Every time we hear about churches being converted into pubs and mosques, we ask the question, ‘how can we re-evangelise Europe?’. There is only one answer to this question: to go out and evangelise. It’s not the only thing we need to do, but it is the first thing that we need to do. Before Jesus rose to the heavens, he asked his disciples to become his witnesses to the ends of the earth. And the first thing they did after receiving the Holy Spirit was to evangelise.
Anti-Christian sentiment is becoming widespread across the world, and following the outbreak of the pandemic, opposition towards Christian in Korea is growing, which has led some people to say that it has become very difficult to evangelise. I would like to ask those people: was the early church welcomed when proclaiming the gospel? The book of Acts tells us that they were prosecuted just because they believed in Jesus, and because they preached His name. No matter how anti-gospel the world may be now, it just cannot compare to the challenges the early church must have faced. Evangelism has always been hard. So evangelising is something that we don’t do, rather than can’t do.
In general, other Christian activities are much easier to start and continue compared to evangelising. Praise, prayer, serving the homeless, volunteering – all of these aren’t easy, but they don’t feel as uncomfortable(?) as it does to evangelise, and they aren’t met with as much resistance either. My experience has shown this as well. I was trained through the Korean Campus Crusade for Christ, which focused a lot on evangelising, and while serving as a church pastor in Korea I encouraged others to evangelise, even children by making gospel tracts that they can understand. But though I was quite good at consistently running most of my other ministries, my efforts to evangelise didn’t ever last long. Perhaps as a result of such experiences, evangelising felt uncomfortable and awkward to me back then.
But after coming to God’s Vision Church and by participating in our Saturday Evangelism, evangelising finally started to feel comfortable, and at times, even exciting. Rather than considering it as a one-time event, focusing on sharing Jesus and meeting people to share their thoughts on Jesus really helped me become passionate about evangelism, and about God in a unique way.
As with everything, being constant is important with evangelism. If you continue to participate in evangelising activities despite the awkwardness that you may feel, one day, it will become exciting. Looking back, I am really grateful for God’s guidance in this area. On the day that our evangelism campaign for the 2012 London Olympics ended, God asked me, ‘Young Joo, will you continue to evangelise for me?’ – in obedience, I handed out gospel tracts for three years, as I wasn’t very fluent in English. One day, I was joined by a sister who had joined us on Saturday for the first time, and watching her talk to everyone about Jesus gave me the courage to start talking to people as well. Thanks to my time at Amnos Church Planting School, I learned that door-to-door evangelism, which doesn’t seem right for the UK anymore, may still be useful for local churches.
I would now like to focus on Arise, the evangelism programme that we will participate in during June. In my view, a “church that evangelises” isn’t a church that offers financial support to others to evangelise – it is a church where several of its members participate in evangelising themselves. In reality, the real thing that the English church needs right now is people that will evangelise with them. While we have a long way to go, I will continue to pray that our church will become a church that evangelises, and would like to walk that path with the members of our church.
