Evangelism: Reconsidering Our Approach in a Pandemic

By amazon Wednesday, September 9, 2020 Comment Edit

Pursuing creative, personal opportunities for evangelism during COVID-19.

Many churches have found effective and creative ways to be on mission and to engage in evangelism during the coronavirus crisis. At the same time, some evangelism approaches have been affected just like church life (and, let's face it, all of life) has been disrupted.

If you aren't a scholar or researcher in the field of evangelism you may not realize the many ways it is carried out. On the one hand, we all understand that evangelism involves the proclamation of the good news of the gospel and an invitation for women and men to respond by grace, through faith, to that invitation of the gospel. There is biblical, gospel content involved: "How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" (Romans 10:14).

Mass Evangelism

On the other hand, there are different ways actually to practice this by different people and groups in diverse contexts. For example, many people are familiar with the category of mass evangelism. I direct the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center; the most famous evangelist in history was Mr. Graham. Masses of people in large arenas hearing the gospel illustrates a form of mass evangelism. Evangelism remains as long as somebody is telling others about Jesus and how to respond and receive.

But there are other means of mass evangelism like open air evangelism. That's also a kind of evangelism, in the category of mass evangelism.

Small Group Evangelism

Small group evangelism has become an increasingly used tool today even as small groups have become an important part of culture both inside and outside the church. Alpha is probably the best known; another example is Christianity Explored.

Small group evangelism existed in earlier forms. ...