Outreach is a team sport

I am a ‘Champion’ and an ‘Enthusiast.’ That’s if you consult some of the more popular personality tests.

On the Myers-Briggs scale (a system for categorising personalities) I come out as a feelsy extrovert who loves big-picture concepts and last-minute ‘preparation’. Add it all together and a Myers-Briggs devotee will slap the label on me: ‘Champion’. That means I will heartily endorse the latest IDEA or BOOK or FILM or GADGET. ‘You’ve got to see this thing’, I’ll say, wide-eyed (while the introverts nervously edge out of the room).

If you ask a fan of the Enneagram (another system for personality types – don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it), I am an ‘Enthusiast’. I’ll wax lyrical about my latest passion, and I will demand to know why it is not your passion also. In fact my enthusiasm requires an echo: If I enthuse you, I need you to be enthusiastic. Why aren’t you more enthusiastic? Why?

I know, I’m exhausting. Sorry.

About an hour ago I was in a room with 40 university students. I asked them to describe an evangelist. They shouted out descriptors which I’ve heard dozens of times before (I do this exercise a lot). Without a pause the adjectives rang out: ‘Bold. Loud. Fearless. Confident. Passionate.’ You get the idea. Essentially they were describing an ‘Enthusiast’.

As the word associations continued, the students became ever more free: ‘Bearded. Thick Skinned. Argumentative. Controversial. Megaphone. Placards. Personal Hygiene Issues.’ The reason I asked the students to indulge their worst impressions of an evangelist was for the sake of the next task. I told them to turn to their neighbour and describe a person who was prominent in their journey to faith. At the end, the feedback could not have been more different: ‘Wise. Patient. Loving. Consistent. A Friend’ — just the kind of person you crave in order to recover from an encounter with an ‘Enthusiast’!

Certainly there are people in our stories who are bold proclaimers of the truth. Thank God for that. There’s no getting around it: ‘Faith comes by hearing’ (Rom. 10:17). But, overwhelmingly, when Christians think back over their journeys to faith they recognise what we should have known all along: evangelism is a team sport.

‘Evangelist’ is not a personality type, and we need to move away from the caricatures. When we picture an evangelist, the first person we think of should be Christ: the ultimate Mediator. How did He reach out? He was bold with the Pharisees; tender with the downtrodden; sometimes withdrawing; sometimes outgoing. No caricatures here. And it is His body that is the great evangelist on earth: the ‘royal priesthood’, bringing God to the nations and the nations to God (1 Peter 2:9-12). In the body of Christ, ‘thick skin’ and ‘loud mouth’ have their place (for which I’m grateful!). But the quiet, the sensitive, the introspective – they play their part too. They reach those the extroverts never could.

Don’t worry if you’re not an ‘Evangelist’. That might make you exactly the evangelist your friends really need.