Evangelism

We proclaim and live out the Gospel with love and boldness, calling people to repentance, faith and new life in Jesus Christ.

This is the eighth in a series of articles about InterVarsity’s twelve Core Commitments.
CORE COMMITMENT #8
EVANGELISM

“Through every means we seek to make
Christ known.” So wrote Charles
Troutman, InterVarsity’s second president.
While this vision has taken on many
forms during our six decades of student
outreach, such as traveling student
teams, book tables, campus missions and
lectures, spring break evangelism, 2100’s
presentation of Habakkuk, campus harvest
events and Groups Investigating God
(GIGs), making Christ known has
remained a hallmark of our ministry.

Paul Little, InterVarsity’s first Director
of Evangelism, once defined evangelism
as “one beggar telling another beggar
where to find food.” The first part of
our task is simply to point others in the
right direction.

When we do that with consistency
and integrity, campus witness changes
lives. Former U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield
credits his conversion to a group of students
who persisted in praying for and
loving him while he was Dean of
Students at Willamette University in
Oregon. After lengthy reflection and
study of Scripture, he concluded: “I saw
that for 31 years I had lived for self and
decided I wanted to live the rest of my
life only for Jesus Christ.”

Evangelism is as much who we are as
what we say. In his letter to the
Colossians, the apostle Paul admonished
his readers: “Be wise in the way you act
toward outsiders; make the most of every
opportunity “(4:5). Dwight L. Moody
once observed: “Of one hundred [nonbelievers],
one will read the Bible; the
other ninety-nine will read the Christian.”

A Christian’s lifestyle is contagious.
How we care for others, how we allocate
our time and money, how we treat animals
— all reflect the gospel. In his book,
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
described the advice given by a senior
devil to an apprentice devil. The latter
was instructed to keep his “patient” out
of the home of a particular Christian
family because “the whole place reeks of
that deadly odor… Even guests, after a
weekend visit, carry some of the smell
away with them. The dog and the cat
are tainted with it.”

One of my personal heroes is Charles
Finney. Perhaps the greatest evangelist of
his day, he was also a leading abolitionist
and educational innovator. His deep
commitment to ethnic reconciliation and
social justice created many bridges for his
verbal witness. The more holistic our
approach to evangelism, the more
bridges the Holy Spirit has to make
entrée into the unbeliever’s heart.

My oldest brother is not yet a believer.
He’s the smart one in the family; he reads
at a level that boggles my mind. As I pursue
spiritual conversations with him, I find
that the best entry point is through his
reading. The Holy Spirit is somehow able
to make use of my meager knowledge of
Carl Jung and Martin Heidegger to
engage him in deeper conversations. On
his own turf, he is much more open to a
conversation about faith than he would
be if I were to broach the subject directly.

Evangelism is both love and boldness.
It is incarnational. It is humble. It finds
affinity with fellow beggars. Finally, it is a
grace to both the one who shares and
the one who receives.