"Patriotic Ambassadors: Plundering the Strong Man’s House - Part 2" by Chuck Pike

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Welcome back again, Brother Chuck. We really appreciate you doing this in two sessions today. It's a lot of information, there's a lot of ground to cover, and it's very pertinent information that you're revealing to us here, so we're grateful for this. I didn't really cover much of your bio this morning. I was just reading over it here before we started, and it says you were—you've taught in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. You mentioned this morning that you were in Albania. I'm guessing that was the Middle East.

No, actually the Middle East would be a little further than that. That's—that would be Eastern Europe, so that's—yeah, but I've taught quite a bit in several countries in Europe, but also getting into the Middle East as well, so. I see, that's great.

So do you speak Farsi? No, I do not. I see, okay. Interesting. I just noticed that you've helped develop some resources online, and you're probably working with a translator or something like that. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. Well, we appreciate your zeal and using your gift of teaching in this way.

God bless you for all the work you do in teaching here and historic faith and wherever else you do your teaching, so God bless you for that. Before we get started, let's just bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Righteous Heavenly Father, we come before You this afternoon. Our hearts are full with joy and adoration for Your love and Your mercy toward Your children. We thank You that You have raised up people among us who can teach and reveal the Scripture to us by Holy Spirit inspiration. I pray that You would anoint Brother Chuck as He shares this morning or this afternoon. I pray that Your will would be done, and if anything is said that is not according to Your plan or Your purpose, that it would fall to the ground and that truth would come forth and our hearts could be touched by Your word. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, let's get started.

This is part two of Plundering the Strong Man's House. It's a lesson on evangelism, and I want to share some practical insights. My wife and I were part of a very evangelistic church movement, and so I learned a lot of good and bad things in that both, but I'm really grateful for the opportunity to share from our own experience.

So a little overview of the lesson. I want to start with a parable and the dangers of when people want to become evangelistic. Sometimes they'll pick up some influences that mess up their churches, so we're going to watch out for that.

The harvest is still plentiful. I want to talk about that both from what the Scriptures say and also personal experience. And the secret sauce. Everyone wants to know what's the secret of evangelism, and I think I stumbled on that. What the secret sauce is, we could share that. And some examples, we have a lot of examples of people who came to faith and how they came. There are people from all different backgrounds that my wife and I have gotten to share the gospel with. A general rule of thumb, which will be helpful, I think, for evangelism. I can't prove it, that's why it's just a rule of thumb. And then a challenge for us to follow up.

So I want to start off with a parable, and I told this parable to Bryant Martin's Church a few years ago, and I said, before I preached it, I told my wife, Alison, he said, "You know, if I share this, I'll probably never get invited back here again." And I come to think of it, I never was invited.

I'm just kidding here, but it's a parable. I shared it with Sattler also. It's a parable of an ineffective fisherman. Okay, so I wanted you to imagine that the owner of a pond said, "Listen, this pond is stocked with bass. It's loaded with bass, and so feel free. You can go in there and fish to your heart's consent, but it's loaded with bass." So the fisherman decides, or the tenant of the property decides, "I'm going to be a fisherman," and he goes off to Cabella, gets the catalog, goes into the store, and he gets all the equipment. He gets the pole, and he gets the bucket, and he gets the weighters and everything else. He has all the gear.

And then he goes in a solemn procession walking around the pond, holding his bucket out, and he does this for 30 days, but no fish ever jump out of the pond into his bucket. And so his conclusion is, "I guess the fish, I guess the pond really isn't loaded with fish because here I'm dressed up as a fisherman. I'm going out fishing, but I'm not catching anything." And so either the man who told me that this pond was stocked was wrong, or maybe all the fish have just died. Maybe they all ate each other up and none of them left. So maybe there's no fish in the pond. That's his conclusion. Now what happens is someone else comes along to the same pond, and they use the right bait.

I don't know if they're using worms or crayfish or lures, whatever. And lo and behold, they come back with a string of bass. So how do you think the first guy feels? He might be feeling, "Well, they must be doing something wrong because I went out there every day and never caught anything," or he might have the humility to say, "Wow, I guess I didn't know what I was doing. I was being pretty ineffective." And so I'll let you think about the personal applications of that. If the pond has fish in it and we're not catching any fish, maybe we need to stop and think about, "Are we doing what it takes to catch fish?"

Or have the humility to learn from somebody who could teach you something. Now, what a lot of people do when they come to this realization, "Yes, the pond is full of fish, but I'm not effective, and no one's ever taught me." Not for any fault of their own, "No one's ever taught me how to fish effectively." And so what they'll do is they'll look around and think, "Well, who could I learn from?" And they'll look around and look around, and the Protestant Evangelicals is the first place a lot of people turn. And so they'll have the tracts and the approach and the way of studying the Scriptures with people, pick up the Romans' road or the four spiritual laws or things like that, which is basically including in a lot of those messages, those approaches is the idea that all you have to do is believe in Jesus.

You don't actually have to obey His teachings, and you can't lose your salvation, things like that. So there's very little about repentance and turning away from sin and living a life of obedience. There's nothing about the Kingdom of God in there. So what happens is people who want to become evangelistic, who want to be effective, pick up the Protestant tools, and it starts messing up their church.

You're introducing Protestant theology, evangelical theology, into a church that's trying to follow the teachings of the Kingdom. And the other problem, you end up with diseased fish. Maybe you're catching some fish, but they don't have any intention of actually obeying Jesus and obeying the hard commands of Jesus, and so it's a very frustrating experience. So let's not learn the wrong lessons from the parable of the ineffective fisherman.

Two key passages for me in connection with this subject have to do with the fields being white for the harvest. This is like the fisherman who says, the owner of the pond who says after he leaves, "This pond is stocked with fish. They're in there."

Matthew 9:37-38, Jesus said to His disciples, "The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest." And then John 4:35, "Do you not say there are still four months and then comes the harvest? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields. They're already white for harvest." And so I'm thinking about this. The harvest is truly plentiful.

The fields are white for harvest. So here's my question. Do you believe that's still true today? Do you believe the pond is full of fish that can be harvested? Do you believe that the fields are—the harvest is plentiful now, or was that only true at the time that Jesus was speaking? So this is a foundational question because if you really do believe the fields are white for harvest and you're not effective in bringing in a harvest, then you think, "Well, what do I need to do to learn to become more effective without picking up the evangelical bad theology in the process?" So I want to share about what I saw as part of a very evangelistic movement in Boston for decades.

And this was a very unusual thing in that it wasn't preaching easy—so outwardly it may look like an evangelical church. This was the Church of Christ, a very unusual type of a Church of Christ. But the message that was preached was radical repentance, not easy believism.

It was total commitment. Before someone got baptized, they said, "You need to sit down and count the cost of what is it going to take for you to follow Jesus for the rest of your life." There was a big emphasis on discipleship and mentoring, of helping people to grow and mature. And there was an expectation from the outset that every member of the church would be responsible for evangelism, that they needed to take the Great Commission personally, and they needed to be concerned about making disciples and active in doing that. So that's what the message that we preached. And the outcome is we saw here in Boston people from all backgrounds, nations, countries, economic situations coming to faith in Jesus and making the decision to follow Him.

It was a very rapid-growing, multiplying ministry and a very aggressive church-planting movement that came out of this that reached all over the world. So I'll give you a little snapshot. It would be beyond the scope of this to talk about really what happened there, but to give you a glimpse of what happened. So things really got rolling in 1979. In 1980, '81, 200 people were baptized, and that included 126 college students. The focus was on Boston because of all the campuses here. And I was baptized in March of 1982. And at that time, at the time I was coming to the church, there may be 400 people in attendance. And then 1990, eight years later, 1,000 people were baptized in the church that year, and the attendance was about 4,000.

Okay, so this is starting from a handful of people in about 11 years to a church of 4,000 people in Boston. All ethnic backgrounds. It's a complete mix: Black, white, Latino, Asian, you name it. Everybody was there. So I was right smack in the middle of that. I was actually for six years on the staff of the church, leading a small group in a very urban area in that. So I got to see and experience all of that. So if somebody tells me the fields really aren't white for the harvest, now Boston is not exactly the Bible belt, to put it mildly.

So this is a—they think, "Wow, Boston." And a lot of people thought Boston, "They're never going to be open to the gospel in Boston." And the idea was, "Well, if they're open in Boston, well, then what about New York City? What about Philadelphia? What about all these other—what about Los Angeles?" So the extraordinary growth, some of the hallmarks of the church, there was a focus on multiplication rather than addition. So you try to make disciples who would then make other disciples, who would then make other disciples. And you bring the younger disciples along with you. You train them to do what you're doing, and then they go out and do the same thing. So it's focus on a few, raise them up.

When I first came to the church, I was 28 years old, and I was older than anyone on the staff of the church. This was a young church and made some horrific mistakes as a result, as you can imagine, of people so young and inexperienced leading a large group of people like this. So within 25 years of 1979, this was a movement of between 100 and 200 thousand disciples. Okay.

The largest church in the movement is in Los Angeles, which had about 6,000 disciples. And I talked to Finney. He ran into them when he was out in LA, and he said, "This is a very controversial group, but they're doing something right because I see that people are very serious about sharing their faith, about repenting of sins, and following the Word of God." So while it may be kind of strange in some ways, they're onto something.

So by that time, they had planted churches from this one church in over 170 countries. Okay. And when I talk about planting a church, they would say, "All right, if we're going to plant—if we're going to evangelize Italy, we need to hit Rome first. We need to hit London first for England. We'll hit Paris for France. We'll hit Tokyo." So they went after the big cities, and the idea was, "All right, after we plant you, you're responsible for evangelizing the second-tier and third-tier cities of sending out church plantings in a few years." And so it was over 170 countries. I think it was every country that had a city with over 100,000 and in all 50 US states.

And this was, no exaggeration, one of the most aggressive church-planting movements in modern Christian history. What happened to it's another story. It's beyond the—it was some mistakes that were made, but there were some strengths. And so I'm grateful for having been through that experience to see the strengths and also the weaknesses. I can learn a lot from both of those. So some of the strengths included very strong reliance on the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures. And remember, this is Boston, which is—that's not the reputation of Boston. A big focus on campus ministry and evangelizing the campuses. You have top students from all over the world that come to the schools in Boston, so they wanted to have a big focus on campus ministry outreach.

The group was—maybe you can relate to this from your own background—very skeptical of seminary training. They thought seminary training messes people up and introduces all kinds of liberal ideas into their minds. So the group did not focus on seminary training at all. It really was kind of a bias against traditional scholarship. And the focus was on growing and raising their own leaders, raising them up internally and not sending them off to seminaries.

The mentality of the group, although outwardly it may look like an evangelical church to some people, it really wasn't. It wasn't—that was not the DNA of the group. The idea was everybody understood, as you said, "Do you have to obey the teaching of Jesus in order to be saved?" Everybody would have said, "Well, of course you do. I mean, what are you thinking about? You don't have to obey the teachings of Jesus." So that was very deeply embedded, is that we have to not just believe; we have to obey everything Jesus said. Now, there were things they didn't teach or they would explain away in the Scriptures, but they understood that you need to obey.

They practiced baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins. There was a claim in the church, "We want to be just like the first-century church." Now, when you start to point out, "Hey, the first-century church, first, second-century churches believe some things differently than we do, and they line up with the Scripture," that wasn't always received as favorably as I would have liked, but at least that was the claim. We want to be like the original church, which was a good thing. And the past was from a kind of a non-conformist framework. So there was a big tendency—you don't get involved in politics.

Historically, in the Churches of Christ, they were non-resistant. They stayed out of war. All of that kind of fell out of favor. But there's a very definitely a flavor of non-conformity and an openness to the two kingdoms perspective. And I remember David Brousseau saying that the two groups out there that are the most interested in what he was teaching on the early church, the largest group was the conservative Anabaptists. The second largest group was the Churches of Christ. And the church I was a part of sent in an order for 1,000 copies of one of David Brousseau's books. And that just kind of—that blew his mind. It's like, "Who are these people? And what are they doing with the Real Heretics book?"

So anyway, the church made some mistakes. And there's one I want to focus on. And I think this is one we all need to wrestle with of what do we do with this. I think we went too far off in one direction with this. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:20-22, he says, "The Jew I became is a Jew that I might win the Jews to those under the law as one under the law, that I might win those who are under the law to those who are without the law as one without the law, not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ, that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became weak as I might win the weak."

And then he says, "I've become all things to all men so that I might by all possible means save some." So we took this Scripture in some rather incredible places that we will become all things to all men so that we can save some. The focus was so much on evangelism. Now, sometimes I use the expression that some churches focus on offense and some on defense. Okay. And I think many of you are from groups that really have excelled for quite a while at defense, of holiness, of keeping the world at bay. Well, this was a church that was focused on offense and not nearly as much on defense. And so their attitude was, "Okay, what do we need to do to get in the lives of people to win them over?"

So if that meant going to a bar to reach out to somebody or whatever, the mentality was, "What do I need to do to become like people in the world so that I can influence them for Christ?" And honestly, I think that was a huge mistake in taking it way too far.

And that's something I think about a lot. And actually, in our house church, we have a house church that people mostly who came out of this kind of background, and we've really had to take a good hard look at what the things we're missing, Scriptures about holiness and separation from the world and modesty and things like that. And it's a continuing—after many years, there's a continuing discussion, particularly among the sisters in the group, of, "Okay, how should we dress? We don't want to dress in a worldly way, all right, but we want to become all things to all men so that we might save some. So what does that look like?" And it's been a—it's an ongoing struggle.

And I think the example that I think of, and you can judge for yourself whether this is a good example or not, but I remember years ago reading a biography of Hudson Taylor. He was with the China Inland Missions. And when he decided being a missionary in China, they had people who were coming over from Britain to become missionaries and to join his group. And so the first thing he'd do after they came off the boat as they were drying out from their trip, he'd take them in to a barber, and he'd have the men shave their heads to look and change all their clothes to dress like the Chinese did back at that time and wear the unusual shoes.

And he said when they came out that the Europeans would be laughing at them and the Chinese would be laughing at them both. And so they wanted to—he's trying to put this into practice, become all things to all men. And there's a quote in here that he said, "People and the European missionaries were really criticized as group. They said, 'You're not acting like Christians, and you're not acting like British people either. So why are you dressing like the Chinese?'" And his response was, "Do you want to be remembered for the strange Western clothes you wore or for the message of salvation you preached?" He asked them. And the new missionaries could see his point and spent time practicing how to roll up the sleeves of their tunics and eat rice with chopsticks.

So most of the European missionaries just wanted to continue to look like Europeans. And he's thinking, "If we want to penetrate Chinese culture and influence them, this is what we're going to do." So we have to—I think we've all got to wrestle with this of what is this going to look like and how do we become all things to all men on the one hand? On the other hand, we don't want to do anything that is sinful. So we took it way too far. Now, the secret sauce here. Say, "Well, okay, what was the secret sauce in evangelizing and growing that fast?" And unfortunately, this is probably the last thing you want to hear, but Matthew 9:38, Jesus says, "Pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into his harvest."

Okay. And what people don't realize, this was really, really hard work. Okay. Evangelizing was hard work. It was facing a lot of rejection. It was pouring your lives into many people, some of whom would become Christian, most of whom wouldn't. It was going out on the streets. It was having people into our homes, offering hospitality, studying the Bible with people. It was a tremendous amount of work. And I think that's why Jesus says, "Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into the harvest field." Because evangelism, if you really, really want to reach out to the lost, especially in the face of a busy life and a lot of other responsibilities, this is hard to do.

And it takes time. It takes sacrifice. People made enormous financial sacrifices also to spread the gospel. I mean, I knew people who would—and I knew one couple that they sold their bed and slept on a mat on the floor because that's the only thing that they had to sell for missions. Okay. So this is a—people made tremendous financial sacrifices, personal sacrifices. Many people decided to move to other countries to go into the full-time ministry and to move places where they could be trained. So it was just really hard work. I mean, I'm taking nothing away from prayer. The people would be praying.

But I think that was the big thing that people don't appreciate is that people just work really hard in evangelizing.

And you say, "Well, how did you meet all these people from all these different backgrounds?" And pretty much you name it. I mean, I think of the passage in Ecclesiastes 11 where it says, "So you're seen in the morning and the evening do not withhold your hand. You don't know which will prosper either this or that or whether both alike will be good." I would say most people became Christians as a result of somebody they knew who it was a coworker in some cases, or it was a neighbor or a friend or a relative, somebody that they knew that was reaching out to them with the gospel. However, there were also people that were met, what we call cold contact, where you go out on the street and you just start talking to complete strangers.

And some people became Christians that way. So people became Christians all kinds of different ways. And the attitude was, "We don't know what's going to work. We'll try everything, every way of reaching out to the lost people who are around us." And I'll give some examples a little later. Now, this is my personal rule of thumb. All right. And this is just based on a few decades of experience here in Boston. So I have no scientific data to back it up, no statistical analysis here. So you just have to take it with that in mind. Okay. So this is my personal rule of thumb.

I say, "If I was going to share with 5, 10, 20 people who were close friends or people I had some kind of a relationship to the point where they trusted me, maybe 1 out of 5 to 1 out of 10 to 1 out of 20 would end up becoming a Christian." I'm talking about not just believing, but being totally committed to following Jesus and turning away from their sins and the whole picture here. So somewhere between 1 out of 5 and 1 out of 20 people, okay, if someone they knew and trusted shared with them. All right.

A stranger, cold contact on the street, it's maybe 1 out of 100 to 1 out of 1,000. So the fish are out there. It just means if you're using that approach, you may have to get 99 or 999 no's before you get a yes. So that just means you just have to work really hard. You just have to deal with a lot of rejection, looking for the one who is that open. Now, a lot of the other people, there'll be people in that group who would be open if a friend shared with them, but not so much with a stranger. So if you want to know how we baptized thousands of people, it was because we were reaching tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people as strangers and because we're reaching tens of thousands of friends.

So everybody had the idea that, "I am here to seek and save the lost. My purpose is the same as that of Jesus." And that was the culture of the church. So I want to give some examples to have some examples written down of how people became Christians that I think you might find encouraging.

Just get my notes here.

Okay. And my wife, I remember putting a lesson together on this on evangelism some time ago. And Alison said, "I've never been that terribly effective at evangelism." And then we started to list the number of people who became Christians through Alison's outreach. This is not false modesty. She just didn't think she was very effective. So Alison reached out to her sister.

She reached out to several of her sisters. One of her sisters became a Christian. She reached out to a coworker who became a Christian. She reached out to a neighbor who lived across the street who was pursuing an advanced medical degree. We were living in a very urban area who got baptized. She reached out to another neighbor who was the wife of a roofer. She got baptized. She worked out this way to another female coworker, then another coworker.

And that coworker, whose name was Joyce, reached out to neighbors of hers who became Christians. And then the mother of the woman of the neighbor became a Christian. So what happens is you reach somebody who reaches somebody else who reaches somebody else, and you have a whole chain of people who become Christians. And then our next-door neighbor and her husband became Christians. Alison reached out to her. And somebody from a completely different background and mindset from Alison, like a polar opposite, but they became friends and they became Christians.

I was reached out to by my sister. She became a Christian. She reached out to me. And I would go out periodically just on the street talking to strangers and inviting them to a Bible study group, inviting them to church. And one man who was single, who later on married a Christian, he became a Christian. And then I was going, reaching out to people, and I ran into a French businessman who was living in Cambridge who was at the post office where I was, reached out to him, and he had a British girlfriend, and she became a Christian as well. And the last thing I did when I was in the full-time ministry is perform their wedding over in the UK and England.

And one guy, a friend of mine, reached out to him. He was from a very tough background. He had a big scar on his neck from a knife fight that he had been in. He spent some time in prison and was divorced. And he had custody of their two children. Very, very rough background. But he was bold and incredibly evangelistic.

He reached out to his niece, and she brought her to church one day. And Alison got together with her and drove her back home from the party after church. We had a little ring-your-neighbor day gathering. Alison brought her home. And so she was saying, "Can you explain what sin is to me? What's this thing sin that they're talking about in the church?" And Alison said, "Sure." She gave some examples like sexual immorality, things like that. And she said, "Well, what's that?" And said, "Well, that's having sex with someone you're not married to." And she was living with a guy at the time and had just had an infant boy. Okay. And so Alison explained that to her.

And then a couple of days later, Alison is talking to her on the phone, and the woman says, "Okay, he's on the couch. What do I do next?" Okay. A couple of days later, she calls back to Alison and she says, "Okay, now he wants to get married to me." Okay. And Alison says, "Just hold off for a few weeks. I want to study the scriptures with you before you make any decisions about it." And of course, Alison explains that you only marry another Christian. We reached out to him, but he didn't want to become a Christian. So the woman became a Christian, raised her son in the church. He became a Christian. I was at his wedding a little while ago.

So people from all different backgrounds. And my friend Richard, he's black, and he was so bold. He would get on the bus, and he'd go to the bus driver and say, because he's commuting to work, he'd say, "Do you mind if I share my faith with people on the bus?" And the bus driver usually said, "Go ahead, do what you want." So he'd go up and down the bus, and he'd share his faith with every single person. I was on a bus once, and I was more—I wanted to crawl under a seat. I wanted to jump out the window because I was so embarrassed that after 10 people in a row say no, he goes to the 11th person like nothing happened.

Okay. I couldn't do that. But he was so bold. And once, after asking everybody on the bus, he asked the bus driver. And the bus driver ended up coming to church and getting baptized, studied with the bus driver's wife. She got baptized. And then the bus driver's brother studied with him. He got baptized. And I tell people that with the bus driver's brother, I tell people, "I studied the Bible with and helped baptize the biggest drug dealer in Boston." And they're amazed. They say, "The guy who sold the most drugs in Boston, you baptized?" I said, "No, I didn't say that." I said, "He was the biggest drug dealer in Boston. He's about 400 pounds.

He's just a big guy." So he was all different people from all different backgrounds. And he would go up and down the streets, a really rough area, and call people to repent and tell them they need to get serious about cutting out the sin, getting to church.

And I asked Alison, "What do you think are the most important things?" My wife, Alison, said, "Prayer, fasting, loving people, really strong teaching on repentance." These were all things. And then working together as a group. So this wasn't a solo—we gang tackle people. So we'd all work together if somebody came to church, and we'd all work together as a group. The church culture was very receptive to people who were coming in and very, very welcoming.

And we do all kinds of things. Every once in a while, we'd have a bring your neighbor day, which would be a big focus on visitors. We'd have people over for dinner. We'd have chili cook-off contests and invite our friends and neighbors to those.

We'd reach out when soccer games or volleyball or playing ping pong or whatever people like to do. And then insert the word of God in any situation and just insert the word of God in our discussions and see how people responded. Some people would be curious and be drawn, and other people would be repelled. So that's what we do. So very strong emphasis on getting people into studying the Bible and bringing them to church. And a few practical things that I'll throw out there.

At the end of the day—and I gave a lesson this morning on how to prove from the scriptures that Jesus is the Son of God—a lot of people, if they just read the New Testament, it resonates. They hear the Master's voice, and they follow him. They just get him into the Bible, and they read the Gospels, and they do that. Some people need more proof and have more questions. It really depends on the person.

And for most people, I mean, there are a lot of good-hearted people out there, but there's also a lot of people who just are holding on to their sin. And the bottom line is they don't want to repent of their sin. And that's what Jesus said. I talked about that this morning in John 3:19 to 21. This is the verdict: "Light has come into the world. Men love darkness instead of light because their deeds are evil. And those who love the truth want to step into the light." So you have to realize we are in a spiritual battle that Satan has people enslaved, doesn't want to let them go. And he's tormenting them with all kinds of goodies and pleasures of this world to get them to ignore God and to not want to repent.

So the other thing is boldness. I mean, the people who were the most fruitful, they weren't the smartest people. All right? They weren't the most eloquent people. The people who were the most fruitful were the boldest people. And so the apostles prayed for boldness. And we got to pray for boldness. It's hard to get rejected to speak up and to pray for wisdom and boldness. I think that's really important.

I'll throw out a personal thought here. A lot of people will take the personal testimony approach. "Here's how Jesus changed my life for the better. I had a terrible life, and then I became a Christian, and everything became a whole lot better."

Read the book of Acts. Nobody did that. So nobody saved my life. In fact, a lot of people, their lives became a lot worse. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, "If only for this life we have hope, we are of all men the most pitiable." So this is the testimony that Paul gave was not how his life became better when he became a Christian. It certainly didn't. His testimony was, "Jesus is the Son of God who died on the cross and rose from the dead in fulfillment of the prophecies and was seen by hundreds of people. This really happened. It's based on historic fact that he is the Son of God, not how Jesus personally changed his life."

And not the—and this is, to me, this is—I call this the used car salesman approach. You too can have a wonderful life if you just become a Christian. You can have a wonderful life like I do, a wonderful marriage, a wonderful family, etc.

And Jesus said he's going to divide families two against three and three against two. So maybe they will by pulling a lot of sin out of their lives. Maybe the families will be a lot better. There's no guarantees about that. I've seen people's lives become outwardly much more challenging. So we shouldn't do that, in my opinion.

I'd steer away from that. Let's stick to the word of God. This is a team effort, as I mentioned before. So everybody would pitch in and work together. We'd have group Bible study groups, and we would all—and somebody comes to church, everybody reaches out to them and is welcoming and really trying to make friends with them. We used a basic Bible study series. I'm not sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing, but that's what we did. And so we would study with people. We'd sit down and have a study for 45 minutes or so about the authority of the word of God, about the kingdom of God, about faith in Jesus, repentance, baptism, basic topical studies where we look at six or eight verses.

And this was almost a one-size-fits-all approach. That's what we did. I haven't made up my mind on whether that's the best idea or not. So really, this is the challenge to realize that the pond is stocked. People from my background know, having been through what we were through, we know the fields are white for the harvest. The pond is full of fish. And maybe it's going to be one out of 20 or one out of 100 or one out of 1,000. But you think about that. Let's say if it's one out of 20 people or so, if you're living in an area of 5 million people, you can do the math. How many thousands of people are there who, if a friend reached out to them, would become Christians?

That's a lot of people. We are nowhere near saturating any of the communities where we are with making disciples of real Christians. So I'll open it up for any questions or comments or discussion at this point.

Thank you, brother. That is challenging. I know there's a couple of things that I would like to highlight and ask about. I've got to say the question that you started out with, "Do you believe that the fields are ready for harvest?" really challenged my view of the community that I live in.

Yeah, it's really something to think about. Do I believe that that's true today in the community I live in? That's a gut-level challenge right there.

That's why I started with that, because I think if that's the only thing, if somebody dozed off after that, if that's the only thing they got, they got the most important thing. That if you, once you get the idea, "Okay, the fields are white for the harvest. They really are, but I'm just ineffective or my group is ineffective with this," then you got to start asking the tough questions. "All right, how bad do I want this?

And what am I going to do to turn this around?" Excuses are gone. That's right. Because if you agree that they are, that is true today, just like it was when Jesus said it in the first place, then you'd immediately turn the focus on, "Well, what am I doing? What am I doing wrong? What am I doing that's not effective?

How lazy am I being? Or how much does this mean to me?" And a lot of successful evangelists, the word means a lot to them. Their salvation means a lot to them, and they want to share it out of that as well.

So how much do I love the people around me? I mean, it raises a lot of questions. We have a question on the chat here. It says, "Could Chuck give an example of a typical approach to a complete stranger?" And I know that maybe we should preface that question with we're not looking for a formula or something like that, but if you have some insight. Well, it's really whatever works. And it also depends on how much time you have. You're standing in line. You're going to be with somebody for a long time. You're on a car ride or on a bus. It depends on how long you have.

One thing that I will ask people is, "Are you a Christian?" And no matter what they say, there's a follow-up question that goes with that. If somebody says, "Well, no, I'm not," I can say, "Well, have you ever read the Bible? Do you have any interest in that?" to go down that road. Or if they say, "Well, I am a Christian," or sometimes people don't know what to say, "Well, I was raised Christian, but I'm really not going to church anywhere." So I'll just, if I have very, very little time, I'll start with something like that and just ask, "Are you Christian?" And if they are, say, "Well, that's great. Do you read the Bible?"

Because maybe they're going to a church where they never teach the Bible, or maybe they're not attending church at all for some reason. So I just start with that.

Yeah, I think pointing people to the scriptures is a very healthy thing to do. I mean, I've heard numerous Christians that are professing Christians that go to church and may have gone to church for years, and they got into trouble spiritually when they started reading their Bible. Or their story will start with, "But then we started reading our Bible on our own instead of just whatever was on the PowerPoint on Sunday morning." And the word of God is the most effective, powerful tool in transforming people's lives. I mean, we can all bear testimony to that. So I like that point of pointing people to scripture right away. Yeah, I totally agree.

One of the things I really like to do in any conversation is if I can share something of the word of God either verbally or say, "Can I show you something in the Bible here? I got a Bible in my backpack. Can I show you something here?" Because it actually talks about the very thing that we're discussing right now. And the Bible, it's like a magnet, okay? It's either going to draw people or it repels people. And it has an incredibly powerful effect. So if I can get the word, the sooner I can get the word of God in front of somebody, or some people are going to really be hungry and want to know more, and you can see them getting drawn in, and other people are repulsed, don't want to have anything to do with it.

So to me, that's a wonderful thing to do. Yeah, that's great.

Any other comments or questions?

Another thing I—or go ahead.

Well, I don't want to butt ahead of you. Go ahead with yours. No, that's fine. I've done a lot of talking already. You can go ahead. Yeah. Well, this was very stirring. I didn't get the first 15 minutes, so I don't know. Did the brother share a little more just what their church looks like? But this thought of going out and making disciples and then having that multiply, it sounds biblical.

Well, I am in kind of a traditional Mennonite-type church, and we certainly believe in evangelizing. We do jail ministry, prison ministry, try to reach out to neighbors. But we don't have one soul that comes from any of the surrounding towns or villages that has come in, and we have baptized him.

So I sometimes wonder, what are we doing? What is wrong? And then hearing you share how it multiplied and spread, I was curious how much of, I'll just say, Anabaptist-type beliefs that kind of separates us from the Protestant churches, how much of that do you withhold in the church you described of—yeah.

Well, the common thing was, like the conservative Anabaptists, we would teach people that you must obey the teachings of Jesus if you want to be saved, and you need to continue in that. It's not just a matter of believing. So the evangelicals really couldn't stand us because we're telling them, "No, no, you actually have to obey Jesus." So that was the foundation. Now, the question is, and we would teach radical repentance and call people out on sin, on sexual purity, on internet pornography, on drunkenness, on drug abuse, all those things. So it was a hard-line message of repentance.

There were things—I mean, every group has its blind spots. And I can see that more clearly now than I could at the time. There were things that we neglected to teach or miss taught, things like head covering, things like modesty. There was a whole range of different convictions about modesty in the church.