21st Century Evangelism--The New Wine

By David Hobbs

A few years ago I was in a small church with an old-line evangelist who wanted to get back out on the field. He liked to tell stories about the old days: when crowds would come, God would move, and people would be healed and converted. Many times he lamented that it just didn’t work that way any more. One Sunday morning in church I felt I had a word from the Lord and prophesied to him not to worry about trying to resurrect the old days because they weren’t coming back. Rather, God was going to do a new thing in evangelism and it would be done through the Holy Spirit. He didn’t say much at the time, but later called me in the middle of the Super Bowl (yes it was that Sunday) and railed on me for perpetrating false doctrine and not to “ever do that again.” “You’re a liar!” he shouted, “God doesn’t change! Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever!” (I guess that’s why God still uses the King James version of the Bible up in heaven [and yet what did He do during the first 1600 years of the New Covenant when it hadn’t been written yet?].)

God doesn’t change. But His tactics change all the time, as they must. We are at war with the devil for the souls of men, and in war, tactics change as situations and technology changes. It would be a foolish general who would send his soldiers out on horses carrying swords to meet the enemy today!

The hardest part of evangelism now is getting through the barrage of noise and other messages constantly vying for people’s attention. How many advertising messages do they calculate people are subjected to every day? I’ve quit answering my phone unless it’s our local area code; I don’t watch TV (except for the Super Bowl), maybe 1% of the emails I get are personal rather than bulk (not counting the tons of junk emails screened out before getting to my inbox). We are bombarded with messages trying to get our attention, if only for a moment. How can the message of the Gospel get through? Do you think this is by accident? Or is it part of a demonic strategy to insulate people from the message which could deliver them from the kingdom of darkness?

The old methods no longer work. An evangelist preaching against sin sounds a lot like a car salesman shouting about the latest once-in-a-lifetime sale. We’ve trained our minds to tune them out, just like we used to tune out our parents’ words no matter how loud they shouted.

Flyers, newspaper ads, radio spots… nothing has the ability to break through the competing messages out there. (That’s true for us Christians too. That’s why God tells us to “be still and know that I am God.”) Let’s face it—the world has it down with advertising. And we have one hand tied behind our backs already because we can’t use the world’s favorite attention-getting tool—scantily-clad women!

So how do we get our message out? And how do we overcome that other barrier: message fatigue? It’s not a new and fresh message for most people; they have heard it in some form over and over; in many cases hearing just enough to immunize themselves.

Enter my evangelist friend Joy Gartman. Joy goes down to the river bottoms with a feeding team once a week. While they are feeding the homeless, Joy is being led by the Holy Spirit to talk with individuals of the Lord’s choosing. Joy is a grandmotherly type, gentle and soft-spoken. But when God shows her something about a person, she is not afraid to speak it. (She asks permission first.)

To one man recently she said, “I see that you are a violent person. I see you snuffing out people like you would grind out a cigarette butt under your heel. And God wants you to know that the people whose lives you’ve snuffed out were people He loved and cared about. And though God loves you very much, He loved them too, and He’s telling you that you need to repent for those lives you’ve taken.

Whew! That’s a long way from “The Four Spiritual Laws,” and “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

To another man she said, “I perceive you are a man in a lot of trouble. I see this huge net suspended over you that’s about to fall on you and take you away. God has given you a lot of chances but you blew them off and now it’s all caught up to you and you’re not going to escape.” Tears came to this hardened man’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks because (as he told Joy later) he was facing a long prison stretch and was afraid he might never come back as one of his many enemies caught up with  him and snuffed him out there.

Can a supernatural word of knowledge break through the noise and penetrate a man’s heart? Can the Holy Ghost still “read a person’s mail?” That’s what it’s going to take for evangelism to succeed in the 21^st century. For too long the church has tried to do it alone. In this day we need the Holy Ghost.