If you grew up in the modern evangelical world, you’re familiar with old-school evangelism methods: walking along a beach, clutching brochures in sweaty hands. Memorizing the Romans Road and cinching knots in beaded, wordless bracelets, we stood ready to deliver our formulaic gospel presentations. And to be clear, methods like these have wrought beautiful eternal ends over the years.
Yet I wonder if our approach to evangelism is evolving as rapidly as the changing culture we hope to love. In 2022, an Evangelism Explosion study released by Lifeway Research reported that 35% of respondents would feel less open to continuing a faith conversation that employed pamphlets, brochures, or phone apps.
We may not see as many Christians handing out tracts today, but there are many modern-day equivalents—impersonal faith-sharing strategies that can leave the hearer with the impression You don’t even see me. Perhaps now via an app, a platitude offered on a social media post, an apologetics argument removed from the soul-questions of the asker—we may inadvertently communicate that the gospel is a one-size-fits-all, plug-and-play solution rather than the Good News of a God who levels his gaze, offers his presence, and engages us directly with our individual stories and needs.
This disconnect also discourages many believers from even wanting to share their faith. Curiously, the same Lifeway study referenced above found that while the majority of Americans are open to faith conversations, most of their Christian friends “rarely talk about their faith.” Likewise, a 2019 Barna report found that while 73% of millennials feel equipped to share their faith, close to half (47%) aren’t sure they even agree with the ethics of evangelism.
Perhaps the reason we feel so uncomfortable sharing the gospel is that our mentality lacks integrity and authenticity and often sees people as projects. But what if we reframed our understanding of evangelism, such that even the most disenchanted could fall in love with sharing their faith?
First, we know much reluctance toward Christianity these days is due to the image problem of the church. Close to one in five non-Christians claim hesitancy toward Christianity due to overpoliticization, and nearly half (42%) of those with no faith report resistance due to the hypocrisy of religious people—unsurprising given the abuse crisis among Christian leaders. Surveys and studies consistently show American Christians are perceived as self-righteous and judgmental or simply inauthentic, unsafe, and irrelevant.
In Evangelism in a Skeptical World, Sam Chan writes, “When our non-Christian friends think of Christianity, they don’t think of good news, salvation, forgiveness, restoration, justice, mercy, or love. Instead, they think of hate, fear, power, and violence.” They see Christians as hating and treating gay people contemptuously, as worse sinners than the ones guilty of any other sinful lifestyle, like those listed in Prov. 6:16–19 or 1 Cor. 6:9–10. In short, for non-Christians who prize the ethics of equality, rights, and justice, Chan reasons, Christians are seen as oppressors rather than friends of the oppressed.
This perception is particularly problematic with Gen Z. Instead of viewing religion as a set of truth claims to be dismissed on its own terms, the next generation is characteristically one of “ethical absolutism, [where] some discard and denounce any religious outlook that seems to produce unpopular ethical conclusions,” observes Benjamin Vincent in a previous CT piece.
Consider, too, the possible need to approach Gen Z and Alpha as we would do for honor/shame cultures of the Majority World. Many young people today are geared toward saving face or, perhaps via cancel culture, “finding ways of shaming people who are considered a threat to their social group,” explains one youth pastor. Rather than revealing Jesus as the antidote to a personal guilt they don’t feel—how might they respond to him as a communal shame-lifter?
In an article entitled “How to Share Jesus so He’s Actually Good News,” Asian American Tony Wee writes of how the guilt-innocence gospel framing failed to reach him growing up in a collectivist family. Even in his youth, Wee cared far more about the shame or honor of his community than about his own individual guilt. And like Wee, most of my own teenagers and their friends hardly seem concerned by personal guilt. But shame? Shame, they understand.
Wee encourages us to consider how the gospel offers radical solutions to a new set of burning questions: “How can we present the good news for their unique longings—to the point they might genuinely find it beautiful (Romans 10:14-15)?” For instance, youth pastor Sean Dotson proposes tracing shame for this generation throughout the Bible and exposing how “Jesus conquers shame through his death and His resurrection,” serving as the scapegoat for the shame of all humanity.
Rest assured, the burning questions and longings are there. As a missionary and mother of teenagers, I see so many of my kids’ peers feeling their way toward God (Acts 17:27)—like the many Gen Zers among the 50,000 people who flocked to the Asbury outpouring. One article [with research on a spirituality-focused app for younger generations] that “most Gen Z (77%) consider themselves spiritual … and over half (51%) of millennials report feeling deep spirituality at least weekly.”
A wider understanding of all God saves us from isn’t just advantageous for non-Christians. In The 3D Gospel: Ministry in Guilt, Shame, and Fear Cultures, Jayson Georges observes that “a one-dimensional gospel […] threatens the veracity and integrity of the Bible. We misread Scripture and construct a sub-biblical view of God. If God does not save us from shame and fear … we severely minimize his glory.”
When we seek to grasp all dimensions of the gospel and its saving power, we put ourselves in a position to know God more deeply and make him known more effectively. To that end, we might ask ourselves what questions the gospel has answered for us and healed in our own hearts.
How have we beheld different facets of God in various seasons of our own lives? Can we truly proclaim that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched … concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1)? Does our experience of Jesus and his healing demonstrate “the power of God that brings salvation” (Rom. 1:16)?
As Ruth Haley Barton describes in Life Together in Christ, effective evangelism acts as “an invitation to spiritual transformation offered by someone who can bear witness to that transformation in their own life.” Or to paraphrase Spurgeon, we are beggars telling other beggars where we found bread; humility is an irreplaceable ingredient. But before we can rightly offer this sustenance to others, we must first examine how we have personally tasted and seen (Ps. 34:8) Jesus as our Bread of Life (John 6:35)—not just when we were first saved, but for fresh manna day after day.
With that kind of authenticity and self-awareness, initiating conversations about Jesus becomes as natural as it is inescapable. Let what pastor Trevin Wax observes of his believing friend be said of us: “it would have been impossible for us to form a lasting friendship without talking about Christ. His Christianity was so central to his identity that it could not go unnoticed or unmentioned.”
I am always ready to talk about Jesus—whether on the beach, in line at the grocery store, or in the comments of a social media post. I still strike up conversations with people who sit next to me on flights and share testimonies of all that God’s done in my life. Sensitivity to social situations and awareness of others’ needs doesn’t dampen our courage, our urgency, or the frequency with which we share about the love of Jesus. It simply prevents us from doubling as an annoying gong (1 Cor. 13:1).
It’s also easier for us to lean into this authenticity (rather than forcing a “gospel” conversation ill-suited to the moment) when we remember that salvation belongs to God alone (Rev. 7:10) and only the Holy Spirit can truly change a human heart. God’s preferred method of reaching people is through the body of Christ as his ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19–20), but his process is ultimately a long-suffering, journeying one. As Paul said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6).
Which means, in our approach to evangelism, we must hold in tension both eager exigency and peaceful patience. When I served as a missionary in a Muslim context, I learned about the Engel scale’s fifteen stages of someone’s posture toward Christ—spanning from the time when someone has no awareness of God to the moment they feel comfortable sharing their faith with others. I knew I might never move someone from 1 to 15. But guiding someone from a 3 to a 6? That was cause for gratitude.
Being present, opening ourselves to empathy, and embarking on the often painstaking yet vital process of establishing trust must critically precede any method or strategy. We must prepare ourselves for the long haul of receiving someone’s searing pain or unshakable questions if we are to avoid bypassing the suffering of others, not unlike the priest and the Levite who walked past the man bleeding by the wayside.
Drawing near to those who seem far off empowers us to respond to their church hurt with compassion rather than defense (2 Tim. 2:24). We learn the invaluable skill of active listening (James 1:19), so we know when to pose thoughtful, tell-me-more questions and when to share our own stories (1 Pet. 3:15).
The late Steve Douglass, former president of Cru, once remarked from stage at a missions conference I attended in 2003, “The gospel flows best through the holes in people’s lives.” Each of those holes are specific to the person: No doctor would perform CPR as an antidote to a broken femur. And when we take the time to listen each person’s story and pinpoint their pain, we can offer words of life that bind and heal their unique wounds.
For this reason, Galatians exhorts us to “carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2). The former action satisfies the latter command in ways that are messy, self-sacrificial, unique to every person—and decidedly unformulaic. This is, after all, how God bears our burdens.
God descending to dwell with us now and forever—to the point of carrying our sorrows (Isa. 7:14; 53:4)—underscores the steep prerequisite of modeling this all-in love as people first encounter Jesus. Evangelism extends its plea from a high priest who keenly sympathizes with weakness (Heb. 4:15). Christ alone is the unique balm for both my crippling pains and theirs, where God himself shoulders all our suffocating burdens and responds to our overwhelming questions.
Even in his ministry, Jesus responded to vastly differing needs with responses that were equally diverse. Jesus repeatedly addressed his listeners with dignity, engaging their needs with unconditional love—often long before he ever asked them to follow him. As John Marriott reminds us, Christ met each person wherever they were, with kindness that led them to repentance (Rom. 2:4). “Think of the woman at the well,” Marriott writes. “Zacchaeus. The woman caught in adultery. All had rejected him with their lifestyles. But Jesus pursued them, loved them, and kept the conversation going.”
The high calling and standard set by Jesus’ unconditional love does not change, whether its message is accepted or not. Even after Adam and Eve’s rejection of God, courtesy of their sin, he kept leaning in. And in a culture where Christians are viewed as either pretentious or suspicious—and impersonal evangelistic agendas can be sniffed out a mile away—our desire to share the good news about Jesus must be modeled after his example. That is, any compulsion to talk about our faith must proceed from a deep conviction of our own testimony and an even deeper regard for the recipient.
So don’t throw away that impromptu chat on the beach about the hope you have! But just as the Great Commission precedes the Great Commandment in every Gospel, we first love our neighbor, so we evangelize—not the other way around. And in both directives, our obedience to Christ is as urgent as ever.
Janel Breitenstein is the author of Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write on Your Kids’ Hearts and a missionary with Engineering Ministries International, with which she served in Uganda for five years.
