Missional Evangelism Quotes

Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the relationship all over again. The old adage "it takes six to stick" is proven true over and over again. I realized this in year three of our church plant. I think of the hundreds of people that came to our services that had no connection with me or our people because we were willing to build a sustained relationship with them through marketing. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

Every church has a marketing plan! The only difference is that some are better than others! When I think of marketing I think of building a relationship with those within reach of your ministry who know nothing about your church or are disconnected from your people. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

God makes his gospel attractive through his people. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he. ~ Thomas Hughes

The mission that God has given us is a highly relational mission. Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you" John 20:21. Jesus came into this world, lived in obscurity for 30 years and then spent three years relationally investing in twelve men, whose charge was to do the same thing by relationally investing in others. This strategy has worked for 2000 years each of us has been touched by someone reaching out to and investing in us relationally, thus advancing the gospel and the mission of God. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

The mission that Jesus invites us to participate in is primarily a relational one in nature. Our ability to sustain our relationship in a meaningful way will have a direct impact on our missional fruitfulness. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

Remember all missional advancement always engages missional resistance. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

Evangelicals usually fail to challenge the system not just out of concern for evangelism, but also because they support the American system and enjoy its fruits. They share the Protestant work ethic, support laissez-faire economics, and sometimes fail to evaluate whether the social system is consistent with their Christianity. ~ Christian Smith

My job is not to get between YOU and God. My job is to put your hand IN God's hand. ~ David McGee

The reason many fail to joyfully proclaim Jesus Christ is because deep down they fail to joyfully adore Him ~ Steve Bainbridge

While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic. ~ James MacDonald

The world doesn't judge us by our theology; it judges us by our behavior. The validity of Scripture in the world's view is determined by how it affects us. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

All apostolic ministry in some sense involves this return to the founding message as well as purpose. The missional task that follows is to reinterpret it radically into various contexts. To use the words of leadership gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, the key to dynamic entrepreneurialism is to "preserve the core and stimulate progress."15 Thus, there is both a continuity and a discontinuity in the revitalization process, involving both a conservative dimension and a radical one. Radical traditionalism involves a rediscovery of the founder's vision, but it must be matched with spectacular innovations that are as yet undreamed of.16 As such, it is the apostolic intrapreneur's (the Petrine apostle) basic method of renewal. ~ Alan Hirsch

The great crowds themselves are meaningless. The thing that counts is what happens in the hearts of the people. The evangelist sows the seed, and much inevitably falls upon stony ground and bears no fruit. But if only a few seeds flourish, the results are manifold. ~ Billy Graham

Soul winning for Christ Jesus is a great business everyone must endeavor to start and keep it diligently ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Question Eight: Self-righteousness is an insidious spiritual disease which is a betrayer of the gospel of grace and a great hindrance to evangelism. What is self-righteousness? Why is it such a hindrance to evangelism? How does the gospel of grace enable us to repent of our self-righteousness and free us to share the gospel with compassion? Maybe I was all right with it for a while. I read their answers, too, and in those answers Lucy and Jesus walked together as friends. The self-righteous exuded a condescending air of moral superiority that non-Christians are rightly repulsed by. I appreciated that. ~ Ann Patchett

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages - which helps to explain why so many of modernity's avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel's God, represented the world's resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption - symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos - spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, "I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God," precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection. ~ Robert Barron

If you are anything like me you'll have to fight tooth-and-nail to stay in the game (evangelism). Because although the home runs have been invigorating, my batting average over the years is abysmally low. ~ Bill Hybels

We must decide where we want our ministry to count - in the momentary applause of popular recognition or in the reproduction of our lives in a few chosen people who will carry on our work after we have gone. Really it is a question of which generation we are living for. ~ Robert E. Coleman

Any method of evangelism will work - if God is in it. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

Too often, we fall into the trap of preach­ing the gospel to adults and the law to chil­dren: "God wants you to be good boys and girls." It is not that there is no truth in that state­ment, but with­out the right con­text and qual­i­fi­ca­tions it is a recipe for hope­less­ness. ~ Jeremy Walker

We should be holy people eager to greet our Lord when He returns, ready at any moment for the trumpet's call, people of optimism, busy in evangelism, hands to the plow, eyes on the prize. ~ David Jeremiah

Before I can call upon Christ as my Savior, I have to understand that I need a savior. I have to understand that I am a sinner. I have to have some understanding of what sin is.I have to understand that God exists. I have to understand that I am estranged from that God, and that I am exposed to that God's judgment. I don't reach out for a savior unless I am first convinced that I need a savior. All of that is pre-evangelism. It is involved in the data or the information that a person has to process with his mind before he can either respond to it in faith or reject it in unbelief. ~ R.C. Sproul

But even if we remain in our own country, Christians and non-Christians are often widely separated from one another by social sub-cultures and lifestyles as well as by different values, beliefs and moral standards. Only an incarnation can span these divides, for an incarnation means entering other people's worlds, their thought-world, and the worlds of their alienation, loneliness and pain. Moreover, the incarnation led to the cross. Jesus first took our flesh, then bore our sin. This was a depth of penetration into our world in order to reach us, in comparison with which our little attempts to reach people seem amateur and shallow. The cross calls us to a much more radical and costly kind of evangelism than most churches have begun to consider, let alone experience. ~ John R.W. Stott

There were no bigger stars in the new evangelism than the Bakkers. ~ Kathie Lee Gifford

evangelism of children nonetheless seeks to cut off the process of independent thought before it begins. It's this aspect of religious indoctrination that is most unacceptable - the idea that doubt is bad, that unquestioning acceptance is good, that there is only one possible right answer, and that someone else has already figured out what that answer is. ~ Dale McGowan

Let eloquence be flung to the dogs rather than souls be lost. What we want is to win souls. They are not won by flowery speeches. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Every moment thou waitest does but increase thy misery; thine attempts to plume thyself and make thyself fit for Jesus are all vanity. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

People who are starving and dressed in rags don't want to hear someone read a list of propositional "good news." They want to see the good news in action. The church doesn't hold revival meetings and call it a day - we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, dig wells, and staff medical clinics. Social action isn't an optional part of evangelism; it is evangelism. This is an important correction to the overspirituality that dominated evangelical Christianity just a generation ago. But the both/and of holistic mission still misses the heart of Jesus if we don't see that the church needs the poor as much as the poor need the church. Jesus didn't embrace the poor only because he pitied them or because he knew he had the resources to help them. Jesus embraced the poor because they were rushing into the kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees - those who called themselves God's people. Jesus welcomed people who knew poverty because they were ready to receive what he had to offer. Religious people, he said, could learn something from them. Our spiritual lives are linked to the material conditions of our life. When we feel like we don't need much materially, we often have trouble remembering why we need God. We comfortable Americans can go through an entire day without thinking of God. But Jesus gave the poor more than food to eat and relief from their sickness. He restored them to God's beloved community. ~ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. ~ Alister E. McGrath

I am not so interested in religion or dogma of any kind. It is too restrictive for me, too organizational, too hierarchical, and too tied up in power and being right. You call it a "rabid evangelism." ~ Terry Tempest Williams

People, especially the young, wanted to hear about God and not man. ~ Billy Graham

We must reject the thought that evangelism is to be separated from the importance of standing against evil. We weren't saved just to escape this world and go to Heaven. Transformed people transform the culture while standing boldly against evil. ~ James Robison

It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur'an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what God they prayed to. The shared consensus is that Christian evangelists are not very good listeners. They assume they are speaking to people with no knowledge of God themselves. They are disrespectful to other people's faith. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

Edwards's God was glorious, full of beauty, and seemingly uninterested in making people feel insecure. Edwards was a mystic, a man who didn't simply write or preach about God, he experienced him. ~ Matthew Paul Turner

When we feed our faith, we starve our doubts. ~ Christine Caine

Sexuality isn't ancillary to Christianity, in the way some other cultural or political issues are. Marriage and sex point, the Bible says, to a picture of the gospel itself, the union of Christ and his church. This is why the Bible spends so much time, as some critics would put it, "obsessed" with sex. That's why, historically, churches that liberalize on sex tend to liberalize themselves right out of Christianity itself. ~ Russell D. Moore

The Missional church always thinks of the long haul rather than the quick fix ~ Michael Frost

If you want to help people we have to dive into people wade into the sea of humanity. ~ Hugh Halter & Matt Smay

Belief in Some One's right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seed-beds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation. ~ Lillian Smith

Friendship evangelism' is the freedom to Agape others without an agenda (Young)."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods

An evangelist is like a newscaster on television or a journalist writing for a newspaper ... except that the evangelist's mission is to tell the Good News that never changes. ~ Billy Graham

Since much of American taxes prior to 1763 went to support the local clergy, one humorist suggested the opportunity to vote on that. If the minister was turned out, he could open a tavern and preach to his customers if he served them liquor. ~ Colin G. Calloway

I've never seen such a hunger in people for spiritual things ... People realize the past is gone, the future is uncertain, and the present seems to be hopeless. As a result, many [in Moscow] were open to God. ~ Billy Graham

Evangelism is not salesmanship. It is not urging people, pressing them, coercing them, overwhelming them, or subduing them. Evangelism is telling a message. Evangelism is reporting good news. ~ Richard Halverson

What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.

Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They
have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old. ~ G.K. Chesterton

ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We're a life cult. Rock 'n' roll is a life force, and it's joy as an act of defiance. ~ Bono

We met with more closed doors than open ones
and the people who answered our knocks were invariably older. Young people didn't aswner the door to strangers, who would undoubtedly be trying to sell something, any more than they would answer the telephone to telemarketers once Caller ID came along. The only people we encountered going door-to-door were the ones old enough to remember when that's the way the world worked. ~ J. Mark Bertrand

So you can't demand the broken to live as if they were whole. Discipline is not the issue; apply discipline and you'll make it worse. What is needed is healing. ~ John Eldredge

I think one of the serious breakdowns in modern evangelism is this: it has offered too much for too little. What we do mostly is offer forgiveness. We need cleansing! There is no true conversion until a man takes up his cross. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

As the leadership goes...so goes the church. ~ Frank Chirico