Evangelism Paradigm Shifts - Ministry Exchange (MX)

“Evangelism Paradigm Shifts God has brought us through”
UCLA and The Edge as a case study
Pacific Region 5/98 Doug Schaupp

INTRO: It is a real pleasure to be with you all! But being here to share
with you is slightly weird for me for several reasons: I feel like a
rookie in evangelism, and you all are honoring me well beyond my years.
Also, my own words of great skepticism about Seeker Services and public
evangelism still ring in my years. So this is also God’s way of having me
eat my own words. Anyway, I am blessed to be here. I visited Cal last
month to learn from you all, and learn we did, in abundance. So I really
appreciate these cross-pollination opportunities.

Mental Models:
Donna told me that you have been talking about shifting mental models. I
read a paper by Bobby Clinton at Fuller on Paradigm Shifts. He says that a
person’s value system is a little like an onion: we have superficial values
and then we have values that go all the way into the core. He said that a
paradigm shift can be out here on the surface of my onion, or it can
penetrate all the way into the center of who I am. He argued that our job
is to let the key paradigms not only shift our thinking about things out
here, but effect us at the center. Our choice is how deeply we will
embrace the shift God is bringing. So that’s the question I’d like to pose
to us at the beginning: How much are you willing to let this paradigm shift
that God is bringing you effect you? How much are you going to let
evangelism change you?

MY BACKGROUND:
31/2 years ago, our Area Team decided that evangelism was going to become
one of our top 3 values. We gave ourselves some criteria to measure our
changes by. We just re-evaluated our 3 1/2 year vision last week, and we
laughed. We laughed together out of delight at how totally different we
are now. 3 years ago, we didn’t even have categories for where we would
experience the change.

So, all that’s to say, that I personally have been deeply effected and
changed by evangelism and God’s new work in us. The paradigm shifts
started before 3 1/2 years ago, but we really let them effect the core of
who we are over the last 3 years.

From 1989-1997, we at UCLA had a 3-prong basic approach to evangelism. I
say this in hindsight, because at the time, I could really only embrace and
articulate 1 of those 3 prongs. But there were, in fact, 3 different
prongs:
1) We heavily focused on relational incarnational evangelism
2) Supplemented by the occasional special event on campus (2 a year)
3) Did our boot-camp style training for a grueling week up at Cal with our
sophs.

The first of the prongs was the only one I really felt convicted about. We
had formal 5 step system that we taught, which I’ll include here just in
case you are interested. a) Do what they do: we need to get in the world of the non-
Christians, and let them know that we can relate. b) Accept and Enjoy them: We must genuinely open our hearts to them
in the process of bonding and incarnating. c) Affirm the truth in their belief system: God has already put
pieces of his Kingdom value system in them. We need to see those pieces
and affirm them, and start with common ground. d) Share the Gospel in their terms and show them the Kingdom. We
need to quickly bring the Kingdom into our relationships, but in a way that
they can appreciate and receive it. e) Invite them to follow Jesus. Don’t be afraid to put in the hook.
You leave this step out, and basically you might as well not have started
in the first place.

This incarnational evangelism approach brought us annually 5-15 conversions
a year.
And so we went along with this approach for almost 8 years. Then in Jan.
1997, we launch the Edge, a monthly Seeker Service. And we head off into a
whole new direction. And we have never been the same since. The Edge road
has not been easy at all, but it has been amazing indeed.

Let me explain our shift in terms of an over-arching model, and then I can
come back and explain all the little sub-paradigm shifts that we were going
through which made the big one possible.

FRONTAGE ROAD:
As I was getting ready for a NSC ’98 seminar on evangelism, God gave me a
cool analogy to explain our experience. I wrote it in my write-up, but
I’ll repeat it. Prior to ’97, we saw ourselves as a community of God, on
the freeway of the Lord. We were on the move. That is still the way I see
us. And we had occasional on-ramps for non-Christians: NSO, Our
conferences, Evangelism Weeks, and our Bible studies were mini-on-ramps,
and NSO was our most effective evangelistic tool as well as our most
effective outreach tool in general.

But we realized that non-Christians, in order to join our Jesus caravan,
had to hit these on ramps at break neck speeds, zero to 60 in 5 seconds or
less, or else get off the autobahn. We never intended for this to happen
to them, but it was just the result of our strength, our intensive
community.

So year after year, I would look at all the non-Christians who couldn’t
make the intense on-ramp experience and feel sad: “Those poor non-
Christians. They just aren’t the elect. They just aren’t being re-
generated by God, or else they too would have joined us like the few, the
proud, the amazing converts who did make the turn successfully.”

We had a major mental model in place, a whole theology and philosophy and
strategy that forced me to be resigned like that. To not feel that way I
would have had to re-think our whole approach to non-Christians and to
revamp the whole way we do things, and I wrongly assumed that that couldn’t
be either healthy or godly.

This seems stupid now, but the biggest butt kick to us was the question,
“How are you serving non-Christians? From their perspective, what do they
need to best warm up to Jesus?” You see, without even meaning to, we fit
non-Christians into our structures and our approach to ministry. We never
asked what would serve them most. Instead we started from the position of,
“What can WE handle? What is reasonable for us to pull off?” Once we got
ourselves fully in their shoes, it was a much easier road. Now, there are
still the few, the brave, the seekers, who will join us in what we do and
will come to Jesus through the normal process of us being a community of
disciples. (5-15 a year, which has happened this year too by the way).
But what about those who won’t step foot into one of our meetings? They
need an on-going opportunity to check out Jesus, and our once-a-year events
don’t do a thing for them.

So we came up with a new model, the frontage road. Separate, but parallel
structure that partners with our community and helps people warm up to
following Jesus with us.
Let me give you a couple of examples of these types of students:

ABNER: Up until October, Abner was a hard agnostic. He had been very hurt
by “Christians” in his family, and thus had written God and Jesus off
altogether. He had friends in InterVarsity, but he would never have come
to one of our events. His frosh year he enjoyed his IV friendships, but he
kept his safe distance from any of our events. Then in September of his
soph. year, God began to gently open him up. So he accepted the invitation
to come to our first Edge of the year. In my talk, God helped him realize
that I could relate to him, that I had felt what he feels, and that God
could relate to him. He didn’t know why, but he was very moved. So he
grabbed his friend and asked if the two of them could hang out with me
sometime. When we got together, I was able to share more of my story and
lay out more of the gospel and invite him into the Kingdom. He declined my
offer, but went to several of our Investigative Bible Discussions for non-
Christians. He was very struck by Jesus, and made his commitment to Jesus
a few weeks later. That was in November. Then in January, Abner joined my
intensive Mark Study for new students. He has thrived in the Word, and now
he is quite the evangelist himself, just 6 months after conversion. What
are the lessons? 1) If we didn’t have the Edge, there would have been no
place for Abner to initially check God out. He had too much to lose (in
his own mind) by coming to a “religious event”. 2) His conversion has been
very solid, and the transition into the core of our chapter was seamless
for him. He warmed up on the Frontage Road, liked what he saw, and merged
smoothly into our community, just like we hoped.

WILL: I met Will on the Basketball court in March. We were playing a pick-
up game, and he ended up on our team. He looked at me, and tried to place
my face. Then he remembered that he had seen me at the Edge. He had
several IV friends who got him to come to 2 Edges earlier that year. I
asked him if he liked them. His sheepish smile told me “no”, but he said,
“sort of”. So I have sarcastically asked him to give me another chance,
and I would make sure that the next Edge would be worth his while. He did
come to our April Edge, and he signed up for an IBD, which he did 5 weeks
in a row. He went from being an atheist to an agnostic to a seeker. Then
he just came to our last Edge and came up to me overwhelmed with
excitement. I asked him what God was doing for him. He told me that he
didn’t know, but that he liked it. He said he wasn’t quite ready for a
decision, but he was getting there. I’m praying that within the month Will
joins Abner in the Kingdom.

I tell both of these stories because if we didn’t have the Edge, we would
not have had any place for Abner’s and Will’s friends to bring them. God
is using the Edge to reach people that we otherwise would never be able to
reach.

OLD PARADIGMS: Now, God was up against some powerful old mental models
inside my head and heart. He had to work hard to de-construct my thinking
in order to get me open to making such a big switch. Using Mark’s
language, there were 5 major “old wine skins” that I needed to be helped
out of in order to be ready for the new skins and Jesus’ new, tasty wine.

I “If the few can make the jump to light speed with us, every one should be
able to.” That was a very powerful one. The fact that we had some
conversions each year told us that we could be having more, if only people
were more soft hearted. Also, I converted that way, and “I seem normal
enough, so why don’t all the non-Christians do like I did? Because it
worked in my experience, it must be a universal truth, right?”

. We failed to understand that we were basically only drawing seekers, and
that we by default were ignoring skeptics and cynics. Unintentionally, we
were being selective and practicing preferential treatment for toward
church background students over and against non-Churched folks. Once I
faced that truth, God brought serious conviction to me about how evil that
was.

. We did not understand the negative inertia that our structures held.
I’ll get into that more in a minute. But my point here is that I was self-
deceived by telling myself, “As long as I personally am open and committed
to any type of student joining our community, they are welcome to join.
Since my heart is open, our community is hereby accessible to all the tax
collectors and sinners on campus.” Which in hindsight is totally not true. Just because I feel like we are open to all in no way means that non-
Christians feel like when they come to our meeting.

. Probably the most subtle and tricky paradigm for me to identify and
change under this first major mental model was my theology that said,
“Treat Christians and non-Christians the same. They all need the same
thing. They all need to be loved, served, prayed for, and called into
Lordship. Its a good diet for all.” This came from Acts 2. The first
church just lived radical community, and people just sprung into the
Kingdom. Since that worked in Acts 2, we only have to live the same kind
of community, and we will automatically see the same results. That was a
powerful paradigm for me. (Now obviously I am still huge on Acts 2, but we
have added a way to serve non-Christians to help them join our community.)

Another piece of this paradigm came from a story that Dr. Dan Fuller told
me one time. He was driving his dad, the famous radio evangelist, to the
radio station where he did his daily radio show. His dad was lamenting
over who to preach to that day: Christians or non-Christians. Dan said,
“My dad didn’t realize that they all need the same message: to put their
trust in God. To bank their future of happy tommorows on God’s desire to
serve them.”

So my theology said to me, “Don’t worry about accommodating non-Christians. We all have the same needs, and respond to the same messages.” (As a side
note, Dan had a good point, we all do have the same needs. But Dan is no
evangelist. They way you word those needs makes all the difference for a
non-Christian. The point of the message for Christians and non-Christians
may be exactly the same, but I now would go about making that point in
entirely different ways.)

II Old Wine Skin #2: “Structures aren’t that big of a deal. Since ministry
is really about relationships, what structures we have in place is really a
non-issue. Structures don’t make evangelism happen, so I don’t need to
think about it.”
I really believed this one. Ouch!
Now, the good part of this paradigm is that structures really don’t bring
transformation and don’t make a ministry happen. For us at UCLA, the day
we begin thinking that the Edge makes things happen is the day we die. It
is all about the students friendship, students praying, students living out
the Kingdom, students inviting, students following-up. In terms of
structures, I’m an Anabaptist, a Christian Anarchist, using Vernard Eller’s
language.

But that was almost my down fall. What I totally failed to see is that our
structures DO subtly communicate volumes to our students about how to live. If we structure it in, guess what message the students pick up? “This
here is the key value.” If we only preach on it but don’t structure it in,
guess what they walk away with? “This thing is optional. At UCLA,
students were acting like evangelism was for special occasions only. It
was this once in a while thing. No matter how much we taught the opposite,
that’s what they lived. Why? Because of our annual evangelism project and
outreaches. Without our knowing it, our structure told them: “this is
something that is okay to focus on only every 6 months.”

For 7 years, I beat my head against this stronghold that Satan had our
students in. I just couldn’t make evangelism normal, mainstream, a regular
part of life for our regular students. But then when we changed our
structures and made evangelism a normal part of life, guess what happened?
Poof! Almost overnight that old stronghold just disappeared. They now see
evangelism as totally normal for all Christians. You don’t know how much I
am rejoicing over this miracle!

I’ll never forget the first time I realized that this shift had happened.
It was Spring Quarter ’97, after we had done 3 or 4 Edges, and a frosh,
Jennifer, came over to my apartment to do some cooking for a chapter event. Jennifer was a rather shy, reserved student, the kind that in the past
would never do evangelism unless we nearly forced it on her. So I was
eager to hear how she was experiencing the Edge and our evangelism
emphasis. As we were talking, I casually turned the conversation to
evangelism and asked her how she felt about bringing her friends to the
Edge. She lit up and shared about how much she loves to invite her
roommates and others to the Edge. She also told me about hard questions
they have asked her and how she tries to answer them thoughtfully. As she
talked, my heart warmed because here I was listening to this shy frosh tell
me how normal evangelism had become for her. I don’t even think she
realized she was doing evangelism. But because we structured it into our
ministry, she naturally integrated it into her life with Jesus. It is for
people like Jennifer that we do the Edge so that she has a regular, useful
tool to use in her evangelism with her friends.

III Incarnational Evangelism is only something that can be pursued
relationally
I had no idea that you could take a whole structure and create it to be as
close in as possible to the non-Christians world. I didn’t know a
structure could work as a direct bridge between us and them. It seems so
much more risky and heretical to take a structure and push it so far toward
non-Christians. But then I realized that the tension I’m feeling has been
felt throughout the ages. For example, when Luther wanted to take a
strategic step into being incarnational, he adopted bar tunes for hymns.
Imagine how that went over with the traditionalists! Whenever we make a
strategic decision to get into the non-Christian world and culture more, we
are pioneering new turf and we will make mistakes.

But I have been shocked how much it works. The non-Christians intuitively
understand the difference between the rules that run our Frontage road
structures which are made for them and the rules that run our Christian
structures. There goes my Dr. Fuller paradigm, that everyone is equally
served by the same event. Post-modernism is really a different culture,
and it is a little scary at times to really incarnate into it and trust God
to work it all out. More than ever, I feel like a missionary to foreign
culture that I have to keep learning and studying and engaging. I even
have to wear different clothes, like the baggy pants, which is a little
weird.

Part of my skepticism also came from the notion: “You convert people TO
what you convert them WITH.” In other words, I thought that if I help
convert people through relationships and community, they will convert to
our community. But if I help convert them with a slick structure, they
will become Edge junkies, committed to that and nothing else. For this
reason, I had a general bias against all public evangelism, because I
thought they were getting a cheap version of the gospel.

But, I am glad to report, that those who have converted through the Edge
are not Edge junkies. In fact, of the more than 25 who have come into the
Kingdom thus far this year, 18 are now core members of our community who
are becoming true, obedient disciples of Jesus. And for me, it’s that
number of 18 that is much more important than the 25 converts who appear on
my AFR. I want disciples of Jesus who will be faithful to their Lord for a
lifetime. Some random prayer in some meeting that doesn’t translate into
discipleship is meaningless to me.

IV Major Change in my Self-Perception
In the summer of ’96, we as an Area team worked through Bobby Clinton’s
spiritual gifts material, and we discerned each of our spiritual gifts. We
individually drew a diagram of how we thought our gifts worked together,
and we as a team gave each staff our feedback about which gifts we saw at
work in each of us. Then we re-worked our job descriptions around our
gifts. For me, my team confirmed my gift of evangelism, which I had been
neglecting because I hadn’t found a way to work it into my Team Leader
position. So it was actually a very frustrating experience to see that
God had gifted me for evangelism, yet I couldn’t find a way to do it. Out
of my frustration, I made a resolution with God: “God, since you have given
me this gift of evangelism, I would be sinning not to develop it. So I
commit to developing this gift this year, at any cost.” Thus I began to
give myself permission to pursue evangelistic outlets, and I began to
change how I saw myself: from primarily a pastor, to actually more of an
evangelist.

Then in October of ’96, I took our Area team to Willow Creek to their
Church Leadership Conference. (I had been the year before and was
impressed by their values and passion, but not with their Seeker Service
philosophy, ironically.) While at Willow Creek, I went to visit their Gen
X ministry, called Axis. As I was sitting there, I had this growing sense
of empowerment from God, and I said to myself, “I can do this!” So, right
there, I determined that when I returned to LA, we would launch our own
structure just for non-Christians, only that we would go further into the
non-Christian’s world and go after the cynics. When I got to UCLA, I faced
some skepticism from the staff and students. But God pulled together a
great band, an excited drama team, and a few planners to help me, all of
them students except me.

For the first time, I was no longer waiting for someone else who was more
qualified or gifted to step up and lead the charge into evangelistic
innovation. I knew that God loves rookies, and I was a total rookie, so
that was enough right there. I didn’t just want to complain and be
frustrated any more. God was going to use me to create a new path of
evangelism. What a paradigm shift in how I saw myself!

V Major Shift in How I saw InterVarsity
Before all this, without even knowing it, I felt like IV was rigid.
Structures felt like they were all set in place, and that it would be bad
to rock the boat. No one ever told me not to rock the boat, but I just
felt that vibe. My supervisor, Steve Stuckey, was never resistant to my
innovative ideas. But it’s just that evangelistic innovation was
completely up to me. If I could muster the initiative and courage to try
new things amidst all of my other overwhelming Team Leader
responsibilities, more power to me. No one was holding the door shut
against my innovation, but also no one was intentionally opening the door
for me, asking me to try new things. As an aside, one key thing that I
have learned since then is that for innovators like me, we do much better
if the door is actually opened for us by someone else. It makes it much
easier to change how we do things if our supervisor or mentor gives us
permission or a request to change how we do things.

In the past 5 months, I have realized that there are a lot of frustrated
evangelists in IV, stuck in positions and job descriptions that don’t fit
their gifts or passions. I used to think I was the only one in the whole
country who was ready to pull my hair out. But then I met people like me,
and when I told them that I worked my job around my gifts in order to do
innovative things, they got really excited.

The paradigm shift that I went through is that IV isn’t rigid and closed.
In fact, the thing that makes us a great organization is that I have the
freedom to totally alter what I am doing in ministry if God gives me a
better idea. How many other ministries allow for that kind of creativity?
None that I know of. So this new paradigm allows me to actually expect
that each year I will change my job description so that I will personally
keep growing and also so that I will always be giving my most creative
stuff to the students. I am much more happy, and the student are more
blesses, Amen?

Some of you are like me: you feel stuck and frustrated. Now is a very
creative time in IV. We have a new national vision with a new National top
priority: witness and evangelism. Because of this, I call you to step out
of the old wine skin and your old ways of doing ministry, and into totally
new and untried things. You must not let your passion for evangelism lie
dormant, or else it will die. Your campus needs your passion, and so does
IV. Please re-work your job description to include 10% of your time
developing an evangelistic platform that fits your gifts and your campus.

That is exactly what I did with the Edge. It fits me and it fits UCLA.
You and I both need the freedom to risk and create and explore and fail.
It wasn’t until about 7 months ago that I even realized that the Edge was
succeeding; at the end of fall quarter, I began counting conversions, and
it was then that I realized something totally new was happening in us. My
point is: I didn’t care primarily about success. I was just launching into
the world of incarnational evangelism, and I hoped that God would honor my
risk if I gave it my best shot.

Who are we waiting for to lead us into evangelism? The management team?
They have already given us the green light. Now its time for the rest of
us to step up and take the initiative and create a whole new breed of
evangelism and evangelists for a post-modern world. We Gen Xers are the
closest to the generation, so we should expect that God would raise us up
for this new ministry opportunity. Amen?

So What Have The Results Been?
I OUR MINISTRY: How has launching into evangelism and the doing of the
Edge effected my other ministry paradigms? It used to be that the dog
wagged the tail, that our main chapter wagged the Edge. But now the tail
wags the dog. And this is a really beautiful thing in several ways.
1) We have added “Edge” components to most all of what we do. For example,
each year we do a Frosh Project in the inner city with World Impact. This
year for the first time, we had a handful of non-Christian frosh sign up,
so we offered them an Edge small group during the weekend so that they
could take the input at their own pace. Because we helped create a safer
track for them, they were more willing to come. Another example is our
year-end Chapter Camp at Catalina. Last year we started our “On the Edge”
track just for non-Christians. We are doing it again, and we are hoping 30
non-Christians join us for a week of fun, friendships, and the Gospel of
Mark.

2) IV is now known at UCLA as the really evangelistic ministry. This has
the nice effect of helping other Christian groups begin to want to partner
with us with the Edge. Also, the evangelistically oriented frosh are drawn
to joining IV because they want a ministry that is committed to good
evangelism. Lastly, since the Edge has won us a name on campus, the non-
Christians invite their non-Christian friends to come because they know it
will be a good time.

3) God has developed a beautiful symbiotic relationship between our
students and the Edge. They know that the Edge exists to help them do what
they already want to do: introduce their friends to Jesus and his Kingdom.
Before, I expected that our students could do it all themselves. I was
running with the notion that they single-handedly should be able to take
their non-Christian friend Zero to 60 straight into the Kingdom. Without
knowing it, I was guilty of Jesus’ Matt 23 rebuke of the Pharisees. I was
laying heavy burdens on the back of our students, and I wasn’t lending a
hand.

But now things are different. The students now know that I will bust my
butt for this weighty and difficult task of getting our friends to Jesus.
They know that I will spend 20 hours on an Edge, and even pull an all-
nighter the night before an Edge if I need to in order to give their non-
Christian friends a talk that will be useful. They know that they will
never be embarrassed that they risked to bring their non-Christian friends
to hear me speak. And because I am willing to invest so much, guess what?
So are they. Now we are partnering with the heavy load of doing good
evangelism, and it is a true joy!

4) In case you were wondering about that whole dog/tail analogy: we are
still a dog. We haven’t become a cat. We are not a primarily evangelistic
ministry with no discipleship. Far from it. In fact, the level of costly
discipleship at UCLA has never been higher. The students live more under
Jesus’ Lordship than ever before, largely BECAUSE they now obey Jesus with
joy in his call to be witnesses. Also, student initiative has never been
higher. They do it all, and they know it!

II How have I been changed by the Edge?
1) My evangelistic style has changed from apologetics to stories. Don’t
worry, I haven’t abandoned apologetics. I just hide them in my stories so
that the non-Christians don’t see them coming. I like my new style much
better. I present a gospel that works for real problems, which we all
have.

2) I am more willing than ever before to take risks to reach non-
Christians. I take risks in my preaching, in my vulnerability with
stranger, and in just trying new speaking techniques. Also, I am leading
my first ever Investigative Bible Discussion for non-Christians. I am
taking new steps, and I am setting our student leaders free to do more of
that themselves.

3) My heart is changing. It is no longer okay for me to spend my days
“baby-sitting” church background students. It is no longer okay for me to
help run a chapter that exercises preferential treatment toward Christians
when the skeptics on campus have no group that is actively helping offer
them Jesus.

CONCLUSION:
So what are your old paradigms that God want to challenge and change?
Where does your heart need to change, and where does your definition of
ministry need to change?

Thank you for considering this stuff.