Whenever you discuss evangelism, specifically the fruit of one’s evangelistic activities, it never takes long before someone insists they knew someone, or heard stories about people, who were saved through whatever the particular mode under discussion is. And I’m sure the stories are all true – no doubt somebody was saved through it. Maybe even a few someones were saved through it. But I can’t help but think these sorts of things have a tendency to miss the point.

First, it bears saying that the mission of the church is not evangelism. Evangelism is a part of the mission of the church. A particularly important part. But it isn’t the fundamental mission of the church. Jesus did not command his people to go into all the world and do evangelism. He called them to go and make disciples. Of course, you can’t make disciples without evangelism – it is vital and necessary – but it also bears saying you can’t make disciples through evangelism alone.

This is important because we need to be clear on what we are actually called to do. Our task isn’t to ‘get people over the line’. Our job is not to view what happens in church with all that Bible teaching as something of an inconvenience to the real work Jesus wants us to be doing winning souls. The task Jesus gave the church is the making of disciples. Which means, yes, we won’t make disciples without evangelism but we similarly haven’t made disciples unless there is some discipleship. Both are necessary in the making of disciples. If we ‘get someone over the line’ or encourage them to ‘say the prayer’ and yet they end up nowhere near a church, not encouraged into church and do not grow in a church then you haven’t actually made a disciple at all. You haven’t even made a convert. You just got someone to say some words in a moment.

Second, if we are clear what we are about, it helps us see whether our evangelism is actually serving the mission. If our goal is to make disciples, the measure of our evangelism is whether it is serving the cause of the gospel by actually making any disciples. That is to ask, is whatever we are doing having any impact that is seen in the local church? That doesn’t, I grant, necessarily mean your local church. A person might go to another local church and be a disciple there. But if your evangelism does not lead to them becoming disciples then there is a case to made that is not actually being effective in the mission Jesus gave us.

Third, of course, we have to note that the results are not ultimately in our hands. It’s at this point people quickly jump to arguments about faithfulness in order to defend their deeply ineffective evangelistic strategies. We are not called to results, they say. These are in the Lord’s hands. We are called to be faithful. All of which, I should say, is absolutely true.

What this argument ignores is three things. First, it ignores the fact that the person making it is usually arguing for faithfulness to a thing that Jesus hasn’t specifically asked them to do. For example (and I will purposefully use something utterly ridiculous), let’s say someone feels called to attempting to shout the gospel through car windows as people drive past them on a main road. If someone dares to suggest it hasn’t been very effective, they immediately argue the results are not up to us but the Lord and they insist on being faithful. The problem is, Jesus has called us to be faithful to him and his commands. Being faithful to this as a means ignores the fact that Jesus hasn’t specifically asked them to do this.

Second, the problem with this argument is the response that comes back will be something like, ‘I am being faithful to the biblical command to share the gospel.’ But this ignores the fact that what Jesus actually calls us to is the making of disciples. Not only has he not sanctioned this mode in particular, faithfulness to the mode that isn’t working is actually unfaithfulness to the specific command to make disciples inasmuch as it isn’t doing anything to actually accomplish it. Jesus has not asked us to be faithful to a thing, or our vehicles for mission, but to his commands which haven’t mentioned our particular vehicle. If people are saying let’s not bother with evangelism or making disciples at all, then yes, the pushback that we are called to be faithful is valid. But if the criticism is not let’s stop doing any evangelism or disciple-making, but rather, this is not serving the cause of the gospel as well as we could by doing other things to make disciples, then the pushback isn’t valid. We are called to faithfulness to Christ and his commands, not our particular vehicles and ministries that we have created as a legitimate means of doing so.

Third, if your evangelism doesn’t actually lead to any disciples being made, then in what way are you about the business of making disciples? When I was a teacher, the adage that did the rounds was ‘if they aren’t learning, you aren’t teaching.’ You can use as many words from the front as you like, you can have as lively a discussion in the class as possible, you could have all singing and dancing lessons, but if you mark the books and the kids have failed to grasp any of the basic concepts you were supposed to teach, what can we say other than you haven’t actually taught them anything! The same is inevitably true of our disciple making. If nobody is moved one iota closer to the Lord Jesus through anything we do, in what way have we actually done the work of making disciples? If we keep holding gospel services nobody comes to, doing open airs in empty towns where nobody is listening, running mums and toddler groups nobody comes into, holding coffee mornings nobody attends, what evangelistic work have we actually done?

When the argument to faithfulness is seen for what it is, we usually then get the argument by anecdote: I knew someone who was saved by this. The implication is that it is effective because the Lord has used it somewhere. That is usually backed up by the argument that ‘we don’t know’ how effective it is and ‘the Lord can use anything’. So, because the Lord saved someone or we know some stories of folks saved through it, we should persist.

There are lots of ways we can respond to that. We could point out that the Lord spoke through a donkey in scripture but we don’t plan our entire evangelistic strategy around the donkey man at seaside resorts in the hope he’ll do it again! Just because the Lord can do something – of course he can do anything – doesn’t mean he typically will do something. We have to be wise. I think there is a good argument for saying it is bad stewardship of both our financial and time resources to persist with works that have shown themselves to be largely ineffective in our context.

But perhaps more pointedly, the argument by anecdotes sidesteps the real issue. The real question is, how many people have been led to the church through this? If the answer is none, or we don’t know, then we have to surmise it is not very effective. Of course, the results themselves are not down to us; we don’t save anybody. But the question is not whether our stuff is what turned a heart of stone to a heart of flesh, but whether our stuff has been a means of people becoming disciples or not. The mission of the church is to make disciples and if our evangelism isn’t leading to that end, we surely have to ask questions about whether we are, in fact, being faithful in the mission we have been given.

If our answer to serious decline and a seeming lack of interest in the gospel we are offering is to persist with ineffective or outdated modes of evangelism Jesus hasn’t sanctioned, we are free to do them if we wish, but we similarly have to face the reality that we may well be looking at closing our church doors down the track. We also have to ask ourselves honestly whether we have fooled ourselves into thinking our means of evangelism are the specific thing Jesus has commanded us to do rather than simply being a legitimate (even if outdated, ineffective or no longer viable) means of evangelism. Of course the results themselves aren’t down to us, but if all the churches doing what we do are declining and all the churches doing perfectly legitimate but different things are growing, ought we not to pay some attention to those trends rather than simply reply, but I knew someone who was saved by a man who shouted the gospel through his car window once?