This book, short and sweet at only about 40 pages, makes an irrefutable case that the vast majority of evangelism that took place in the New Testament was among strangers. This goes directly against the idea that friendship evangelism is the ideal way to evangelize.

Personally, I’ve come to the belief that if you want to do friendship evangelism, or make balloon animals and pass them out and tell people Jesus loves them, you should go for it. However, be sure that you’re not discouraging those who are practicing confrontational (intentional witnessing to strangers) evangelism, because there’s a much better biblical case for this type of evangelism than for friendship evangelism.

On page 39, the author provides guidelines for what your church can do to become an evangelistic church.

• Provide biblical, effective evangelism training.
• Provide a wide variety of confrontational evangelism opportunities.
• Encourage and work with those promoting Biblical evangelism in the congregation.
• Have an evangelism budget.
• Provide creative evangelistic outreaches for church members to invite unsaved friends to (ladies teas, sportsman dinners, career focused dinners, etc.).
• Mention personal evangelistic opportunities in lessons and sermons.
• Mention evangelistic prayer requests in appropriate settings.
• Announce confrontational and invitational evangelistic opportunities and encourage and model involvement.
• Invite guest speakers who specialize in evangelism.
• Challenge one another to be intentionally evangelistic.
• Pray the Lord of the harvest to raise up workers for the harvest (Matthew 9:38).

I think my wife is giving a lot of benefit of the doubt when she says our church does five of the eleven items. If we go to the most evangelistic church in our small town, and still don’t get a passing grade, what does that tell you about how good the church in America is at evangelism?

I encourage everyone who’s interested in the topic to to purchase the book, which is available here.