It turns out – I must be honest, I really wasn’t paying attention – that it is an Olympic year. As with any major sporting or cultural occasion, churches begin thinking about how they can utilise the opportunity for the gospel. There are already tracts and books you might be able to give away. No doubt others will be thinking about how they can tap in to proceedings. Some will build whole programmes around the event.

Now, before I go on and speak about what this blog post title says, let me just make a little caveat before you hurl your stones at me. I don’t think it is wrong to jump on the Olympic bandwagon and think about how you might use the occasion for the gospel. I even applaud the impulse. I think it is a genuinely good thing that Christians might be thinking about how they might reach out to their community and tell them about Jesus. I even think there may be legs incorporating Olympic events into your ordinary evangelistic and discipleship setup. How can anyone complain at the thought of your mates coming round to watch something with you and it providing opportunities to chat as you do it? I am not saying anything negative here about doing that sort of thing. Have at it.

But clearly, if you have read this far, the title of this blog post doesn’t sound like I’m saying utilise the Olympics for evangelism and discipleship. Which isn’t quite what I’m saying. What I’m really suggesting is that we shouldn’t build an entire evangelistic strategy around it nor make it a key plank in anything we might do. By all means, incorporate it into what you already do. Use it to strengthen existing relationships and provide opportunities to chat. I’m not here to say we should boycott or ignore the event altogether. Just to say, with a gentle word of caution, we shouldn’t do what we often do with this sort of thing and make out it is a bigger evangelistic or discipleship opportunity than it really is. Let me explain.

Regular readers will know that I think the most effective means of evangelism and discipleship is long term, repeat contact and relational. One-hit wonder bits of evangelism are painfully ineffective. Yes, I know someone somewhere was saved through whatever once. But in general, the evidence suggests hit and run bits of evangelism ae ineffective and people coming to faith and pressing on with Jesus tends to be done most effectively through long term relational contact. There are all sorts of means that might be useful in getting us into such relationships and all sorts of means of sharing the gospel and doing discipleship in such relationships. But long-term relationship is, typically, more effective than short term, one-hit efforts.

So, as I said above, if you invite all your pals from church over to watch an Olympic event – or a series of Olympic events – and you use that opportunity to chat about Jesus, that’s great. If you use it as an opportunity to have conversations you wouldn’t otherwise and people are happy to come over, that’s terrific. But those things are ultimately worthwhile because they are already building upon existing relationships in which you are (hopefully) already talking about Jesus and this is simply the latest opportunity.

But if you are aiming to build a week of events around the Olympics, you might pull in some people, but you need to ask yourself honestly, how likely am I going to get repeat contact with this person through this thing? In two weeks time, the Olympics will be over and there will be nothing else to invite them to. Will I still see this person then? How effective is the one, short, sharp hit of the gospel message going to be if we never see the person again? The Lord, in his goodness, might well use it to that end. Which would be wonderful. But in the ordinary run of things, that isn’t how people tend to come to faith (at least according to the stats and evidence we have). More to the point, we might pour and awful lot of time, money and energy – vital gospel resources – into a two week programme around the Olympics and find, at the end of it, we have relatively little fruit of any kind to show for it. We could have saved all that money and resource and poured into relationships we do have with people that are more likely to yield fruit for much less outlay.

Again, I am not saying we must shun the Olympics. I hope you can see here that the Olympics are not really the issue at all. We have this tendency to build entire evangelistic strategies and pump vast amounts of time, money and energy into evangelistic hooks centred on the latest cultural event we think we can tap into. But as an evangelism strategy, all the data tells us it is deeply ineffective. It is big, expensive, man-power heavy and usually relatively fruitless.

By contrast, some of the most effective stuff we can do is the very cheapest and least resource intense. The problem is, it is unsexy, takes ages and doesn’t come with any great pizzazz. It isn’t the kind of thing that makes people sit up, say ‘wow’, write us big cheques or laud or evangelistic innovation. The most effective thing we can do is the slow, long term work of simply sharing the gospel and discipling people in relationship with them. We could raise £25,000 and pour it into Olympics based leafleting, activities, events and marketing and see little to no return. Or, we could raise £25,000 and give a church a worker for a year who will build relationships in their community and run ministry work where they see people time and again and have repeated opportunities to reach the lost in their area. All the data we have tells me one of those will be blown in two weeks and there will be little discernible fruit from it, the other will last for a year and there may well be all manner of gospel fruit both inside and outside the local church they serve.

The short-term mission mindset is the same one that leads to short-termist thinking in our churches. We so often struggle to get outside of the event mindset, the invite culture, rather than thinking creatively about how we can create lasting relationships that might bear fruit for the gospel. That isn’t to say short term things are all fruitless. But it is to say, we should at least be thinking in terms of how this short term thing serves that long term mission strategy. How does this little event help me in my efforts to share the gospel in my long term relationships? How does this help me develop long term relationships? How does this help me share the gospel more effectively, or build up those other believers, for the cause of the kingdom?

So, once again, if you have ways of using the Olympics alongside your existing ministries and to serve that cause of building relationships for the gospel, that is a great way to engage with it. But if you are thinking about what events you might run, if you are building up to you yearly hit of big ticket evangelism – building everything around the big events – can I gently suggest you go away and rethink your strategy. Think about how you can use this cultural moment to build relationships and share the gospel over the long term rather than how you can create events and activities that may last for the duration of the Olympic Games and be forgotten just as quickly as they will be. Think about long term, lasting means of sharing the gospel with your community that will be there long after the Olympics has finished.

If you are going to build the Olympics into your efforts at all, think of it in these terms. But if you can’t see how it fits, that is fine. Better to focus on fruitful, long term ministry where you see people again and again and have repeated opportunity to share the gospel than to drop it all – or, doing nothing already, build everything around – a one hit wonder bit of evangelism that is unlikely to bear fruit. For that reason, I wouldn’t be building my mission strategy around the Olympics and I am minded to find they are incidental to what we are doing rather than central to it.