A Sunday sermon on evangelism – Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

The sermon at church today was by a lady who works as a staff at the Singapore Youth for Christ. She is an occasional speaker at my church when she comes round to give a sermon. She gave a sermon about evangelism based on the text of Luke 10 where Jesus sent the 72 to evangelise to the towns. Regarding evangelism, it is something that I do hear a lot about from my Christian leaders, be it the pastors, or the youth workers at the Varsity Christian Fellowship.

She was saying that there are people who spend their entire lifetime trying to convert a particular someone, and that this is admirable. But she also referenced to the passage where Jesus told the 72 that if they did not succeed in their evangelism, to wipe off the dust off their feet on the household and move on. According to her, a Christian is not obliged to spend effort beyond a certain point to try to convert the nonbeliever, in so far as he has really done his reasonable best. I suppose there may be certain circumstances in which as a Christian, one would want to convert a particular nonbeliever, especially if that nonbeliever is a loved one. I don’t think my grandmother was particularly active as a evangelizer, but at least one thing that she did was try to convert my grandfather to Christianity with the best of her efforts, and she succeeded I suppose. My grandfather now attends church every Sunday, but he doesn’t seem to be particularly a religious person.

But like a fisherman trying to catch fish, or a salesman doing his sales pitch (actually, that is the awkward feeling I sometimes get when I am evangelising), it would be a waste if one focus on converting a particular person at the expense of evangelizing to many other people in the midst.

She was talking about how she reached her wits end in an evangelistic endeavor during her secondary school days. Her friend, whom she was trying to evangelise to, taunted her to prove that God really exists by praying for God to appear right in front of her. She responded that if she indeed made God appear in front of her friend, her friend would die from the sight of God, and that would defeat the purpose of her attempt at redeeming her friend. The conversation between the speaker and her friend ended off in a rather caustic manner with she pulling out the stopline argument of “If you do not believe in God, you will go to hell!”, to which her friend retorted in an off-the-cuff manner that she would be happy being in hell.

I can identify with the sentiments of the friend. Sometimes, I wish that god would just show himself to cure my doubts, in a manner that is explicit enough for me to know that god exists, but yet at the same time not to the extent that I would be condemned for being a skeptic, or to death. And it can appear to me to be sore attempts at defending God’s apparent absence by throwing out answers such as “if God appeared before you, it would remove the necessity of faith in order to believe in him and you thus can’t love him genuinely.”

The speaker said that she had a surprising encounter with her friend again long after their days in secondary school when she saw her friend at her church one day. She was pleasantly surprised to see that that friend continued attending the church regularly. When she approached that friend, the friend quite responsively replied, seemingly with the recollection of that unsightly episode in their secondary school days, “okay lah, I believe lah”

From hearing this testimony at evangelism presented in the sermon, I would say that the way evangelism works is also very much mysterious. The speaker could have indeed been an extremely bad evangelizer to her friend, causing more ire and defensiveness in her friend than convincing her in any manner. But perhaps, it could also have sown the seed in the mind of the friend, which in quite inexplicable manner, moved the friend to attend church on a particular occasion. It could be that she was somehow reminded of that event, and decided that she would give church a try. The attempt at evangelism worked after all, by tapping into some unknown, perhaps even irrational aspect of the human psychology.

I do understand the impetus for evangelism, and why the church, as well as the varsity Christian fellowship I attend pushes for their members to evangelise. It is afterall, what Christians call the Great Commission. I have heard a fellow Christian framing his evangelistic endeavor in what appears to me to be a rather incentive-oriented manner by borrowing from the verse in Matthew 6:20 to “Store you treasure in heaven.” Can’t say I am too impressed with this belief-system as a way to compel evangelism. It seems to me to run counter to the virtue of selflessness that Christianity preaches about.

I try to do my bid for Christianity as well, and to carry out this aspect of what seems to be my obligation as a Christian. I try to do so even though I am not exactly sure that God exists, or that Christianity is true. You can call me a Christian agnostic, the sort of Christian who believe it wiser to hang upon the safer side of the Pascal wager. Still, I evangelise because I am concerned about the afterlife of my loved ones such as my friends and my family members, and I believe that it is good for people to take practical and moral instructions from the Christian religion in their living. Also, I believe that Christianity is good for society if people live out the charitable values preached in the religion.