A little while ago, after I had done some teaching on evangelism, an older woman approached me. She told me about some non-Christian people she had been friends with for over twenty years. Despite their being friends for such a long time, she had never talked about Jesus with them. It was quite an admission. I have heard more of these kinds of stories than I can count. I used to be one of them.
I wonder if you’d stop and think about her admission for a moment. I want to ask you this question: Is it an evangelism failure or is it a friendship failure? She was telling me something she felt badly about. Something she thought she should have done differently. But what had gone wrong?
A Friendship Failure
Most people probably think it was an evangelism failure. I used to, too. She should have shared the good news about Jesus with her friends. It’s one of the reasons why you need to talk about Jesus early on in a friendship before it gets too hard. Some will think she needed more evangelism training, to learn how to manoeuvre in conversations more effectively. Still others will think she now needs to repent of her sin of not sharing the gospel with her friends. These may all be valid thoughts, but they miss the mark because they are all built upon the assumption it is primarily an evangelism failure. But it isn’t an evangelism failure. It’s a friendship failure.
Why? Because friendship is about walking together through life. It is about knowing and being known by one another. She was friends with these people and had walked with them for over twenty years, and she had never told them about what (or who) was most important to her. She hadn’t let them in to that part of her life. I don’t mean to be overly critical of her, because I have done a similar thing in the past, but the reality is, she needed to be thinking more about the nature of her friendship than the failure in her evangelism.
Problems and Solutions
If you get the problem wrong, then you inevitably get the solution wrong. It’s as true when you go to the doctor as it is when it comes to reaching a lost world with the gospel. It is my contention this misconstruing the kind of issue as an evangelism failure has led us up the garden path to solutions that don’t deal with people’s core problem. We have written evangelism books, delivered evangelism training, and developed numerous evangelistic programs, that are good in themselves, but we haven’t dealt with the friendship problem.
What we should do is teach people how to be good friends to those who don’t know Jesus. If we do this better, then I suspect many more people will be motivated to talk about him and so many more will hear about him.
This post includes excerpts from Friend of a Friend: Introducing Your Friends to Jesus, used with permission.
