“The first great step in evangelising is that we should start with ourselves and become sanctified. . . . When the man of the world sees that you and I have got something that he obviously has not got, when he finds us calm and quiet when we are taken ill; when he finds we can smile in the face of death; when he finds about us a poise, a balance, an equanimity and a loving, gentle quality . . . he will begin to take notice. He will say, “That man has got something,” and he will begin to enquire as to what it is. And he will want it.” -Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Tag Archives: evangelism
The Witnessing Power of Kindness
“There was an aged woman who credited her salvation to George Whitefield. People doubted this because she was barely old enough to have heard this great preacher from a prior age. She replied that when she was a little girl, he had stayed at her house. “It was not any sermon that he preached,” she explained; “it was not anything that he ever said to me. It was the beautiful consistency and kindness of his daily life . . . . I said to myself, ‘If I ever have any religion, Mr. Whitefield’s God shall be my God.’ ” -Richard Phillips
Missions Community
“Missional community is not just when you gather. You’re still a missional community when you’re in the city. That means when you go get your ramen noodles at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.” – Eric Mason
“Radically ordinary hospitality may resemble the social-gospel practices of liberal churches and non-Christian mercy communities, for radically ordinary hospitality engages in some of the same practices: we gather people in close, we feed and clothe the poor, we accept people where they are, we care for the needs of the body, and we seek to restore the dignity of each human being. But here is the big difference: radically ordinary hospitality practiced by biblical Christians views struggling people as image bearers of a holy God, needing faith in Christ alone, belief in Jesus the rescuer of his people, repentance of sin, and covenant family within the church. Bible-believing Christians do not believe that a shave and a meal help people in the long run-or atone for the sin nature of us all.” – Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key
Strong and Kind
We can be strong in our message, “but there is never an occasion to be unkind.” -Ravi Zacharias
Praise and Evangelism
“If there is no praise in our hearts, there can’t be much evangel on our lips.” -Edmund Clowney [unconfirmed]
Mission is the mother of theology
“Mission is the mother of theology.” -Martin Kahler
John Drury explains, “What he [Kahler] meant by this is that the early church first began to theologize (explicit reflection on its teaching) in response to the missional encounter of the gospel in new cultures. In other words, the early Christians embedded their claims into the language and mind-set of its pagan mission field in order to bring them into the fold. Such mission-driven theology can be seen at work specifically in the intertwining of Greco-Roman culture and the Hebrew Scriptures, first in an incipient form in the New Testament and later in the full-blown synthesis of Trinitarian and Christological doctrines.
What Success Looks Like
“We’re not getting anywhere as long as we gather in church with people we’d gather with if Jesus were still dead.” -Russell Moore
Jesus Doesn’t Fit
“In Acts 17:16-34, Luke has become fully at home within the linguistic world of paganism, facing its questions and using its speech. Luke refuses, however, to fit the good news of Jesus into paganism’s preconceived categories. Jesus Christ is Lord.” -William Willimon
If Christianity were genuinely taken to heart
“It should be uncontroversial… to say that if the teachings of Christianity were genuinely to take root in human hearts–if indeed we all believed that God is love and that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves– we should have no desire for war, should hate injustice worse than death, and should find indifference to the sufferings of others impossible.” -David Bentley Hart
A Pilgrim's Theology 