Chilly…vangelsim

In my father’s last season of life, we shared long conversations about church leadership and ministry philosophy. Both career pastors, he was as proud of me as I was of him. In those discussions, we often reminisced about the proverbial “good ‘ole days.”

I remember sitting around the island in our kitchen on one particular morning and him saying, “You know, Tom, I used to teach the oikos principle, but just didn’t use the word oikos.”

There is probably no way to convey how much I respected my father, both as a pastor and a dad. He left for Heaven years ago, but his love for God’s Word and God’s people is the stuff legends are made of. But, when it came to reaching the unchurched, he operated in a world that we all seemed to be stuck in. One that ignored the data.

Anyway, I responded, “Oh, really?”

The tone I used put a big smile on his face because he knew I wasn’t convinced. I continued. “If you believed in the oikos principle, then why did you send our youth group out every Sunday afternoon of my high school career for three hours, to go door-to-door and present strangers with Gospel tracts?”

He smiled even bigger. “I did that?”

“Yes, you did. And after all of those hundreds of hours of canvassing our community with tracts, do you know how many meaningful conversations I had with people about Jesus?”  

“No. How many?” (His smile started to fade.) 

“I can’t even remember one! That’s why I hated Sunday afternoons. I did it to honor you, but dreaded it every weekend.”

My Dad and I did agree that my classmates and I were probably not the greatest ambassadors of the Gospel that Jesus had at His disposal. I’m also sure we should have prayed more. Perhaps we should have even taken better tracts! But, as I look back, I believe it would have helped a ton more if we’d all recognized that sharing the Gospel is exponentially more effective when people use a radically different approach. 

After all, 95% is really a difficult number to argue with.