Becky: “I’m just not sure that I understand this Jesus hype. I don’t see why so many people change their whole lives and become Christians.”
John: “You should come to my church sometime! You can see just how awesome God is!”
Have you had this conversation? Are you the John that sees a lost person and invites him or her to church? Probably. The problem is, though, that this is exactly not how we are supposed to handle the people in our lives who don’t know Christ. Yes, the intention is good. I’m sure that you believe that by completely surrounding a lost person by Christians in a church service on a Sunday morning is a surefire way for God to convict them and bring them to saving knowledge of Christ, but this is not the Biblical approach to evangelism. I’m going to explain why our modern “come to church” method of evangelism is a total failure.
It’s Not the Pastor’s Responsibility
The main idea of inviting your friend to church is so that he or she can sit through a sermon by your beloved pastor so that he can speak just what they need to hear, convicting them and ultimately leading to their complete and total surrender to God. The problem here is that you have completely put all of the responsibility on your pastor and have taken no responsibility upon yourself to witness to that person.
The senior pastor of a church has many – and I mean many – responsibilities at the church. The main responsibility of the pastor is to shepherd his sheep. What we mean by this metaphor is that the shepherd (pastor) of the flock (the church members) leads the flock into a deeper understanding of God and his way of life expected by the Christian. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the pastor’s job to win souls to Christ. That is your job, Christian.
Your pastor is training you (or should be) in how to speak to the lost and help them experience Christ. The sermons preached on Sunday mornings are to be directed to you, the saved Christian, not your lost friend who you bugged enough times that he actually came on Sunday to get you to shut up. Though it happens millions of times every Sunday morning in America, the pastor’s sermons should not be geared towards salvation because it should be a given that the Christian in the pew is saved, otherwise, by definition, you are not a Christian. Rather, the sermons should be geared towards training the saved Christians how to go out into the world and share the Gospel so that others can be saved and then join us in the services every weekend. This all leads me to my next point.
It Neglects the Needs of the Christian
The reason your pastor continues to preach salvation sermons is due to probably one of two things: 1) He doesn’t understand the role of a sermon to a church service of Christians; or 2) He realizes that no one in the church can go out and share the Gospel because half of them don’t even know if they’re saved.
Do you see the circular pattern here? The pastor should be giving sermons which better help you understand the Bible so that you can go share it with lost people, but because he knows that you keep bringing the lost people to him, he must instead give a salvation sermon in hopes that someone in front of him will take step one (salvation) and hopefully take step two (evangelism) soon.
We have caused our own starvation because we do not do our jobs. We starve ourselves of proper Gospel training by our shepherd because we keep throwing the responsibility of getting people saved onto him instead of doing our duty. That is why we have people who sit in church pews every Sunday claiming to be Christians but have no idea what the Bible says; they keep hearing salvation sermons and can never get off the milk and onto the solid food. The author of Hebrews recognized this issue and had this to say.
“About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
(Hebrews 5:11-14 ESV)
It should also be noted that if we expect lost people to be among the people in the pews, we will even direct our music towards an evangelical approach. This absolutely deprives the Christian of an authentic worship service. If we sing and play songs that are about getting saved, how do the saved relate to that? Worship songs should be sung to God but songs used for evangelism are sung to the nonbelievers. If you would like to read more about my views of worship music, please click here.
Going further, the weekly church service is a holy gathering of God’s people. Often times we forget that what we are doing is ancient and sacred in the eyes of God. As marginalizing as it sounds, a church service is not for the lost; it’s only for the Christians. It is a service where God’s presence comes to meet with the corporate body of Christ and to pour out his spirit on them. This is not a place for a non-Christian to be. If we continue to mold our holy gathering into an outreach service, we will never fully experience God and his majesty in the one single time per week that we all come together! This should be a time of worship, praise, and diligent study in hopes that we can go out and share the Gospel efficiently for the next six days.
Bottom line: By not taking time to share the Gospel with your friends and get them on the milk yourself, you have prevented yourself from ever getting to sit under a pastor who can wean you from the milk onto solid food.
Evangelism Means “Go”
The driving point of this entire article is that evangelism is your responsibility. Here is what Jesus said concerning evangelism.
“Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
(Matthew 28:16-20 ESV; The Great Commission)
Jesus is the true shepherd of the church (John 10:11), and his disciples were the first of the flock. Jesus trained these disciples in all of God’s commandments, his laws, his statues, his mercies, his grace, and his expectations of the Christian. He then tells those members of the flock to “go” and make more disciples of the lost by teaching them the same exact things.
Jesus did not say, “Now that you know everything I’ve taught you about the Kingdom, stand behind your pulpits, hope that lost people come sit in your pews, and preach salvation.” But that’s exactly what we do. But here’s what completely confuses me… Why would a lost person come to a church service if he or she doesn’t know and love God? Yeah, sure, some come out of curiosity, but not very many lost people come to church (willingly) because they do not believe in the God we claim to meet in our churches.
It is time for the Christian to start acting like a Christian. It is time for the Christian to go and make disciples, not invite them to church and hope they magically hear the words of a pastor and surrender. Go to the lost and share the Gospel so diligently that the people you speak to see God in you so strongly that they want to know more. Share the Gospel with them and bring them to the saving knowledge of Christ. Then bring them to church as a new Christian where they can be trained how to go out and bring more in. If we take it upon ourselves to do our duty as Christians, we will see an explosion of new believers flooding our church doors in hopes to learn more about the God we serve.
