Thursday, July 20, 2023 Adventures of a Young Christian, Part 11: Explosions of Evangelism

If you want to start at the beginning of this series, here you go:
Adventures Part 1

How do you feel about evangelism, i.e. sharing the gospel? Before my conversion, I resented Christians who wanted to “push” their views on me. As an unbeliever on whom the Holy Spirit was beginning to work, my response was to push Him away. I didn’t want to hear about sin. I didn’t want to hear about Jesus and His death on the cross. Once, when someone on campus handed me a gospel tract, I went to the nearest trash basket and threw it away in front of the person who gave it to me. Take that! I wanted Christians and their Christ just to leave me alone. But they didn’t, and He didn’t, thanks be to God.

Now that I was on the other side of the fence, I was filled with a zeal to pass on this glorious good news. I realized it wasn’t about getting brownie points with God, it wasn’t about some sort of legalistic list of good works that I could check off. It was about sharing life-giving and life-saving news. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Well, most of us, actually. It’s decidedly intimidating to approach people who might be like I was, with “LEAVE ME ALONE” written all over their faces, body language and in their speech. What we think of as “good news” isn’t often interpreted as such right out of the gate. And people don’t like the feeling that they’re just a project for you, which is the way it can often come across. But sometimes, God has worked ahead of the encounter in such a way as to present you with someone who is primed and ready to hear it.

I found out that the Evangelical Free church to which I was going had an active Evangelism Explosion (EE) program and decided to investigate. EE was started in 1962 by D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. When I became a Christian in 1983, the program was still fairly young and was often very effective. I told the pastor of our church, Pastor Erickson, that I would like to take the EE classes that he taught and signed up with a couple others.

I found out early on that being a part of the class meant not only learning the materials, but also going on visits with members of the EE team. These visits were generated by pew cards that visitors filled out. When I first visited the church as a non-believer, my friend Tamie warned me not to turn in a card unless I wanted a visit from one of these teams. Do you think that was wrong of her to give me that warning? I assure you it was not. I was not the kind of person who would have responded positively to a visit; in fact I would have turned them away at the door and then fumed about their duplicity in getting my contact information through the innocent pew card.

But now here I was, ready to become a member of one of these teams. I don’t remember much about the classes, but the main gist was that we were taught to ask the two classic EE diagnostic questions:

1. Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you can say you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven?

2. Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and he were to say to you, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” what would you say?

The point of these questions was to ascertain the spiritual state of a person, as much as one person can do that without knowing the other person’s heart. An uncertain answer to the first question might indicate someone who knew the gospel, but had no assurance, who needed to hear the good news of 1 John 5:11-13: “And the witness is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you may know that you have eternal life.” Your goal in that case was to encourage and strengthen that person in their faith with scriptures, to help them understand that they could have scriptural confidence not only in their eternal destiny, but also in their day to day living by faith in Christ.

The second question was meant to ferret out those who were putting trust in their good works. Someone might answer, “Well, I think I have done more good things than bad things,” Or “I’ve always been a good person, so that’s got to count for something.” We would then take that person through some Bible verses that helped people to see that no one is good enough to get into heaven without being covered by Christ’s life, death and resurrection on their behalf. Salvation is through Christ alone, by faith alone, by grace alone. So we learned a whole method and approach using the Bible to lead a person to faith in Christ and if a person was open, we’d pray with them. That was the theory anyway.

I enjoyed the classes, but going on the visits made me extremely uncomfortable. We were only supposed to be observing at that point, but I lived in fear that I might be called upon to actually say something. The final exam for the EE class was to be the lead person on an EE visit. Horrors! I don’t remember how I did it, but somehow I convinced Pastor Erickson that I didn’t have time for that (I think I was still in the midst of the dietetic internship). He said that EE made provision for that circumstance and would allow me to go through the presentation with a friend and just record it and send it in. What a relief!

I asked my friend Mary Ann to be my guinea pig for this experiment. She agreed to do it and I came over with my tape recorder. We failed to take into account that we might both get the giggles, which made getting a clean recording extremely difficult. I’d turn on the recorder and we’d start in and get derailed almost instantly with uncontrollable laughter. There was a lot of stopping, rewinding, recording over the bad parts, and starting again. Somehow, we sobered up enough to splice together a fairly cohesive conversation between us and I sent off the tape to the EE headquarters.

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I passed the final exam (amazingly) but never went on a bona fide EE visit after that. It just wasn’t for me, or at least that’s how I justified my reluctance then.

That was a time during our culture in which most people had at least been raised in the church and had a somewhat nascent trust in the Bible, even if they didn’t understand it and know it well. Christians and Christianity were still largely seen in a positive light by many people. This was the reason that EE was as successful as it was in those days. It would never work now – we live in a culture that has become Biblically illiterate (even among Christians, sadly), and which views Christians and Christianity in a very negative light. In the late 1990’s Evangelism Explosion re-evaluated its approach, which had become less effective, and decided to revamp their methods to focus on relationship building and discipling new believers. But in its heyday, EE was used in over 20,000 churches, and over 7.25 million people claimed to have to come to Christ through its use. I look back with a little regret that I didn’t muster up the courage to try this at least once with the EE teams at our church.

I’ll probably giggle about this and delete it in the morning.