I left the United States to become an international missionary in 1990. The ten years previous had been spent in a church plant in the Bible belt where evangelism had been the primary means of church growth. Of those church planting years, 1980-1990, the best year from an evangelism standpoint was the last year.
I returned from the international experience to be a pastor again in 2005. People do not seem to respond to the gospel message in the way that they did in the days of my first pastorate. I conjecture that this is not only a personal issue. In the 80s I would regularly hear of other places where great numbers of people were coming to Christ through personal witness in churches that utilized Evangelism Explosion or some other method of that nature. I know that no church close to me is experiencing this kind of evangelistic success and I have not picked up on stories where great harvest seems to be happening. This has caused me to reflect a bit on the evangelistic field that we are called to harvest.
Shortly before our return to the US from the field, I had the privilege of sitting with Viggo Sogaard, a media driven research missiologist. Viggo, a student of James Engels, had added an additional axis to the Engels' scale. Engels had demonstrated that people have to reach a cognitive level in order to come to Christ. The scale begins at -10 (no knowledge of God) and moves upwards to conversion (0) and on to maturity in Christ (+10). What Sogaard added was an affective axis, measuring the attitude towards things of Christ. Sogaard's premise, as applied to a media perspective, was not from an individual, but a societal perspective. Drawing from his experience in Thailand, Sogaard's goal was to move the general knowledge in Thai society to a place where an evangelist did not need to introduce many new concepts to bring an unbeliever to a place of belief. Simultaneously, the goal was to also improve the societal attitude from negative to positive. I think that this has relevance for the American culture that we work.
In my diagram, I have graphed what I think has happened in the United States since 1990. The culture has shifted dramatically in its understanding of things of faith. To move the average unbeliever along to conversion will require more than just the Four spiritual laws or "How to have a full and meaningful life". The culture has moved further out in its basic understanding of things of Christian faith, requiring that we move individuals further in their understanding of faith. This additional information will be more difficult to deliver because we are in a day where Christian values are rejected; Christian morals are considered odd and out of date; and, Christian interest in giving the gospel is seen as a negative activity instead of a genuine concern.
This will require a complete rethink of evangelistic strategies and methods. It is no longer enough to equip our members with the Roman Road and think that they can charge the gates of hell successfully. The enemy has successfully changed the defense to his gates! Breaching the defenses of 2011 with weaponry designed for the 1950s or 70s or 90s will have, at best, limited success.
Without doubt, the Lord of the harvest has the answers that we need, but He will not give what is unsought. I am convinced that the method, whatever it turns out to be, will not include a mere invitation to church a la the seeker sensitive approaches of the previous decade. The church is already superfluous to secular thought. Real disciples engaged in real and thoughtful dialogue with the lost, over time, will produce real disciples, but it won't be easy and it won't be done with methods designed for other times.
