Introduction

Dear Missionaryish Family,

I want to think with you this week about evangelism, partly because it is one of the most misunderstood things we do. There is no single prescriptive way to go about it. There is real diversity here, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. But some ways are helpful and some are harmful, and rather than spend our time cataloging where the church has gotten it wrong, which is easy, and which we are all very practiced at, I want to look at how the thing is meant to work. Scripture has already handed us the framework. I think we have largely traded it for something smaller.

Here is what I keep running into. We are Western. I am writing from an American vantage point, and it is hard to see the water you are swimming in. Somewhere along the way we made evangelism individual. You get your individualized training. You build your individualized platform. You do your individualized research. The ministry bears your name. Even our picture of the evangelist tends to be a lone figure on a corner, or now a lone figure with a camera and a channel.

God uses these things. I am not saying He does not. But I do not believe the primary way He moves to share the gospel ever began as a solo act, and I am convinced that for it to be sustainable, it never can be. Evangelism was meant to be the work of a covenantal community.

What a Covenant Is

A covenant, at least the ancient Near Eastern kind that runs underneath so much of Scripture, has a shape.1 There is a king, a suzerain. There are promises: obey, and you come under His protection. There are stipulations: break faith, and there are consequences, curses, accountability. And there is always an act that ratifies the whole thing, a sign that the words have become real.

For us, that sign is baptism. It is the picture of a person crossing over from death to life, leaving the old gods behind, and God saying, in effect, this one is mine.2

Everyone Is Already Covenanted

Here is what is easy to miss. That architecture holds whether or not you believe in God. If you do not believe, you will still covenant. You will still swear your oaths. You cannot live as a human being without it. The spiritual part of you has to be reckoned with, and if you will not name the true King, you will hand the throne to some other god, some system, some symbol that tells you who you belong to, what protects you, and what it will cost you when you fail.3

You can watch this happen in people who have never set foot in a church. They build their own blessings and their own curses. They run their own cycles of guilt. The structure is always there. Only the King changes.

So when we talk about reaching someone, we are never talking about a blank slate. We are talking about a person already covenanted to somebody, already built like a temple around some throne.

The Lord Moves as a Family

Now here is the part I actually wanted to land on, because I find it genuinely beautiful. The Lord moves as a family.

In a family, there are different jobs. There is a mom, there is a dad, brothers, sisters, and sometimes even an uncle or an aunt. There is the one who is good at cooking and the one who is good with jokes. There is the one who is never late, and there is the one who is always late. Nobody is gifted with everything, and most of us are fashioned for one or two things in particular. And notice: there is no such thing as individual expertise here. When someone is operating in real power inside the body, they are not putting on a solo performance. They are a part being accentuated for a season, because no one is exceptional forever, not on this side of things.4

And God will use anything. He has used rocks and donkeys, pharaohs and generals, enemies and outsiders, the very things you and I would never have picked.5 That should free us. The pressure was never on your competence.

The Whole Person

"that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that you sent me."

John 17:21

Here is why the body matters so much. A person who does not yet know God needs to see the living God, and the way they see Him is by watching the church actually work together.6 On its own, each of us is a fragment. Alone, at best, we end up mimicking what the world already offers, and we carry our same old sins right into the work.

Alone, each gift only mimics the world. Moving together, the parts compose one whole person: Christ, made visible.
The fragment alone
Truth without presence
The gifted teacher who only teaches will reach for truth in every situation, because truth is what he has. But picture someone in front of you who is wrecked, raw, tender, in need of nothing so much as presence. The teacher is not wrong. He is simply not what the room needs.
The body together
The right member, ready
Someone gentler, more hospitable, more willing to simply sit, has been prepared for exactly this, often through their own sorrow and their own brokenness. In that moment the most healing thing may not be a clear word. It may be embodiment. God fashioned them for it.

The teacher and the tender one are not rivals. They are members of one body, and the watching person needs to see them both, working in concert, before they will believe there is anything here the world cannot already give them.7

The Seal of Authenticity

And why does the church work this way at all? Because it is a covenanted community, and a covenant carries obligations. It binds us to love one another, yes, but also to correct, to rebuke, to teach, to keep each other from going down the deep end when we sin and screw up. And when we royally screw up, God offers us forgiveness, and we are to turn and offer that same forgiveness to one another, to confess and be healed.8

Love is the seal of authenticity. You know God is at work in a church when it can actually complete that cycle in love for the sake of the other:

01
Sin named
Not ignored, not managed quietly, not left to fester. The body is honest enough to call the thing what it is, gently and without cruelty.
02
Confession made
The one who failed is safe enough to own it out loud. A community where confession is survivable is rarer, and more healing, than almost anything the world offers.
03
Forgiveness given
We extend the same forgiveness we have received. Not cheaply, not as if nothing happened, but really, so that the record is not held in reserve to be used later.
04
The member kept and made whole
No one is discarded for failing. They are restored, kept inside the family, and the watching world sees a kind of belonging it cannot manufacture.

The Call to Defection

This is the clincher for me. All the parts coming together make one whole person, and that whole person is Christ, made visible. When the man or woman who has been covenanted to a lesser king draws near to that, something stirs. They begin to suspect that the suzerain they have been serving is not actually that great.

And when they come face to face with the whole person of Christ, whole precisely because the parts are moving together in unison, it is, my friends, irresistible. At that point the call to defection becomes possible.9 Not on our schedule. In God's time, not ours.10

What this means for us this week

So let's keep encouraging one another to love, to serve, to share, and to remember that we were never meant to carry this alone. If we have been trying to, and most of us have, that is something to repent of this week, gently and honestly.

The performance was never a solo. It was always meant to be the whole body, in prayer, in unity, as one, so that the person watching might see one Body in Christ.

A Closing Word

The lone evangelist on the corner and the lone voice behind the camera are not the engine. They never were. The body is. And the most ordinary congregation, full of people who are differently gifted and frequently failing, becomes something the world has no category for when it can love and correct and confess and forgive out in the open.

That is the witness. Not a performance of having it all together, but a people who keep one another, who refuse to discard the one who screwed up, who make confession survivable and forgiveness real. A watching person can argue with a sermon. It is much harder to argue with that.