Evangelism

It was the very end of 1994 or very, very early 1995. I was sitting in a pew at Indian Hills Community Church in Lincoln Nebraska when the pastor preached an excellent sermon challenging us to share the gospel more in the up coming year. Though I’ve moved away from Nebraska and moved on from Indian Hills, I remember that sermon every year about this time.

A friend and I (we worked together at the time) took the message to heart and began praying that the Lord would allow us to share the gospel with at least one person each week of the year and the Lord always seemed to answered this prayer (sometimes in some rather strange ways).

As I kept this prayer request in mind I found myself constantly looking for that person. I began keeping track of everyone that I that I spoke with about spiritual things and often jotted a little note of what we spoke about. While I didn’t share the gospel with a different person every single week, the Lord opened many doors of ministry to me that year and I frequently got to speak to many more than one person. When the year was over I had personally shared the gospel with hundreds of different people, it averaged out to a little over one different person a day.

While I haven’t been so faithful at keeping track of those who I’ve shared the gospel with over the years, I usually think about it at the beginning of each year and start keeping track again, for a while at least. I now have a small booklet full of names and dates and occasionally something about our conversation.

I have personally found this practice helps keep me focused on the subject of evangelism and always looking for the next person to speak with about eternal matters, not to mention, it’s always interesting to go back and look at the booklet every now and then. I would highly recommend it to everybody.