Local Church Evangelism — Elijah Yoder — Ep. 012

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here again with Elijah Yoder from Sherman Mennonite Bible Institute. And you've taught a lot of classes on the local church, on evangelism, missions, things like that. You're also a pastor. For local churches just to reach out to their neighbors and the community, what is a good model for that? What's some ways the church can do that? And what is a really biblical approach as well for the church, for local churches to follow? Well, let me comment first on, I think we have to understand the biblical role of the church. Okay.

When I taught the course on local church evangelism for the first time, I took the word "church" and traced it through the New Testament. And expecting to find the word "church" used in relation to evangelism, that's what my course was, local church evangelism. But what I actually found was that the church, the word "church" is very seldom, if ever, actually used in direct evangelism. In other words, it doesn't say that the church went out and did evangelism. It's always individuals and people who were doing evangelism. The church, the role of the church is discipleship. The role of the church is to be there for the people, to gather together and to find fellowship. Fellowship is a key word for the reason for the church, fellowship or discipleship.

And then as the church gathers together and fellowship is in disciples together, then it's the individual members that can go out and do evangelism. Okay. Evangelism in the local church is not, the key is not the programs that the church is using. The key is the people in the church.

I have done this oftentimes. My local church evangelism class, I'll ask them to tell me about people from the local community that their local churches have brought in. And almost always the story is that there was someone in the church who reached out and discipled them. We're not bringing people in through summer Bible schools and kids' clubs and passing out tracts. Those aren't the way that we're bringing people in. We're bringing people into our local churches when someone reaches out and develops a relationship with them. Now, some of those have come through vacation Bible schools. Some of them have come through kids' clubs.

But as I mentioned earlier in a previous interview, it's when you have someone from a kids' club coming into the church, almost invariably it's because someone in the church reached out and had a relationship with the person. Evangelism in the local church, the key is not what the church as a whole is doing. It's not, we need to have summer Bible schools or we need to pass out tracts or we need to have revival meetings. Those things can all be good, but those aren't going to bring people into your local church. It's going to be when individual people in the church begin caring and reaching out on their own.

That's what's happened in our local church. We've had several outside people who were not Mennonites come in and start attending regularly and becoming members. And it's been because it's been neighbors or people that they've reached out to on a daily basis and cared. Kind of going back to that whole discipleship thing that you mentioned a few episodes back.

Well, because, yeah, I was wondering, like, what is the biblical approach? Because you don't really see Paul, you know, writing to some of the churches and being like, "Your whole church needs to go do this," you know, kind of thing.

We sometimes think that the evangelism is the responsibility of the local church. And not really. The responsibility of the local church is for believers to come together and worship and fellowship. And then that encourages our hearts and we gather together. And then in our daily lives and our contact with people, that's where we need to share Christ. Evangelism is not some sudden foray out into the world. You know, you go out on a Saturday afternoon and pass out tracts or go to the kids' club on a Tuesday night, and then you do your evangelism and then you retreat back into your own selfish lifestyle and live the way you want to. That's, I think, sometimes the way we view evangelism.

That's not what evangelism is. I remember coming here to SMBI as a student and we were going to go out on missions weekend. And I was kind of scared of some of these going out and passing out tracts. You know, I can do anything for a couple of days, I thought. And I would do it. I would go out and enjoy it and come back. And those things aren't wrong, but evangelism is going to be a lifestyle. Evangelism isn't going to be something that you do a couple of hours of the day and then you're going to bring people into the church. It's going to be a lifestyle. And you're going to have to share with neighbors and care for them on a daily basis if you're going to bring people into the church.

And that's difficult. Oh, yeah. And it takes commitment. We'd much rather run off every weekend to be with our friends in another state or play softball. And we're too busy to do lifestyle evangelism. It's going to take commitment if we're going to bring people in our local churches. And it's not somebody else's responsibility. It's not the minister's responsibility or the church's responsibility. It's each person's responsibility to do that.

That, wow, that makes a lot of sense. That's a lot more long-term. Like you have to be willing to work with people a lot more. Like handing them a track is like a five-second transaction. You know, that's it.

Yeah. But if you want to, whoo. Yeah. And that can be the beginning of it. Getting together as a group and passing out tracts in the neighborhood can be effective, but then you're going to follow up and those people that are interested and build relationships with it. When I know, like best for us, we did VBS in our town, you know, like a really bad section of town. And it worked really well. We had a lot of kids come and it was great. It was a really great thing. But when it really started going somewhere is when every week we would come in and be with the kids and then we would bring them to church and we would start doing things with them on week.

That's when things really started changing when, you know, you would go over to their house and, you know, play games with them or, you know, stuff like that instead of just, oh yeah, they'd come, you know, once a summer or even once a week to a kids' club. And then as those kids grow older into their teens, typically what happens in our circles is by the time they're 13, 14, 15, they leave and they're gone. Now, sometimes later, those foundations that are laid will be the basis of them coming back to Christ. But it's those 13, 14, 15, 16 years that it's going to, it's difficult, but that is where the river meets the road is someone willing to stick with them.

And you're saying like then it's much more on a personal level, but what are some ways that churches are reaching out? Like, and what are things we can do better? Because surely there are some things that the church can be doing better. Should it be equipping our people better so that they can, you know, bring Christ to people or what can the church be doing? Again, it's not the church itself, but I think the church can encourage people to, most of the people that I've seen coming to Mennonite circles are neighbors or people that you work with. But I know for myself, I mean, honest, it's most difficult to share Christ on an everyday basis.

It's much easier to go out with a group and pass out tracts in a city or to have a kids' club or something like that. And again, it's not that those things are wrong, but what we need to do is encourage our people to, on an individual basis, to share Christ right with the people around them. If you go to knock on someone's door and give them a tract, you don't know the person. It's very difficult to build a relationship. But most of us have relationships with non-believers in our daily lives that we don't really do very much about. We have neighbors that we know or could get to know in deeper ways. We have people that we work with.

We have relatives.

Those are the prime, those are the prime places for us to share Christ. And the highest percentage of people that are coming into our Mennonite churches from non-Mennonite background are in those types of relationships. Well, what can the church do then to help inspire its members, especially more on a local scale? But yeah, what can we do? Like, does it disciple people better or somehow inspire them to live more openly for Christ? Or yeah, what can we do?

That's a good question. And it's not an easy answer. Yeah. It's the whole thing of discipleship and living Christ, living life for Christ on a daily basis in your home community, whether it's from a ministerial standpoint. One of my goals is for the people in my church to be able to do that on a daily basis. And whether it's encouraging them to do that one-on-one or in sermons or so on, I think it's a matter of discipleship and living it day by day. There's just no shortcut. We get our lives so busy.

Shortcut, let's have a vacation Bible school or let's have tent meetings. And then now we ease our conscience. It doesn't work. Again, those methods aren't wrong, but it's not in the methods. It's in the heart of the people, in our heart of love for the community. And if that's missing, if you don't have people who have a heart of love, you can do all the activities you want and it won't change anything. And well, like Paul says, you know, if we do all of these things but don't have love, it's empty. Yeah. It's pointless. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

So somehow teaching our people to love more, I guess. Easy, right? Yeah. Piece of cake. Yeah. No, but that's the bottom line is our heart of love for Christ. That's what's going to attract people. To people watching this video, what's a practical step they can do to help, for one thing, in their own lives, but also to help inspire other people in their church too, to make evangelism a day-to-day thing, not just something that the church does once a month or whatever. Like, well, yeah, what's something practical?

Typically, one of the things I see is I have students come to SMBI. They get excited about evangelism. They go home and then they say, well, no one's doing evangelism. My ministers aren't doing evangelism. Everyone's dead and everyone's doing their own thing. My answer is, what about you?

What are you doing? And if we can individually in our settings begin to follow Christ and serve Christ and then reach out, and then another thing that I encourage you to do is if you start doing evangelism, don't do it just by yourself, but take someone else with you. There are a lot of people in our churches who want to do better in evangelism and outreach and discipleship. All they need is someone to come along and encourage them. So if you're going to visit a neighbor or a friend or do something, take someone else with you and involve other people and that can soon get other people involved.

No one else is going to do it for you. You're going to have to do it yourself. And the responsibility is not on the pastor or on the Sunday school superintendent. The responsibility is each of ours if we're going to do evangelism. So basically don't pass the buck to someone else. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh man, that makes it a whole lot harder, doesn't it? Well, it's challenging. Yeah. And that's something that Jesus never said. You know, he never said that it would be easy to build the kingdom, you know, to bring people into the church. That's not going to be easy. It's not easy. It's not easy for myself. It's not easy for any of us. But it's the only way evangelism is going to get done. If we're going to bring people into our churches, it's not going to be someone else's responsibility. It's going to be I and my relationships with those around me is the way it's going to be done. Wow. I think that's about the best place where we could end this.

That's a good thought to leave it with. And yeah, thank you everyone for watching. And we ended with a fairly practical note here. So if you, yeah, go out there and start doing some of this stuff instead of just listening.

Yeah, thanks for watching. Come back. We do episodes here every week. So if you like what you see, want to see more, hit the subscribe button. And yeah, leave a comment if you have a topic that you would like us to cover or something you want explained better. And we'll do our best to cover that in the future. So yeah, thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one.