently, but we mostly all agree—at least in principle—that we should be doing it. So some of us hand out tracts. Some of us invite a neighbor over for dinner. Some of us embark on overseas missions. Some run for office.

I am utterly sure God uses each of these efforts, and I’m also sure that only He saves. Still, it’s logical that we’d pursue the kinds of evangelism we believe will work. And so the fact that our efforts differ so wildly arouses my curiosity.

So does the fact that a growing number of voices—­particularly since the 2016 election—have insisted that they know precisely the wrong way to evangelize. Often these voices will invoke something they call “the Church’s witness,” by which they ostensibly mean the credibility of Christians trying to spread the gospel. A common refrain is “If you do [that], you’ll harm the Church’s witness.”

But is that even possible? Surely there’s a flawed way to profess the real Jesus, because we are flawed. But is there a wrong way?

I once met a man who came to Jesus in college through a street preacher. I’ve always recoiled from this spectacle—men screaming about hell through a crackly speaker on the sidewalk. But my friend said he was walking home one Saturday morning after a party, feeling the prickly shame of his hangover, when he was confronted by someone yelling that God would punish sinners. It was the harsh, right word at the right moment. The man went home and began reading his Bible, soon to commit his life to Christ.

What can we say if one man’s road to Jesus is another man’s (mine) road away from Him? I wasn’t drawn to Jesus through a man on the sidewalk, and I don’t think I could’ve been. I came to the Lord through a Mormon, because that’s what He ordained, and because I have a pathological urge to be contrary, which in this particular case served me well. But can you imagine my insisting that we flood the streets with Mormon missionaries as a Christian evangelism strategy? Insisting that in my experience, this is how we bring people to Jesus!

No, and in fact this is what Paul wrestled against in his ministry in Acts. He “became all things to all people,” rebuking those who said only the Jewish law-followers could be “saved.” Those who would tell us today that we can only be called Christians if we say it this way, or worship like this, or vote like this, are descendants of these Pharisees. The kingdom of God just doesn’t work that way.

I suspect that people who want to police the single “witness” of a vast, growing, endlessly varied body of believers—as if we were a monolith—are primarily motivated by a desire for simplicity. It’s just daunting to accept that true evangelism ultimately requires the deep, slow work of getting to know individual people. It’s not plug-and-play. It’s time-consuming, and it really doesn’t scale.

Probably this is how God reminds us that all “success” in this endeavor is ultimately His. Our role is to be faithful, kind, persistent, and explicit about the gospel with exactly the people God has placed us next to: our kids, our church families, and our neighbors. I don’t know what will “work” for them, and neither can you until you start literally workshopping it. The only way it “works” is by disciples making other disciples. It’s a cosmic, beautiful, eternal multilevel marketing scheme that builds the kingdom of God one saint at a time.