Best 280 quotes in «evangelism quotes» category

As the church get older and older it becomes harder to keep evangelism on the front burner because of all the competing issues that keeps pushing it back.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Author conveys contemporary respect for Methodist preachers who rode the circuit of frontier settlements to put themselves at risk for the Gospel near the Second Great Awakening. They were dubbed 'God's light artillery'.

A weak and dying Messiah is the very antithesis of a man-made cure.

Cop-out excuses and catch-phrase dismissals can only work so long before the holes in the religious argument cannot be ignored any longer.

Because cultures and languages are constantly changing and because the apostolic testimony must be attested in ever-new circumstances, it is a necessary feature of the apostolic tradition that it both guard the original testimony and make it understandable in new culture settings. Failing either is to default on the apostolic tradition. Far from implying unbending immobility, apostolicity requires constant adaptation of the primitive apostolic testimony to new historical challenges and languages, yet without altering or diluting the primitive witness.

Because we convince ourselves that people won’t accept our testimony about God’s work in our lives, we’re not usually ready to share it. We might prejudge their reactions or simply lack confidence. Soon, staying silent becomes a way of life. We become accustomed to the monotony and forget our calling in the world...We are called to action. Verbalizing, with humility, what God has done for us is an important part of faith. We shouldn’t shy away from it or doubt that He will use it to bring others to Himself. This should bring us to a place of confidence and humility. And it should compel us to speak.

Before we can influence our culture, our visions must die.

Captivated by the Truth of God, the witness must only declare the wonderful works of the Holy One.

Christian education begins where evangelism ends, helping believers grow in their faith.

Because children already have a realization of their weakness, is this not the best opportunity to apply the gospel to their hearts?

Before they are preachers, leaders or church planters, the disciples are to be lovers! This is the test of whether or not they have known Jesus. This remains the case today: this cross-love is the primary, dynamic test of whether or not we have understood the gospel word and experienced its power...It is our cross-love for each other that proclaims the truth of the gospel to a watching and skeptical world. Our love for one another, to the extent that it imitates and conforms to the cross-love of Jesus for us, is evangelistic. pp. 56-7

But some of it (evangelistic persuasion) is going to come through service. The deficit that many Christians face is that people look at followers of Christ more for what they’re against than what they’re for.

Cause every task of your day to be a sacred ministry to the Lord. however mundane your duties, for you they are a sacrament.

Christian myth, reveals the truth that "the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world.

Christians often fail to get in touch with the shocking message that can lie at the heart of evangelism: “I am here to change you, and I’m going to change you so that you become like me.” There are some obvious dangers here once we think about all this. If we approach people in this way, we are not treating them as people. We are not respecting them. We are treating them as part of our own program, like an objective and a statistic, and this is self-centered as well as disrespectful. An obnoxious smell of superiority is apparent. Further, we are judging people as fundamentally inadequate. *We* are okay, of course. Missionary work conducted in this spirit is a well-intentioned but self-centered power-play… We can avoid this instrumentalizing of potential converts - a making of them into something like an instrument or tool that then does something for us - only by approaching them for their own sakes and hence not as potential converts at all. We must value our initial relationships with people for what they are and not in terms of what we want out of them. This means that we must want to become their friends. Moreover, it must be a friendship with no strings attached. We must seek out relationships because we are interested in and value other people for who they are, right where they are. Conversions would be nice, but they are not our main agenda. We hope and pray for the best for our new friends, but that is not our principal motivation for relating to them. In this way and only in this way do we avoid colonizing people as we convert them.

City of God interprets all of the human story, from Creation to the Last Judgment, as the drama of divine providence and human free choice, especially the choice between the two most fundamental options of membership in one or the other of the "two cities." The City of God is the invisible community of all who love God; the City of the World is all those who love the world and themselves as their God.

Conversions were easy, but making full-time disciples was hard.

CS Lewis's humor supported his exposition but never dominated or diminished it.

Dharma is not about believing in God. It’s about making the right choices, doing the right things and leading the right life.

Do I not well deserve to be turned into hell, if the scorns and threats of blinded men, if the fear of silly, rotten earth, can drive me thither (588)?

Disgust at idols strengthened his love for idolaters, and the man who once held Gentile neighbors at a distance now listened to their problems, fears, and temptations.

Don’t wait for people to locate you. Rather, reach out to people and help to bring them to Christ

False conversions are a wart on the face of Christian evangelism.

During all my years as an evangelist, my message has always been the Gospel of Christ. It is not a Western religion, nor is it a message of one culture or political system . , .it is a message of life and hope for all the world.

Every church has a marketing plan! The only difference is that some are better than others! When I think of marketing I think of building a relationship with those within reach of your ministry who know nothing about your church or are disconnected from your people.

Every moment thou waitest does but increase thy misery; thine attempts to plume thyself and make thyself fit for Jesus are all vanity.

Erasmus’s Bible-saturated mind. His was a mind too broad for fundamentalism, which rejects reason, and too honest for intellectualism, which rejects revelation.

Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.

Everything in Scripture is either preparation for the Gospel, presentation of the Gospel, or participation in the Gospel.

Everything would have been for nothing just because I simply didn’t listen.

Finally, the work of the minister tended to be judged by his success in a single area - the saving of souls in measurable numbers. The local minister was judged either by his charismatic powers or by his ability to prepare his congregation for the preaching of some itinerant ministerial charmer who would really awaken its members. The 'star' system prevailed in religion before it reached the theater. As the evangelical impulse became more widespread and more dominant, the selection and training of ministers was increasingly shaped by the revivalist criterion of ministerial merit. The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter. Theological education itself became more instrumental. Simple dogmatic formulations were considered sufficient. In considerable measure the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone. By 1853 an outstanding clergyman complained that there was 'an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect.

Finding happiness by delivering it.

Followers of Jesus do well to spend more time engaging him than explaining him.

For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.

Furthermore, unlike so many of his evangelical contemporaries he did not hold the view that the various inter-denominational youth movements represented the most hopeful field of labour; indeed his doctrine of the church left him with little sympathy for that attitude.

For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them. Like the apostles in all their loving controversies are those who are masters of words while combining this gift with truth.

From today onward, you will learn how to become evangelical about the many ways you help people.

God is calling us to live for the sake of Christ and to do that through suffering. Christ chose suffering; it didn’t just happen to Him. He chose it as the way to create and perfect the church. Now He calls us to choose suffering. That is, He calls us to take up our cross and follow Him on the Calvary road and deny ourselves and make sacrifices for the sake of ministering to the church and presenting His sufferings to the world.

God called me many years ago to be an evangelist, and I have never regretted His leading. I love the crusades, meeting people from every country and culture all over the world. My life has been blessed by friends from every land, and challenges from every corner.

Heart language is logic set on fire.

God is not glorified when we keep for ourselves (no matter how thankfully) what we ought to be using to alleviate the misery of unevangelized, uneducated, unmedicated, and unfed millions. The evidence that many professing Christians have been deceived by this doctrine is how little they give and how much they own. God has prospered them. And by an almost irresistible law of consumer culture (baptized by a doctrine of health, wealth, and prosperity) they have bought bigger (and more) houses, newer (and more) cars, fancier (and more) clothes, better (and more) meat, and all manner of trinkets and gadgets and containers and devices and equipment to make life more fun. They will object: Does not the Old Testament promise that God will prosper his people? Indeed! God increases our yield, so that by giving we can prove our yield is not our god. God does not prosper a man's business so that he can move from a Ford to a Cadillac. God prospers a business so that 17,000 unreached people can be reached with the gospel. He prospers the business so that 12 percent of the world's population can move a step back from the precipice of starvation.

Good art requires the examination of faith issues from a variety of perspectives and voices. Yet for many audience members, the only way a film can be “Christian” is if there is a major altar-call type scene with a dramatic conversion. If the movie isn’t an overt endorsement not only of faith itself but Judeo-Christian morality and/or Protestant culture, then it’s not “Christian.

Have you heard of the Children of Mae?” “The cult?” She knew of a religious group whose members went door to door, preaching the benefits of self-discipline—abstinence, celibacy or monogamy, vegetarianism—pretty much anything fun was prohibited. They had never come to Vesper’s house because her father was a butcher and probably pretty low on their list of possible converts.

God makes his gospel attractive through his people.

God will save whomever He chooses to save. The Christian should proselytize not because he thinks he can change everybody; he should proselytize because the Gospel being shared is the ultimate act of love: because he thinks he can love everybody.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.

He who is called to and set apart for the work of an evangelist is to devote his time and effort single-mindedly to this God-given task. He is not to be distracted by anything likely to deflect him from this. Persecution will not weaken his resolution. The persuasion of others will fall on deaf ears. Only the clear leading of God will cause him to change his ministry.

How we feel about those we give our business to is of vital importance.