I love this:

Doable Evangelism is, for me, largely about letting God have control of the outcome.

I think this really goes to the heart of the matter.

Christians often say ‘the outcome is in God’s hands’ but some of them don’t really seem to believe it, deep down, since they feel so responsible for saying the ‘right’ thing, when they share their faith.

We are convinced that if a person will actually do an OA or two, it will transform their life in ways I cannot explain. It did for me, and I have seen it happen for just about everyone we have led through this material (we have taken a little over 50 people through our class so far, and had about 150 people at Jim’s workshop a year ago). I have taught and modeled evangelism for over 30 years. I have utilized nearly every packaged program produced over that time. I spent 20 of those years on the Young Life staff working with highly motivated teams of volunteers, most of whom were fairly passionate about “evangelism”. I have never seen people respond to any of the training or programs I’ve used in the past like I have seen with Doable Evangelism.

When was the last time you did a class or sermon about evangelism and had the listening crowd say they wanted more? Three classes, three very different groups…all wanted more at the end. Those who felt incompetent, unworthy, and disqualified from participating in God’s great rescue mission discovered for the first time that they could “get in the game”, and that in reality they had already been in it, but never thought it counted. I wish you could have seen a few of these faces. One elderly woman in our last class told me that she never thought she would be able to evangelize because, well, she just wasn’t good at speaking. She felt guilty and ashamed and had avoided our church’s evangelism class (we call it the “GO” class) because she felt like such a loser in this piece of her relationship with Christ. She told me that now she understands that she had been doing ordinary attempts for a long time, but just didn’t think it mattered or counted as evangelism. I wish you could have seen her face. This woman is now fully engaged in helping nudge others toward Christ, relieved of guilt and shame and completely fired up about noticing others, praying behind their backs, and listening. She feels empowered, affirmed, equipped and eager to connect with others in her world. That’s more than being briefly inspired to risk a sneak attack on some unknowing sinner. That’s a life transformation, infecting her sense of others, her understanding of Christ, her view of herself and her sense of connection to the agenda of God in the world.

I could go on, but let me just share one more cool thing that has happened. One gal in our class had been brave enough to admit that she had not yet decided to commit her life to Christ (yes, we have been training pagans to evangelize with us). She had some issues about Jesus that she felt she needed to resolve, and we made sure she felt ok about struggling while she learned how to do evangelism. One of her first OA’s actually transformed her heart toward a certain category of people who she didn’t like. Anyway, long story short, two days after our class ended she was at our mid-week worship service and surrendered her life to Christ. There was no sermon, there was no invitation. It was worship music, prayer and communion. She ran up to me after the service to tell me what had happened, and when I asked her what it was that prompted her to surrender she simply said, “It just dawned on me that I didn’t need all the answers to surrender my life to Jesus. I just felt compelled to let go and trust Him, so during one of the prayer times, I did.” I wish you could have seen THAT face.

Doable Evangelism is, for me, largely about letting God have control of the outcome. It is about recognizing that God is already present and busy in other people’s lives and trying to participate in what He’s already doing, somehow, without messing it up too much. It’s about recognizing that our job is to gently nudge people toward Jesus, and that our participation in their life may be only one small part of their journey. It’s about letting go of controlling the process and the outcome, trusting God for what happens. That has been enormously freeing, empowering and inspiring for us at SCF thus far.

We’re just at the very beginning of the curve, but the momentum is already amazing. This week I’ve had a few people from the last class suggest we gather everyone who had gone through DE at SCF a few times a year, just to share stories and eat snacks. Some others want to get some cameras and go do some “on the street” interviews with people in our community. None of this was initiated by me, but these have been some of my dreams, and will go a long way to fanning the flame of DE at our church.

This is one of those initiatives that is more contagious than Contagious Christianity, and I suspect it will infect our folks completely in a year or so (we have about 1700 adults, so we have a ways to go). The exciting thing is that it’s not ME who’s doing the infecting, and that’s why it will be a tenatious disease. God is amazing.