A Forgotten Gospel : Rediscovering a Radical, Compassionate Approach to Evangelism

Most of us are surrounded by people we care about, people we d love to see respond to the gospel. We can readily picture the faces of immediate and extended family members, neighbors, friends and coworkers as we pray. Sadly, a large percentage of us are not actively sharing their faith with the people we care about.

Why is that?

We feel inadequate. While most of us know our responsibility to the Great Commission, the thought of sharing our faith makes us feel inadequate, unprepared and just plain nervous.

We don t want to mess things up. We know the stakes are high and that many of the people we care about have some pretty negative ideas about Christianity and some negative experiences with pushy Christians. We don t want add to the problem and we don t want to alienate our friends and family.

People don t understand what we are saying. Using words like God, sin and saved in conversations produces quizzical looks or outright laughter. There might have been a shared understanding of these concepts 20 to 30 years ago, but they ve been ignored by today's diverse culture.

We don t know what to say. And although times have changed, our approach to sharing the Gospel has not. We find ourselves trying to convince friends of their sinfulness, creating an antagonistic, counterproductive atmosphere that's perceived as judgmental and prevents on-going conversations.

Even a quick reading of Acts shows that those believers didn't have this struggle. What was their secret? A Forgotten Gospel explores that.

While preparing to teach his own church the basics of evangelism, church-planting pastor Mark McGrath noticed that the popular evangelism methods he'd learned were very different from those used in Acts.

Digging further, he saw that our modern gospel-presentation methods are largely based on explanations from the New Testament epistles, which are written to those who already believe.

Continuing his inventory of New Testament encounters revealed a pattern: Every gospel presentation delivered in Acts contained the same essential elements and emphasized one central theme.

Furthermore, he discovered that by following the example of the New Testament believers and sharing the Gospel with the same elements and the same theme, new doors were opened and people were much more willing to engage in honest conversations about their faith.

Over the years, Christians have done a lot of thinking and re-thinking about evangelism. We ve moved away from more confrontational approaches, from the crusade evangelism and the drive-by gospel shooting approaches where we blitz an area with the gospel and then go home. We ve discovered we need to practice what we preach, care about people before preaching at them. We ve learned to serve the world around us and be friends with them in the hope of having a chance to see them come to faith. But something is still missing!

Faith comes by hearing... Hearing requires someone to do the speaking! And that's what makes us nervous. No matter how much we care, how much we serve, what type of friend we ve become, we will need to share the Gospel with our friends, and we are back at square one again. There is a better way.

Today, Mark McGrath is teaching this easily remembered, biblical approach to evangelism to students on university campuses, as well as to churches around the world. He shows believers how to use this same flexible approach to effectively communicate the gospel to their friends.

No longer will caring believers wonder what to say or how to say it. By following the conversational approach they'll be ready to clearly and confidently share the gospel without alienating their friends.

As a church-planting pastor for 25 years, Mark McGrath has struggled to reach non-believers with the gospel, finding surprising answers to his questions in the gospel presentations made in the Book of Acts.

He has started churches in the New York, New Jersey and Great Britain, conducted evangelism-training programs for churches around the world, and has run a school of evangelism. Mark conducts evangelism training with several national Campus ministries at Rutgers University in New Jersey and has launched an updated version of both the weekend and small group evangelism seminars he developed. These seminars will be available to churches across the U.S.

An accomplished speaker and trainer, Mark owns a communications skills training company that provides training and coaching in communication, facilitation, listening and meeting leadership skills to executives and professionals.