Postmodern Evangelism

Gospel through shared experience is a conversation about reinventing evangelism for a postmodern world; more specifically, it is a conversation about a new and generative evangelistic methodology, one that is patient and poetic.

Patient.

Evangelism is a collaborative process – one plants, another waters, but God makes things grow (1 Corinthians 3:5-7) – and this process takes time.

Contrary to what you might think, being an evangelist is less like being a salesman who can close the deal and more like being a farmer who knows the soil, understands the division of labor, and does his or her part planting, watering and waiting. Effective evangelism is collaborative and patient.

Poetic.

Evangelism is more poetry than prose, less reporting, more re-creating.

Taking our cues from the Teacher in Ecclesiastes we begin with commonly observable, shared experience, speaking languages of immediacy that connect with our hearers. It might be a universal human experience like love, loss, pain, suffering, longing or joy or it might be something more specific like music or art, but whatever it is, this language of immediacy is a sort of vicarious experience by which we can pass from our own experience into the realm of shared experience.