When it comes to evangelism and mission, I am increasingly convinced that what we primarily need is different points of context. Most people need multiple opportunities, ongoing relationships, repeated contact with Christian people before they will even consider turning to Christ. Rare is the person that hears the gospel one time, in one place, spoken briefly once and drops to their knees asking ‘what must I do to be saved?’ I’m not saying it never ever happens, just that it is rare.

Much of our discussions about evangelism centre on things like cold or warm contact evangelism. But the truth is, we ultimately need both. We need some means of reaching people we don’t have existing contact with and we need some means of following up with people that we do. We need a mix of cold and warm contact approaches if we are to reach our communities.

Sometimes, discussion centres on things like ‘links in a chain’ or ‘steps to Christ’. There is some sense in this sort of discussion. But we need to clear how whatever we’re doing is properly a step towards Christ and a link in an actual chain. A lot of the time, what we really seem to have is a load of disjointed, unconnected things we’re doing and then a wishful hope that it might somehow serve some bigger chain of events that we can neither see nor have any realistic basis to even assume exists. If we’re going to talk links in chains and steps to Christ, we need to be clear how this link actually connects with any other and how what we’re doing here functions to actually moves anybody closer to Jesus.

The most simple solution to these sorts of issues is to create multiple points of contact and to try and find some means of moving people from one to another. You might be doing cold contact work, but you need to think about how you are going to move people from one-time, one-off cold contact to being ongoing, repeated warm contacts. If you are thinking about warm, repeat contact you need to think about how your repeated contact with people is leading them to other points of contact and beyond mere contact to proper, ongoing conversations about Jesus. If you are having meaningful conversations about Jesus, you need to think about how they might nudge people towards active belief in him, and then towards the church and then towards baptism and membership in the church.

The specific things you might do aren’t really the point. The real issues are whether you are able to get repeated contact with people and you can meaningfully see how you might move them from this particular thing you do with them towards something even more valuable so far as gospel content is concerned. Can you actually see where what you are doing is moving someone closer towards Jesus or are you just hoping that by ploughing on with it regardless something might happen, with no real evidence for what that might be or thought for how it might happen?

But best of all is when we have multiple opportunities to witness to people. We might meet them in one space, invite them to another and see them at something else again. We may have ongoing opportunities to read the Bible with them or walk through an evangelistic course as well as simply spending some time with them where we can chat about Jesus. In all these things, the more time we have with people, the more points of contact, the more opportunities we have (and ultimately take) to talk about Jesus with them, the more likely they are to move closer to him in reality. What we need are multiple points of contact.