The following article is from the May 2026 MIT Monthly newsletter. If you would like to sign up to receive this newsletter from the Missional Initiatives Team, you can fill out this form.
From Doing Evangelism to Being Evangelists
By Merv Budd, Missional Initiatives Team
Historically, evangelism has been approached as a task we do. In order to facilitate this task, we developed tools for sharing our faith (which is assumed to be a verbal explanation), programs for drawing people into the church building, and techniques to help people broach conversations about God. These equipping efforts served the church well during the era of Christendom, but as cultures have increasingly moved away from a Judeo-Christian worldview and embraced secularism, these efforts have become increasingly ineffective and even detrimental to the evangelistic call of the church.
Instead, we want to encourage congregations to equip their people to become different. They are equipped to embody the Gospel and become foretastes of the faith they believe. Sharing our faith becomes not only a verbal activity, but we also become conduits of the love, joy, forgiveness and grace (to name a few) of the faith we enjoy, to those who are without.
Becoming evangelistic is not merely an individual focus. The whole of the church’s institutional life and presence is meant to be shaped by the Gospel. Our equipping efforts are conscientious of our community reputation and of the ways the institution of the church bears witness to other institutions in the community we serve. As a result, we nurture our reputation as well as our other community relationships so we might have Kingdom influence.
As we embrace this evangelistic nature, we recognize that the evangel we share forms and shapes us in every aspect of our lives. Bearing witness is not simply one type of activity, rather it should be the heartbeat behind every activity in which we engage. Therefore, we recognize that the gifts of the church all have the potential to be evangelistic gifts, and we encourage people to use these gifts in their interactions with those who are far from God.
As people who seek to bring others into the presence of Jesus and make known to them the nature of his Kingdom, we cooperate together in sharing the life of Jesus communally in small groups, which then enfold others into the life of Jesus by our common love, grace, and kindness. In short, we trust our church friends with our non-churched friends.
It is in this kind of posture that we look for where the Spirit is “blowing” and push on those doors that seem to be ajar. We do not try and manipulate conversations or fabricate opportunities but rather exercise discernment of where we sense the Spirit is on the move and prayerfully distinguish what our role might be.