Urging Christians on a Sunday morning, “Tell your friends about Jesus!” probably just makes them feel guilty, overwhelmed, and disheartened. How can you do it?
- Don’t do it out of the blue. Evangelism to friends and family isn’t a sales pitch, but a lifestyle.
- Go low and slow, but don’t forget. Regular prayer that names your targets is effective and will also help keep the goal in mind.
- Focus on only one or two people at a time.
- Worry about non-Christians before you worry about other Christians, like Catholics, Baptists, etc.
1. Become a real friend first
Inviting your friend or neighbor to church when you’ve never invited them into your home is inauthentic and feels awkward. First, hang out together and do lots of things together—movies, Superbowl parties, concerts, cookouts—so that when you finally give the invitation to church or a Bible study, it’s just one of many things you do together.
Bonus: Use positive peer pressure. Mix your non-Christian friend into a social group with other Christian friends. Then your church invitation will be something “normal” people do instead of something “weird.” People will find the Bible story more believable if many people in their community—their trusted friends and family—also believe the story.
2. Coffee—dinner—living room
People will only talk about Jesus inside relationships in which they feel respected for their deeply held views and feel safe talking about personal issues. It’ll take a while to get to that level with someone. Be patient, but deliberate.
Politics and religion aren’t socially acceptable topics for small talk—they aren’t safe in the public space. At the beginning, when you’re in the “coffee” stage of a friendship relationship, just talk about a person’s interests to get to know them better. Ask, “What do you do for work/fun/weekends/reading/movies?”
After a little while, perhaps you can invite your friend to share a meal. In the “dinner” stage, you can move on to talking about values, what a person thinks is good or bad, better or worse, wise or unwise. You might ask, “Why do you...? What do you think about...?”
Finally, you can move to the "living room" stage, where you can talk about worldviews—God, life, death, humanity, spirituality, reality. Ask, “Will there be life after death?” “Are humans essentially good or evil?” “Is there a God?” “Is God loving and personal, or unloving and impersonal?” Listen to their story first and be genuinely interested in what they say. Resist the temptation to correct their answers. If you listen to them with respect, sooner or later they will ask you about your views and maybe also your religion.
3. Know your own story
When someone does finally ask you about your faith, you’ll need to be ready to answer with something more than, “Umm, it’s just the way I grew up” or “I’m hoping to avoid hell.” You’ll need to be able to describe why your faith is important to you.1
Prepare and rehearse your testimony as a story following these steps.2
- Who am I? What drives me? What is my mission in life? What fulfills me? What happy ending am I looking for?
- Give an example.
- Tell why my mission is unachievable.
- Describe how Jesus is “the reason for the hope that I have.”
- Tell how my life is different with Jesus than without.
- Give an example of what a new life in faith looks like.
I am a perfectionist. My mission in life is to make everything better, excellent, and “right.” That means routines and efficiency have always been important to me. Even my kindergarten teacher had to change the order of activities from day to day for the whole class so I didn’t get stuck in a rut.
I try to achieve my mission by fixing everything for everybody. I know I have better solutions—if only people would just take my advice! But the problem is, people aren’t interested in my unsolicited advice.
My faith helps me remember that nothing in this world is perfect, and it can never be. The people and the stuff in the world never work 100% as designed, from my computer to my kids to my coworkers and customers. Everyone and everything has a bug in the system that I can’t fix. It is only Jesus who is perfect, and only Jesus who can fix it. And my fervent hope is to make it to the land of perfection, which Jesus has promised to create for me.
So my job is not to do his job, but to make it through as calmly as possible and help others deal with the world the way it is too. For example, I know that meetings aren’t the most efficient way to get work done, but that’s not my purpose any longer. My purpose is to use the gathering to support and encourage other people in their (messy) work.
1 Some Christians are scared to have this conversation because they’re embarrassed to not have all the answers ready. But only a salesman has all the answers. 1 Peter 3:15 tells you to have your testimony ready, not the catechism or the proofs. If there are challenges after your testimony, respond by saying, “I don’t know. Let’s find out together.” Then Google it with them and talk about what you read in an open-ended conversation that invites further discussion later.
2 It’s ok that your gospel summary leave out parts of the gospel. It’s a summary. Its purpose is to lead to more conversations, not to finish the conversation.