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Excerpt from Witness: Loving Your Chruch By Sharing the Gospel by Jonathan Dodson. ©2025. Used with permission of The Good Book Company.
It’s remarkable that Jesus includes us in his grand mission for the world. Yet we often lose sight of this privilege. It’s easy to get bogged down in our own responsibilities or troubles and be unaware of what God is doing in the world. Alternatively, we may feel hesitant to share the gospel for a number of reasons.
Social Distance
During the months of Covid lockdowns, I had very little interaction with non-Christians. When I went for my morning walk, neighbors crossed the street to avoid making contact with me. When we celebrated my daughter’s birthday, her friends drove by our condo and honked their horns: no hugs, no laughs, no blowing out candles with friends.
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Although epidemiologists later described this phenomenon more correctly as “physical distancing,” it was too late—the world was accustomed to the term social distancing. Fear of contracting a life-threatening virus disrupted the social fabric of the world. Months later, after Covid protocols were lifted, many struggled to return to ordinary patterns of social interaction.
During the pandemic, our family moved into a new neighborhood. Unlike living in our previous neighborhoods, we really struggled to connect with our neighbors. There were a lot of reasons for this. Our neighbors were adjusting to social anxiety, new social patterns, and working from home. We also struggled to connect because of our selfish indifference and our stage of life. But bottom line, I had very few relationships with non-Christians.
Being a faithful presence is an important part of evangelism. If we’re not engaging with people in the ebb and flow of ordinary social interactions, it becomes awkward and difficult to share the gospel with people who desperately need it. When the various strands of commerce, arts and entertainment, neighborhood life, office space, and fitness become isolated, it makes it much harder to be faithfully present in our communities. And if we aren’t deliberate, the Covid legacy will remain in our lives instead, restricting our engagement with coworkers, grocers, baristas, colleagues, gym or sports-club members, and neighbors—who desperately need to hear the good news.
Cultural Resistance
Social distance isn’t the only obstacle to sharing our faith. Very often we encounter what Abraham Kuyper described as a spiritual “antithesis” between those who are committed to the kingdom of God and those who have a negative cultural disposition toward Christianity.[1]
This antithesis exists for some good reasons.
We had just moved to America’s oldest seaport, Gloucester, Massachusetts, when I heard a rap on the door. I opened it to see a couple of people who introduced themselves with big smiles and asked me if I believed in God and if I wanted to talk. I invited them in for a chat. As we talked, I felt uneasy. Beneath the veneer of kindness, I could feel a pressure to cave in to their beliefs. They urged me to read their literature, a magazine with apocalyptic images on the cover. When I challenged some of their beliefs, they became forceful. My sense of unease morphed into distaste as the Jehovah’s Witnesses tried to convert me to their religion.
Many people feel a similar unease about Christians who evangelize. They perceive evangelism as a way for religious people to dominate others with their doctrinal beliefs or to fill a spiritual quota. In order to distinguish ourselves from cultic proselytizers, it is important to sympathize with the secular experience of evangelism. Moreover, we have every reason to be disarming when we talk about Jesus, since conversion isn’t our job. There is only one effective evangelist, and his name is the Holy Spirit.
When we embrace this reality, we will converse about the gospel in a way that is more natural, winsome, and true, and less forced and coercive. While many religious people are fanatical and coercive in their beliefs, Jesus had a non-oppressive approach to evangelism. That doesn’t mean he never debated or encountered rejection, but it does mean that he was able to talk about his beliefs in a respectful way. (For example, Mark 10:17-22; John 3:1-15; 4:1-29.)
Spiritual Resistance
We also face spiritual resistance to the good news. Scripture describes humans as being “stiff-necked” (Acts 7:51), possessing “a heart of stone” (Ezekiel 11:19), and as natural born “enemies” of God (Romans 5:10). Paul writes, “They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Romans 1:29-31). This is an offensive description of humanity. We may be tempted to object: I don’t see this resistance in all people. Is this really true of everyone?
This list combines disposition with actions. While we may not witness some of these depraved actions in one another, we all possess the disposition of faithless hatred toward God. We are born into this world loving ourselves instead of loving God. As Romans 1 describes it, we “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (v 25). Everyone naturally seeks their own interest over the interests of God. We adore ourselves instead of our Creator, and we stubbornly insist on living for ourselves, apart from the intervening grace of God.
Since we are spiritually resistant to God, we desperately need something to dismantle our defenses. The good character of Christians and the beauty of creation are inadequate for that. We need a new conscience and “a heart of flesh” to become friends with God. We need to be born again.
The notion of being born a second time is strange, but we often use this image to explain new experiences. When launching a new initiative we might say, “We birthed a new program!” Or reflecting on a first date, we may declare, “That’s when our relationship was born!” In fact, a second birth is associated with tremendous joy and hope.
In 2006, a paper was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology which tracked the experiences of participants who took psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms).[2] Each participant took this drug in a controlled environment. Afterwards, they described their drug-induced state as “one of the most spiritually significant experiences of their lives,” comparing it to the birth of a first child. But the new birth that God offers to humanity is the most significant spiritual experience available to humanity. It grants us a new identity and a sense of belonging, and it reconciles us with our beneficent Creator to enjoy his perfect love. No drug can accomplish that. But how is a person spiritually reborn?
The apostle Peter says we can be born again by an imperishable seed through the living word of God (1 Peter 1:23). Hard hearts don’t become soft without gospel seed entering them. Dead enemies of God don’t become his living friends apart from hearing the living word of God. We cannot escape the bad news of self-worship without hearing the good news of the gospel: Jesus’ death for our sin and his resurrection for our new life. Peter concludes, “And this word is the good news that was preached to you” (v 25). The only way for the spiritually resistant to be liberated into the saving love of Jesus Christ is for someone to preach the gospel to them. Spiritual death and resistance can be overturned by a single, eternal, powerful word shared by an ordinary Christian.
So, is evangelism plausible? Yes, in fact it is essential. No one gets in on new life in Christ apart from hearing the good news. Our friends, family members, and neighbors are stranded in a Christless eternity apart from hearing about Jesus.
[1] 15 James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Eerdmans, 1998), p. 15.
[2] Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Penguin, 2018), p. 11.
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