I often consult churches on developing an evangelism friendly culture. It is amazing how many different cultures can be developed right before your eyes. I am applying some of my recent thoughts to a message series titled, “Elvis is dead and other essential truths.”
I won’t present it for a couple months, but I can’t wait.
One of the messages will be about feeding what you want to get out of life. We feed the death side of our lives far too much as churches and Christians. And we leave the life side of life out. And our pre-Christian observers have us pegged.
We evangelicals are fundamentally known by what we are against. I bet most Christians would have to stop and think pretty hard to find out what they are for. You can’t succeed if your only presentation is what you are against…or worse yet whom you are against. Pre-Christians are hoping somewhere along the line they can hear what we are for. And they hope it’s for them.
Actually the source of this is “fear.” Our evangelism and Church development is often based upon fear more than faith. And unfortunately I am convinced that many Christian organizations have either deliberately or accidentally learned that fear raises more money than faith and hope more quickly. I personally feel we could to with a lot fewer para-church groups, but that is another topic.
I have a hunch that our evangelical tendency to base so much of our existence on what we are against and fear comes from our roots in Revivalism. I am for revivalism. But many conservative denominations in the evangelical camp had their beginnings with those who often came from alcoholism, depression and poverty. All this is fine. But we had a lot to be against to stay free. The only problem is we haven’t gotten to what we are for often enough. To be effective at developing evangelism-friendly church culture, we have to talk tirelessly about what we are for.
