Making Room for Evangelism's New Reality

   Last week, I discovered what other runners have known for quite some time: toenails can be the most unfaithful of companions. I was on the road for a series of business meetings and decided to blow off some steam one afternoon by taking a run along Lake Michigan. Things were going fine until I hit the three-mile mark and felt an odd surge of pain on the tip of my toe — second in the lineup, left foot. Rather than succumb to my body’s next ploy in a string of attempts to get out of exercising, I decided just to sprint the pain out of me — unfortunately, an ill-advised choice.

   For those of you averse to all things “feet,” I’ll make this quick. I got back to the house where I was staying, removed my left shoe, stripped off the thick, bloodstained sock, and tended to the unsightly mess I found inside. (Researchers say that the two most sensitive parts of the human body are the mouth and the fingertips. Trust me, the toe-tip trumps them both.)

   I speed-dialed a few of my favorite runner-friends and soon learned that evidently, an ordinary biomechanics assessment can tell you why it is that perfectly good toes go bad. All you need is your running shoes, a treadmill, and a video recorder to capture everything on tape.

   Back home in Colorado, I went for such a test. I explained to the technician standing beside the monitor that I had been running roughly the same distance at roughly the same speed with nary a problem, ever since high school. Moreover, I informed him, I’d bought the exact same shoes each and every year — Asics, size eight — with only a handful of exceptions. Nike clearance sales, for example. “There are no variables here,” I explained. “So why the toenail dilemma?”

   After studying the footage in slow-motion, he said that everything checked out: “Your stride, your rotation, the way your heels strike the belt … it’s all good. The only problem you have,” he said, “is that your feet grew. Welcome to your new reality.”

   Now, from a very young age, I knew that things like noses and ears could keep growing well into a person’s eighties — all I had to do was observe my grandfather. But feet? This was news to me. Fortunately, though, my problem had a simple fix: To run with enjoyment once more, all I needed to do was make room for that new reality.

   Sometimes, we encounter new realities that are pretty trivial in terms of their implications. An increase in gas prices, a cancelled flight, an unexpected bump in a commission check, a delinquent toenail — these things don’t alter the course of life all that much.

   But then there are the new realities that are of colossal consequence to the person facing them.

   What’s more, if you are someone who loves God and who longs to have significant impact in your generation, then you won’t want to miss this: there is one of these colossal-consequence types on the horizon right now, and if you make room for it, life for you will never again be the same.

   In his latest book, Just Walk Across the Room, Bill Hybels says that these days, God is on a mission to turn all of his followers into “walk across the room” people who seize spiritual opportunities to help others get to know Him. He wants those of us who have surrendered our hearts to him now to surrender our moment-by-moment lives to His Spirit, paying attention to His cues for when we should walk, when we should talk, and when we should pipe down because we’ve said enough already. The “new reality” is this: Your life (yes, yours) can have eternal impact if you will just walk across a room. This, according to Hybels, is the “next era of personal evangelism” — and it’s something that all of us can do.

   Recently, I sat in on an interview Hybels did with a reporter from a well-known Christian publication and heard him wrap some useful context around this idea. “In the past decade or so,” he said, “believers became incredibly adept at fellowship and community. Especially as it relates to the western church, though, we still haven’t mastered the ability to engage confidently with a person who is lost.”

   He has a good point: unlike previous days when a person’s “religion” was largely a private matter, in most churches today, Christ-followers are accustomed to doing life together. This usually involves gathering on a regular basis in a small group setting to study Scripture, discuss life issues, hold each other accountable to spiritual development goals, and, well … hang out. To stick the vast majority of these folks in a room full of unbelievers, though, is to see them squirm.

   The end result isn’t good: people living far from God are left knowing nothing of the radically-accepting, infinitely-supportive spirit that ought to mark the life of a Christian. Rather than being drawn toward the things of God, they are repelled back into a world that makes it all too easy to stay distracted from the Truth.

   This dynamic shouldn’t surprise us; centuries ago, the Apostle Paul told Timothy that there would come a day when people would care more about having their “ears tickled” than about knowing the truth of God’s Word. His advice to his young apprentice was straightforward: “But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry (2 Timothy 4:5).” In other words, despite the other noble things that Timothy might find to do in life, he could choose simultaneously to play a role in helping people come to know God.

   The same is true for us.

   That being said, however, we have our work cut out for us. “Churches have learned how to grow without getting their hands dirty with the work of evangelism,”Hybels went on to say later in the same interview, “which I guess would be fine if we had been mandated to build bigger buildings. But we weren’t! We were mandated to point people toward faith in Jesus Christ.”

   In his estimation, this doesn’t get accomplished via forced formulas or memorized scripts; rather, evangelism’s true power rests in the hearts of Christ-followers who abandon fear, insecurity, and self-consciousness and instead get absolutely committed to selflessly and actively caring for broken, hurting people — just as God Himself does. Being a walk-across-the-room person, therefore, means that when the Holy Spirit prompts, you engage people in conversation, if only to learn what God is up to in their lives. You ask intelligent questions about their life stories (see page 30) … and you openly share yours. You suggest resources that seem appropriate to the situation at hand — a good book, an inspiring CD, tickets to a conference, a sincere offer to pray — to aid them in their spiritual journey. And you do so naturally.

   It’s a concept Hybels calls “Living in 3D” — Developing friendships, Discovering stories, and Discerning next steps — and this simple, three-pronged paradigm is the backbone of that “new reality”: Evangelism can be as simple as a walk across the room — something anyone can do! Despite the fact that only 10 percent of churchgoers today would admit to having the “formal” gift of evangelism, surely we all agree that we possess enough compassion to befriend one who is friendless, enough relational intelligence to ask an insightful question about someone’s life story, and enough confidence in God’s guidance to offer up a good book.

   If it’s true that instead of being reserved for spiritual superheroes, personal evangelism is our collective work as Christ-followers, then the next time God presents an opportunity to approach someone standing 20 feet away, let’s agree to get moving across the room.

   Make room for the reality that your ordinary steps can have eternal impact on someone else, and soon you will find the work of evangelism as entirely enjoyable as my runs are these days … courtesy of a new pair of Asics, size eight-and-a-half.