What Is Success In Evangelism?

In an age when true evangelism is considered passe or unsophisticated by its cultured despisers, may we believers never adopt such corrupt thinking.  In a retrograde culture where right is considered wrong, and God is said to be irrelevant, may we believers shine as lights in this present darkness.

     "What is success in evangelism?  Is it when the person you witness to comes to Christ?  Certainly that's what we want to happen.  But if this is success, are we failures whenever we share the gospel and people refuse to believe?  Was Jesus an "evangelistic failure" when people like the rich young ruler turned away from Him and His message?  Obviously not.  Then neither are we when we present Christ and His message and they turn away in unbelief.  We need to learn that sharing the gospel is successful evangelism.  We ought to have an obsession for souls, and tearfully plead with God to see more people converted, but conversions are the fruit that God alone can give. 
     In this regard we are like the postal service.  Success is measured by the careful an accurate delivery of the message, not by the response of the recipient.  Whenever we share the gospel (which includes the summons to repent and believe), we have succeeded.  In the truest sense, all biblical evangelism is successful evangelism, regardless of the results."

-from "Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life" by Donald S. Whitney, p.103.

"A mist in the pulpit (still) becomes a fog in the pew."

You have to love Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages (Baker, 1980) by my former professor Haddon Robinson.  How could we then imagine the thousands of sermons that would flow from our introductory preaching classes with Haddon and Dr. Scott Gibson?  Those were the days...or rather, these are still the days!  Preaching, with Biblical Theology, is a never-ending life-consuming pursuit.  Today I'm reminded of why the basics are called the basics:

"Explanation proves difficult if the expositor does not know his audience.  The more familiar he is with a subject, the less aware he may be of a congregation's ignorance of it.  The people in the pew live in a different intellectual world from their pastor.  Indeed they support him financially so that he can study what they cannot.  He must not assume that his listeners immediately understand what he is talking about.  He owes them a clear explanation of exactly what he means.  As a guiding rule, a speaker should define every important term in language the audience understands.  Certainly it is better to define too many terms than too few.  Explaining the relationships and implications of ideas, we should know the explanation ourselves so clearly that no vagueness exists in our own minds.  Then we should work through the steps in the explanation so that they come in a logical or psychological order.  A mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew." (p. 141)

There should be no pride in preaching, but a sober and humble effort to both speak from the heart of God and speak to the hearts of people.  Here's to continually clearing out the mist!

Watch Your Language

So a sign outside a church says, "Mine Eyes are Forever Towards the Lord."  For many people, under the age of 30, this might be a mystery.  They might drive past and think to themselves, "What are mine eyes?  Are these optical spheres which explode when stepped upon?  Are these some weapon, that upon immediate observation appear to be eyeballs in the sand?  And what of 'towards the Lord'?  Does this mean that such devices are strewn about on the way to the Lord?"  That doesn't seem like good news.

Such imaginative difficulties are not too far off from actual ones.  Inquisitive people are put off quite often by this type of religious language.  Why then would people use it?

I can only think it is proper to do so for historical reasons in contexts in which the historical could be appreciated.  To do otherwise might serve only to create distance, profoundly unnecessary distance, between one person and another.

To whom does language belong?  Is it only the author or speaker?  Or is meaning shared by means of linguistic signs that are mutually understood?  It seems to me that if we want to truly communicate, we might want to consider our language, our terminology, our Christianeze way of communicating that others may actually not understand. 

Even if we say something nice, we might say it in a way that encourages others to stop listening.  As the wise DJ says, "Be yourself so you don't have to be by yourself."