We've Been Doing It All Wrong, Part II

A friend has asked for some clarification on a couple of points regarding the essay, We've Been Doing it All Wrong.  There are several things that should be said based on some feedback to the original article. 

1.  I am NOT saying that people should not ever travel to any special events and evangelize.  I AM saying that the majority of your efforts should be focused in your area in conjunction with your local church.  There is Biblical warrant for traveling to evangelize; perhaps the best example is Philip in Acts 8.  However, Philip understood the role of the local church and was committed to it since he served it as a deacon (Acts 6).

I AM also saying that we need to make a serious effort to identify sound local churches and encourage those who are interested to attend them.  We also need to be much more deliberate in referring people to good local churches.  

2.  I am NOT saying there is no role for a traveling evangelist.  I AM saying that even the traveling evangelist has a responsibility to be directly accountable to the local church.  I am currently training a man who wants to become a traveling evangelist who plans on taking six months on the road and six months off.  When he is not on the road he is planning on serving his local church in the area of evangelism and in other ways. One cannot have real accountability without face time. 

I AM also saying that if you spend more time on the road than serving and living in your church, there may be a problem. Additionally, the role of the traveling evangelist ought to be to build the visible church in the areas he is preaching.  Where are the evangelists, who like Leonard Ravenhill, stayed in an area after many were converted there, and served them until they could find a pastor (a period of several years)? 

3.  Some who read what I have written disagree with me and that is fine.   Sometimes we have a tendency to find loopholes in the argument that someone puts forward so that we can find an exception.  If we can find an exception, then we can marginalize the argument and not listen to any of the concerns that are raised even if those concerns are valid.  Not only is this immature, it is spiritually dangerous.

I am not the authority on Biblical evangelism.  No one, including the evangelist you respect the most, is.  Jesus is the Lord of the Harvest and God's Word is our standard.  Nothing else.  If my essay causes you to evaluate what you are doing from a Biblical perspective, then that is what I was aiming for.  If you find that you are wrong, the answer is not to defend yourself because it would mean changing something you like to do.  The answer is to repent and change the way you do things.  If you find you are in the right, praise God.  But in the multitude of counselors there is safety.  Ask for more than your own opinion on this. 

4.   Writing on this stuff is a calculated risk.  I risk offending friends who I love dearly, some of whom I have trained to do evangelism years ago.  I risk offending financial supporters of our ministry.  I risk people who I have personally trained to do the exact opposite of what I am proposing here.  I risk my own small platform in the street evangelism community.  This is a risk I am willing to take for the sake of the glory of God in the church (Eph. 3:21) and for the sake of truth.  If this means that people accuse me of losing my zeal for evangelism, or becoming compromised, then that is something I am willing to live with because my conscience is held captive to the Word of God.  I will mourn the loss of friends, but I cannot soft peddle truth just so people will like me.

Commit to the local church.  Bury yourself there and be content to never be heard from again just so long as Jesus is famous and the local church is strong.

We've Been Doing it All Wrong

Paul Washer on The Great Commission

 "The Great Commission is not limited to the making of individual disciples, but involves bringing each believer into an interdependent relationship with others in the context of a local church." --Paul Washer

I just got my copy of HeartCry Missionary Society's Magazine for this quarter and Paul Washer has an excellent article on The Great Commission.   This quote may be one of the most significant things Washer says in the article, although it is all very good.

Some of my street evangelist friends may chafe a bit when they read a quote like this.  We have been taught that we need to evangelize everyone we meet and leave the results to the Lord.  We carry gospel tracts with us everywhere we go and we have been trained to engage complete strangers in order to share the gospel with them.  Some of my friends travel the world presenting the gospel over and over again to strangers in open-air preaching, one-to-one and mass tract distribution.  Living Waters reported recently that in a period of 12 or 13 years they have had a part in distributing 150 million gospel tracts.  Other tract ministries could report numbers in the millions as well. 

I love street evangelism.  I believe it is a primary way of spreading the gospel that many believers ignore today.  I believe that a resurgence in this methodology, if rooted in sound theology and in reality with the Lord of the harvest, could result in revival in the church and a large ingathering of souls into the Kingdom.  I believe so much in this methodology that I have written and edited several tracts that have a fairly wide distribution.  I wrote a book making the Biblical case for street evangelism.  I still stand by what I wrote there. 

Methodological Error

But let's shoot straight for a moment.  Where are the large numbers of people being added into existing local churches?  Where are the church plants that have come from these efforts? 

Our methodology is off.  We have no Biblical warrant in the context of the entire New Testament to simply proclaim the gospel with no concern for the planting or strengthening of churches as a result.  We have no Biblical warrant for the ministry of traveling evangelists who go into a city, proclaim the gospel widely, and do nothing to teach them to observe all that Jesus commanded (Mt. 28:18-20). We have no basis to organize large scale street outreaches in cities or at events where we have no plans on referring believers to good local churches.  Entire ministries have been built on this erroneous concept.  While they have served an important role of bringing the gospel to many, we are not called to bring the gospel to someone and then leave them there. If I am wrong, show me from the pattern we have in Acts that I am wrong. 

Furthermore, we cannot call it missionary work when traveling street evangelists exclusively visit other ministries who are already doing evangelism in a city.  This kind of thing can be encouraging once in awhile, but to make this a pattern of ministry is Biblically unwarranted.  Paul traveled and visited churches he established in order to train and encourage them.   The best thing most traveling street evangelists could do would be to settle in a sound local church or become a part of a church planting team and use their talents there. 

When we reject the Biblical model for what is happening right now based on the fact that, after all, people are hearing the gospel we are being pragmatists.  God knows better than we do how to do evangelism and He has ordained only one organization for its propagation: the local church.  Is God able to use the local church to reach those same people that you have reached without using a methodology which is contradictory to revealed truth?

Let's be clear: I am not advocating an abandonment of street evangelism.  I am advocating doing evangelism prolifically in the area where your local church is. And I am advocating your deep involvement with that local church beyond evangelism.

What We Need is Not What We Want

You need to have friends who do not evangelize but who are prayer warriors.

You need to have friends who do not evangelize but who are passionate students and teachers of the Word.

You need to have friends who love to serve the poor and destitute.

You need to have friends who scrub toilets at church and wash dishes after fellowship dinners.

You need to have friends who love to sing praises to God.

You need to have these friends with the intent of not only pushing your evangelism agenda, but listening to their agendas as well.  You don't know everything.  And evangelism is not the sum total of Christian existence.  You need to learn to love the pre-schoolers in your church.  Maybe you need to change some diapers in a nursery or go to a school concert to support a teenager in your church.  You need an avenue to love the brethren, including those who do not do evangelism.  You need a place to live and die with the family of God.  You need to live out the commands of Scripture that are attached to the "one anothers" of the epistles.  If you only beat the drum of evangelism and don't live out the commands we have for the community of believers, your obedience is half hearted.

I am afraid many of us, myself most definitely included, need to get over ourselves.  Evangelism will not die with us when we die.  It will live on in the local church.  Bury yourself there and be content to never be heard from again just so long as Jesus is famous and the local church is strong. 

Quotable Quote of the Day

"For there is nothing so boring, stale, flat and unprofitable as holy things retailed in the absence of the Spirit. This is one of the devil's most cunning tricks, to cause the Word of God to be dispensed by lazy, sleepy, moribund creatures, who find preaching the most burdensome part of their work and cannot help showing it. I have heard people praying, preaching and teaching and have been so desolated and my heart has been so opposed to the whole depressing exercise, that I almost wished the things they said were not true so that I could refute them. The whole soul of man, even ungodly man, cries out against the Word of God as a dead thing."

--William Still in "The Work of the Pastor", page 26.

Something about this quote resonates in my soul. There is little that is more tragic than men preaching the great truths of God's Word in a way that sounds like someone reading the stock quotes from the Wall Street Journal. Since these truths are reality, we ought to preach with some fire, some passion, some unction. It's part of Satan's deception that men who preach false doctrine preach with more passion than those who have the truth. It's part of their appearance as "ministers of righteousness" who are nothing more than ministers of darkness (2 Cor. 11:14-15).

It is more than just preaching passionately, but from the springs of living water that one draws from one's own well. I have heard street preaching which is as original as an infomercial and perhaps just as spontaneous. It is very carefully choreographed and rehearsed because it is the same message that has been preached 100 times before. Many times, it is a collection of random one-liners and zingers collected from other street or pulpit preachers forced into a template. To hear this stuff, one would think that Jesus and the Apostles always preached stock sermons and never varied. But in the gospels and Acts we see the exact opposite: nothing but variation depending on the circumstances. The content was always solid exposition of truth, but what truth was used depended on the leading of the Spirit, who in His wisdom, applied the truth to the circumstances.

Spirit empowered preaching comes from the preacher's time in the Word and prayer. The other kind of preaching can be taught to a well trained parrot.

Food for thought. --JS

Ten Commandments for Evangelists

1. Thou shalt not engage in shameless self promotion, as if you deserve the glory that God alone deserves.

2. Thou shalt not make an idol of evangelism. God deserves worship, not His work.

3. Thou shalt not give the enemies of God occasion to blaspheme. Reaping the results of being a jerk for Jesus is not persecution, it is defamation of God's character by your actions.

4. Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy by taking opportunity to rest, worship and serve in the local church. This means your local church, not someone else's.

5. Submit to authority. This includes police officers, local church leadership, and the leadership of evangelism teams that you agree to submit yourself under by joining their outreaches, accepting their hospitality, etc. If you cannot submit, you cannot (and should not) lead.

6. Thou shalt not murder a heckler in your heart. He is not your enemy.

7. Thou shalt not preach against sexual sin while you are looking at internet pornography, having sex before marriage or cheating on your spouse. Yes, it needs to be said. In this case, hypocrite is spelled Y-O-U.

8. Thou shalt not steal time from your family to devote to evangelism. If you care more about the souls of strangers than you do for your family's, you are worse than an infidel.

9. Thou shalt not lie about the size of your crowd, the work of your ministry, the number of conversions, or your time with the Lord.

10. Thou shalt not covet a full time evangelism ministry. If God wants you to have it, He will give it to you without sending you into debt.

Monumental Video

I am blessed to know and call "friend" Marcus Pittman who did the production of this video for Monumental. I have already written a review of this movie, but I like this creative overview by IV His Son.

Thoughts on the Death of an Evangelist

An accident took the life of our friend, David Mann. A guy ran a red light and struck David's vehicle. Now both are in eternity. That is how fast we can go from this life to the next. Yet we all live as if we will never die. This is why street evangelists do what they do. Call us fanatics, misguided, zealots, or specially gifted--all we are trying to do is live in the light of eternity. Ours and the people we preach to. If you don't know Christ, please repent and believe the gospel before it's your time to cross from this world to the next. That's not fear mongering. That, my friends, is reality. The greatest reality that you face every single day. In the meantime, we must preach as dying men to dying men.

Monumental Movie: A Review

Strengths

Last night I went to the opening of Monumental, a film directed by Kirk Cameron. I thought the movie was much needed and was well produced. It was refreshing to hear Kirk say much of what he said. The monologue Kirk does with the kickin' guitar riff in the background at the beginning is worth the price of admission. One of the big points of that monologue is the idea that the church has been passive on many of our moral issues. So much so, that many put forward the idea that the worse it gets, the better it is for the church because that means that Jesus is coming back sooner. While the church sits passive on those issues, it becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. Pretty pointed stuff from the star of the Left Behind movies. I wanted to get up and leave the theater after that monologue and go do something.

The best parts of the movie were the explanation we got about the history of the Pilgrims\Puritans and the explanation of the monument that has been the center of some controversy due to some conspiracy theorist type objections. The Pilgrim history was excellent and could, by itself, prove conclusively that America was founded as a Christian nation. David Barton's segment was helpful in establishing the not-unanimous but majority opinion of the founding fathers' Christianity. The Bible from the 18th century that he showcases, printed by Congress for use in public schools with the subscriber's list in the back showing it was funded by signers of the Declaration and the Constitution is pretty good stuff. His claim that it is one of the rarest books in the world is ridiculous (20-some copies does not qualify that set for such a claim). This is the bookseller coming out in me, but there are a lot of editions of the Bible which would sell for more if they came to auction and rarity has as much to do with demand as supply.

Marshall Foster's explanation of the monument (The National Monument to the Forefathers) was excellent. Brannon Howse has made a stink because the Freemasons were involved in its construction. He writes, "It is my belief based on hours of research that the Monument to the Forefathers is not a Biblically acceptable rallying point or symbol for Christians or Christian families or the way we should go for several reasons. One major reason would be that historical documents report that the monument had its cornerstone laid by Freemasons who were involved in part in funding and erecting this monument." He then goes on to detail the fact that some names of Freemasons appear on the corner stone and that there was a list of subscribers which contained Freemasons. He then asks the question, "Should Christians unite around and worship God at this monument?" Since Howse never saw the movie before he wrote his critique he did not know that Kirk and Marshall never "worshipped God" around this monument. But what they DID do was go over the symbolism (which had zero to do with Freemasonry) point by point and suggest it as a guideline for our families to instill Biblical principles in our homes and eventually, in our nation. I am looking forward to some of the study materials that will be suggested by Kirk and plan on going over them with my family. In the meantime, Howse has marginalized himself in his stirring of the pot since Kirk never endorsed Freemasonry in the movie. The point of the monument is the symbolism.

The other main idea of the movie is that kings and leadership do not have autonomous authority to rule and reign as they wish, with no regard to the Law of God. Some critics of these kinds of documentaries will state that Romans 13 gives leaders carte blanche to govern as they will and we must submit. Romans 13 does not even teach this in context because it states, "For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil...For he is the minister of God to thee for good" (Rom. 13:3-4). In other words, the God ordained function of leadership is to promote "good"--that which is morally excellent. Kirk does not go over this in the movie, but I am anticipating a common objection to the content, which reveals my bias, so there it is.

Weaknesses

Now, for my criticism. In the latter part of the film the movie takes a turn towards obscurity. There was a tremendous build up in the organization of the material and then a vague conclusion. I am not totally sure what the film makers want me to do with this information other than buy some curriculum that they will be offering. This vagueness may be by design, but it is annoying. It's a lot of money to spend producing a documentary and then going light on the punch line. At the very least, a gospel presentation would have been appropriate.

This was evident by the crowd reaction in our theater at the end. Our satellite feed got knocked out in the middle of Kirk's live concluding remarks and a tea party type guy got up and urged the crowd to "do something." He had no plan, just "something" because things are really, really bad. This opened the door to a bunch of tea party types pushing various websites and it became evident that Glenn Beck's publicity for this movie filled our theater since most people pointed to Glenn Beck's websites and work. One retired pastor said that we should all go to church. I could barely stand it, and my wife was even thinking of open-air preaching to this crowd (she has never done it) when a guy I preach with on the streets finally preached the gospel. He started with Acts 17:11--a challenge to study the Bible. The reaction was predictable. People all over the theater stood up and left as soon as he mentioned Jesus. I leaned over and said to Lance (my buddy), "Hey man, you really know how to clear a room." Afterwards, one guy waited at the door to thank Lance for preaching. One. The crowd reaction illustrates the weakness of the movie.

Here's the problem. The principles are all dead on accurate with the movie. But if this movie becomes some sort of rallying cry for the tea party, which isn't fully committed to the gospel or the law of God, it will be a wasted opportunity. Kirk's decision to have Beck do an endorsement in the live feed before the movie began was a mistake. It's going to give Howse and the discernment ministries fits and it was an easily avoidable faux pas. Beck's claims to pray to God (as a Mormon) in that endorsement are problematic since we do not pray to the same God. It doesn't make Kirk a heretic. It makes him guilty of an error in discernment. It's hard for those of us who have defended Kirk and promoted the movie on our Facebook walls when the torrent of conspiracy lunacy was unleashed by Howse's blog post.

I am no movie maker, but if I was a consultant, what would have been wrong with making the point of the movie the power of the gospel to change hearts which leads to national change? What would have been wrong with making a clear statement of "this is where you start" beyond telling us to watch for resources from the movie website? Tie the issue up with Jesus and His gospel and then give us something concrete; like a challenge to read the Pentateuch (the Law of God) and then point to the coming resources? If Kirk had done that I don't think Lance would have had to.

The movie was worth watching and I will be buying the DVD when it comes out. I hope to teach my family the principles behind the Founders Monument because those principles are Biblical (and no, Mr. Howse, I won't become a Mason or a Mormon because I don't join cults). Discernment is not just fleeing from every reference to something worldly in our culture. It is being able to chew the meat and spit out the bones. Monumental is a meaty flick with low bone content. Watch it and bring a toothpick.