I think the Christian equivalent of ‘the bogey man’ or ‘the monster under the bed’ is the much beleaguered street preacher. We imagine an aggressive, poorly shaven man with a bad stereo speaker system, a big black leather bible, and a short stool to stand on with a billboard that says ‘TURN OR BURN’ on one side and ‘ABORTION IS MURDER’, shouting down a microphone about how everyone on the otherwise placid shopping street is going to hell. Lets face it, it’s the thing we tell the kid’s at seminary about to keep them up at night.

What we fear is an evangelistic approach so divorced from in tone from its content that it drives people away from the gospel rather than drawing them close. The problem comes when we extend that fear out to all forms of persuasive evangelism, as if ‘Maniac Street Preacher’ is the only option. What we may need to reclaim then is a view of the persuasive that is positive and engaging, disagreeing with people and showing them the truth in such a way that they feel the warmth and love of the gospel in the process of receiving it.

Not persuading people simply isn’t an option in all this, to some extent there can be no evangelism without persuasion as we are always seeking to change people’s minds about the truth and praying that the spirit changes their hearts in relation to God. Without Christians being persuasive in evangelism you are merely left with, unpersuasive evangelism, which may as well be words spoken to the wind.

From another side then, I think our fears in persuasive evangelism come from the worry that we are offering people something so important and valuable that if we get it wrong, the judgement falls on us if they don’t believe. Drawn to its logical conclusion though that thought just ends up in there being no evangelism, surely that worse than imperfect evangelism? There will simply never be a perfectly persuasive way to speak the gospel, and we cant leave the work to a small group of professionals to get on with because those professionals are very unlikely to meet the people in your office and the members of your family, unlike you. So we are left with a question- How do we persuade people of the truth of the gospel in a way that makes sense of its content?

We believe in a persuasive God. Take the way Jesus talks to the people he meets in the gospels, he is always persuading, but of course he is, he is god himself, come in the flesh to redeem his people, to teach them that he is the messiah and everyone must repent and believe, he also speaks a lot about hell, so, doesn’t that lead us to the worrying conclusion that Jesus sounds quite a bit like our street preacher? Thankfully he is far from that, we need only look at Jesus interactions with those he meets and the interactions of his followers with the people they met to see the love and compassion with which they speak, but they are always persuading people. Those two things aren’t at odds in Jesus life or in the early church then. Lets take two short examples:

Jesus and the woman at the well in John 4 – Jesus pushes through myriad social and conversational barriers to give this woman the life he offers that she so desperately needs. At no point does Jesus hector her, in face he is remarkable humble, ask her first for a drink, he also doesn’t respond aggressively to her retorts, he responds with compassion and the offer of eternal life, persuading her to change her mind. In response to this persuasion the woman is changed so thoroughly that her whole village hears of Jesus.

Paul in Athens in Acts 17 – Paul observes, understands and speaks to these thinking men in terms they understand, having observed and interacted with their culture. Hugely different as an example from the woman at the well but here we see again, a calm, clear and persuasive message that makes sense of those who are being spoken to and after which some reject but some want to hear more.

Evangelism is by nature persuasive, but when we have the words of life and the spirt, how could it not be. That persuasion far from socially aggressive and unacceptable is one of the most loving things we do, risking the potential social discomfort for the sake of offering people eternal life. We must let this impact our view of persuasion, we see the imaginary street preacher for what they are, a misguided (and mostly fictional) extreme that must not dissuade us from the call we have receive to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’ a task that is essentially persuasive. Be persuaded that persuasion is the way!