How Many?

I talked today with a wonderful person engaged in evangelism in Abbotsford. She made the comment that we are only capable of having meaningful connection with a limited number of people. She meets regularly with about eight people that she is discipling and building relationship with. Some one she knows has a personal limit of five people. These are people working in part or full time ministry. I think we sometimes think that in "great evangelism" we are expected to be impacting hundreds or thousand of people and that we should be converting people in the first five minutes of talking to them or at least giving them a book or a tract...

Jesus in Acts 1 directs his apostles to faithful and empowered lives and testimony. Do we experience or see God's empowerment in our lives? If you have no responsibility for converting people, does bold witness and testimony become easier? I think the reality is that it has to start with one choice to wait on the Holy Spirit in prayer and one person whom God will place in your heart or in your life. The task is not to convert them, because we can't do that, but to love and pray that God's power be revealed in both our life and their own life. The task is to with bold humility talk about God's intervention and ongoing impact in our lives.

How many? It starts with one...

Instant Evangelism

Photographer: Monomov.com

In the age of instant oatmeal, tv dinners, digital photography, Shaw on demand, flash hard drives, and self serve checkouts, patience is a thing of the past. Our patience is so thin that to wait for a web page to load or for our friend to pick up the phone is a tiresome and burdensome task. I am an impatient person. I struggle to wait in grocery lines without becoming irritated. 

To practice patience I have recently taken up Polaroid photography. Instant analog photography may seem like an odd direction to turn to practice patience but Polaroid pictures, while instant in comparison to roll film, are like long grocery lines in comparison to the digital photography we have grown accustom to. I also got a camera app on my phone that makes the digital camera feel more analog. No instant picture or results. I am required to wait about thirty second before I am able to view the picture. A Polaroid in contrast takes 2-4 minutes to develop and depending on the temperature requires my attention during that time. These minimal lengths of time can be frustrating for friends, who complain, wanting to see the picture I took right away. These minimal lengths of time mean that if the picture was not successful I may be unable to retake it because the moment or subject is no longer available. But this required wait time also adds the magical quality of anticipation to my life as I wait for each picture and somehow make the pictures more valuable. 

 My reflections on our instant culture and my foray into practicing patience through pictures have led me to consider if our lack of patience is a primary hindrance to evangelism. Does our need and expectation of instant results lead us in odd and unhelpful directions? We want to be able reach our quotas and demonstrate effective input output ratios. We want to be certain that the time we are putting in is yielding the results we are after. Can we expect 5 conversions in 5 minutes? Are we more effective by witnessing in large quantity through sermons, or online ministry or books?

Does the reality that you are probably not going to experience many people giving their life to Jesus within the first 30 minutes of meeting and talking to them mean that we don’t bother meeting people or talking about Jesus? Has our instant culture destroyed our ability or willingness to patiently walk and talk with people? Have instant and digital results created unhelpful and unrealistic evangelical expectations?