Flippin’ Evangelists

Lying in bed on a cold Saturday morning our door bell went, it was two Mormon evangelists. Flippin’ nuisance! But that’s how the world and much of the church regards evangelists, as people who bother others about being saved or lost. 

But the bible says they are people with beautiful feet! If apostles and prophets are people who spend their lives seeing the Kingdom and bringing it strategically down to earth, then evangelists are people who see the harvest field of people who don’t know the love of God found only in Jesus, and want to show the church that harvest and how to bring it in. 

Just like the foundational ministries, evangelists are often seen today as trans-local ministries who spend their time on platforms or religious TV station shows, but in reality they are given to the church in the city to develop strategy for seeing the lost come to be part of the people of God.

The evangelist's strategy isn’t just ALPHA courses, bridge to life diagrams, tracts or any other clever schemes. The strategy is one of getting to know the people so that we can feed them what they are hungry for before we introduce pearls to their diet. Evangel is just the Greek word for 'good news'

When my wife and I have people round for dinner for the first time we always ask them if there is anything they don’t eat. We learnt that lesson the hard way because I am allergic to cucumber, yes I know cucumber doesn’t taste or smell blah blah, well yes it does and it makes me very sick, literally.

When we were first married we would be invited to someone’s house for a meal and I felt to embarrassed to say that I couldn’t eat cucumber and so guess what, it was nearly always on the menu, and on every thing on the menu as garnish. So we learned to tell people what I was allergic to and ask our guests what they couldn’t eat. My point is that unless you have a relationship with people, you don’t know what they can and can’t stomach. 

Evangelists find out and equip the church to find out and release the anointing of being good news to the church. Therefore evangelists have to really know their city. I recently heard an internationally very well known evangelist say that late on in his ministry he has realised that dropping into a city and leading a massive mission doesn’t really have much long term affect, he will now only go to cities where the churches are in unity and serve their city in social action at considerable depth. Now he sees far more fruit because the church knows where the hunger is and meets it, he then helps them bring the pearls. Now thats my idea of an evangelists.