Evangelists Beware!
by Andy Perry

In NASCAR it’s Jeff Gordon; in swimming it’s Michael Phelps; in basketball it’s—well, at least in my mind, it’s still M.J. Every sport has its dominant heroes. In the same way, so does every sector of life. That’s equally true of the church. Who is the reigning hero in our evangelical subculture? I could offer many names, but it strikes me that a category is more apropos. The hero of our world is undoubtedly Evangelist.

I’m not talking about the allegorical figure in A Pilgrim’s Progress, I’m talking about the man or woman, teen or child whose life is driven by an urgency to share the gospel with the lost and see the world converted to Christ. Whether we find him sharing with a friend in the school lunchroom or practicing apologetics in the office breakroom or passing out tracts on a busy street-corner, Evangelist is always driven by one thing above all others, the salvation of souls.

One doesn’t need to listen to many of my sermons to realize how highly I value Evangelist. In fact, though the Bible claims that only some are gifted and called to train other Christians to do evangelism (Eph. 4:11-12), it assumes that we all will live life in the world as active ambassadors of Christ (2 Cor. 5:20). If you are a believer, you should be Evangelist. I believe that is clear.

With that said, I believe we need to strongly guard ourselves against two common dangers which naturally arise from over-exalting Evangelist as the hero of our subculture. The first danger is the unconscious subordination of every evidence of grace and characteristic of Christian maturity to evangelism. The prominent place of the altar call in worship services in many churches alone, I believe, testifies to the disproportionate exaltation of evangelism to the sad marginalization of other Christian graces, including all the beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-11) and the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23). The net effect in many Christian circles is the mind-set that once we have brought a sinner to the point of conversion, everything else is secondary and of lesser importance. I find it interesting that when asked which commandment was the greatest, Jesus did not say, “Preach the good news.” but rather, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind....And a second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” I write this not to discourage anyone from evangelism nor to allow us comfort in our frequent lack of evangelism. Rather, I write this to remind us that there is so much more to the Christian life than evangelism. Until we realize that, we may live under a weight of false guilt, thinking that unless we are out evangelizing at every moment we are displeasing God.

The second danger arising from over-exalting Evangelist flows over into how we raise our children and the sometimes false expectations we place upon them for pre-mature responses to our evangelism at home. Even when it rises from good, biblical motives, our zeal to see evidences of conversion in our kids can backfire years later. I was recently reminded of this in reading the painful memoir of the adult son of an evangelical pastor who tried too hard to squeeze his boy’s conversion into a fabricated mold. The son writes about a latter day epiphany of understanding his own adult bitterness toward God and the church:

For the first time I understood that my parents, having been converted in a dramatic fashion out of what they regarded as a sinful past, wanted the same for me. But because I’d been socialized in the church since infancy—Sunday School, youth group, Bible camp, Christian college—I had no ‘past’ to speak of out of which to convert. “Giving my life to Jesus” seemed like an empty exercise because I was merely ratifying the beliefs and lifestyle that my parents had drilled into me. My conversion didn’t live up to my own expectations, and so I returned to Bible camp summer after summer and rededicated my life to Jesus time after time after time. Staring into the campfire with moistened eyes, I tried desperately to conjure up the right emotions so that I could convince my parents and my peers and, most importantly, myself that I was firmly and finally “saved.”

Although I could never have given voice to it at the time, I suspect that what I found off-putting about the...altar calls and the pressure I felt from my father was their contrived nature. They struck me as coercive and manipulative, and the course they prescribed seemed formulaic.

Dear friends, let’s evangelize. Let’s let “the love of Christ compel us” (2 Cor. 5:14) to engage our lost world with the good news that Jesus saves. Let’s eagerly seize each opportunity to “give the reason for the hope that we have” (I Pet. 3:15). Let’s even continue to honor Evangelist and give him the place he is due. But let’s be careful neither to make him a god to which everything and everyone must bow nor a club wielded by well-meaning parents in an effort to fit their children into a mold for which God has not yet shaped them.