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After my post on Evangelists this week, I got an email from a friend who brought up some points about it that made me think I might have not been as clear as I wanted to be originally, so I wrote the following e-mail back to her. Just thought I would also post that here (with her permission) for a little clarification of what I was saying originally.
I’m not sure I was completely clear in the post (I should read it again, I guess)… I didn’t mean to say sales or salesmen (or saleswomen?) 🙂 are bad in any way. Not in any way. There are some great strategies to succeed in the business world, and often they will work if applied in various settings. You can look at what one guy does, and emulate that in some way and achieve similar or greater success.
BUT… what I was pointing out was that the business world is now copying the church in their sales/marketing strategy. My point with that was that the church is not a business, should not operate like one, and it’s evidence that we’re focused on the wrong stuff when the business world is copying what we call the “church”! It was just another eye-opener to me that we’re (Christians, the Church) focusing our energy in the wrong places (in my opinion) and just forget who we are as the church – the family of God, the body of Christ. That’s not packageable or marketable.
I do understand what you’re saying though. You saw the Life of God in people, and were drawn to that. I guess God is showing me these days how much that is really Him working in me and how little I have to make the “shine” happen. It’s kinda a natural result of a personal relationship with him, not the thing to actually strive for. Like, the fruits of the spirit… sometimes we say those are things we need to work on as Christians, things to strive for, goals. But really, like it says, they are fruit of the Spirit. As he works in our life, he produces those things in us. Actually… HE is the Evangelist. 🙂
That’s obviously not to say there isn’t a place for an Evangelist… my point is that we have turned Evangelist into someone who peddles religion, instead of someone who shares the Good News. It’s hard to separate those in our current culture… we’ve only known the church as a business. But, they really are separable, and really the church has nothing to do with business, or big corporate organizations – we’ve just made it appear that way.
See, today we offer people a one-step salvation. You hear the good news (the Gospel, the Evangelion) and you receive it, and then you take possession of eternal life. It’s a product that’s for sale, for free. (Mostly free… usually at that point, you need to connect with some organization and give a lot of your personal resources to that organization’s efforts) 🙂 But after that exchange (the offer, you accepting, and then you possessing) it’s over. You’re good… on to the next client. But Jesus didn’t work that way with people. He spent a good deal of time with the same people, teaching them about the Kingdom by living life with them everyday. A very different model from what we are accustomed to. I think the evangelists early on might have done a similar model. They made disciples (Matt 28) by spending time with people, helping them see God’s Kingdom and learn to walk the rest of their life with him – a relationship with the Creator.
It’s just a different perspective I suppose. Again, not right or wrong necessarily… but I do think that the business world copying “the church” might say something about what we call “the church”.