Vol 2:29 Mission and Evangelism: Helping People Discover God at Work in Them

This summer I read Ben Campbell Johnson’s Speaking of God: Evangelism as Initial Spiritual Guidance. I found his reframing of evangelism intriguing having missional ramifications.

Evangelism is always a task that would leave me in a cold sweat. How do I walk up to a stranger and share with them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Or how do I go up to someone I know and find a way of weaving Jesus into the conversation. Both approaches I have to admit I have had very little “success” with.

I have always found it easier to be ready to share “the hope that is in me” when I am already in conversation with someone and in dialogue we find ourselves talking about God, about spiritual things, etc. It just seems more organic and incarnational – fitting the way God has wired me.

Yet, being missionally-focused requires, I think, an intentionality that seeks to be in constant awareness of what or who God is noticing, to what God is up to in the world. In recognizing that God is at work in the world, and that God is at work in every human life, seeking to re-create and restore all humanity and creation in relationship with God, Johnson’s insights on evangelism as providing initial spiritual guidance offers some incarnational ways of engaging in sharing the good news of God’s reign present in the world.

In recognizing that God is active somehow in every person’s life – though many, perhaps even the majority are unaware of the extent God is active in their lives and situations, giving the credit to luck or circumstance, enables me to approach relationships and conversations very differently.

In engaging people in conversation – as to what they are reading, or what is going in their lives, even chit-chat like how they are, with an awareness of God being active in their lives, enables me to converse with them prayerfully. It attunes me to listen more closely to what they are expressing, what experiences they are sharing, rather than finding a place to break into the conversation with my story, with my agenda. In listening, I am developing an awareness to notice how God is active in their lives. In noticing how God is active in them, I find that I have the freedom to name God’s presence in them – “it seems like you had a God-moment there” or “it seems that God was guiding you in that.” It’s a comment I am able to make noticing that God is doing something significant in their lives – yet I really don’t expect a response from them. However, invariably a response comes – “what do you mean?” Conversationally, then I am able to respond with how I notice God at work in them in a particular situation, helping them to see or discover God at work in them.

That is about it. I trust the Spirit of God to open up a growing awareness in their lives of what God is doing in them, through them. I do not have to cover all the bases in one conversation as if I will never see them again. Rather, in engaging in conversation a relationship with them develops in which the dialogue can move in directions wherever the Spirit of God leads. Because God is at work in every human life, because God is the one who carries out God’s mission and I am a participant with what God is doing, it is not my responsibility to make it all work out. Instead, in partnership with God, I relate, converse, respond, in accordance with the leading of the Spirit in situations that the Spirit has led me into in order to respond to the stories they share that are pregnant with the moving of God – though they do not necessarily see. I have the opportunity and privilege of helping them see God at work in them. In seeing, and being open to consider this reality, they are in a place where they can respond to God’s moving in them.

Unless we engage persons in conversations that name how God is moving in them – initial spiritual guidance, others may never discover and name for themselves what God is up to in them. This is the kind of evangelism that is filled with hospitality, with relationship, with conversation – and avoids my having “cold sweats.”

I’d be interested in your responsive comments.