An extract from Scattering Seeds of Hope by Jeremy Marshall and Mary Davis (10Publishing, November 2023).
Jeremy Marshall, the much-loved evangelist and banker, went to be with the Lord in August. He spent the last eight years of his life living with incurable cancer and used his influence and suffering to spread gospel seeds to thousands of people. Before he died, he wrote Scattering Seeds of Hope, a book that seeks to encourage believers who feel discouraged and ineffective in their evangelism. The follow extract is from the book.
Excuses, excuses, excuses
Most of the Christians I meet are discouraged when it comes to evangelism. They love Jesus and they’d love to be better at telling others how great he is. So what’s the problem?
I think that many of us are afraid. We feel that society is very hostile and that everyone is against us. We think that people will be aggressive and unreceptive if we try to start a conversation about Christianity or Jesus. But, friends, this is simply not true: most people don’t think about the church or the Christian faith from one month’s end to the next.
In my experience, people are not generally hostile, they are indifferent. Empirical external research in the survey Talking Jesus backs up my claim. It shows that most people have a Christian friend whom they like. The top traits in their Christian friends were that they were friendly (62%), caring (50%), good-humoured (33%) and generous (32%). The most negative traits were that 10% thought the practising Christian they knew was narrow-minded or naive and 9% said they felt they were hypocritical. So, yes, maybe there is a tiny minority of people who are hostile – but God may reach them too. Look at what happened to Saul of Tarsus!
Many people don’t have the slightest clue about the Christian faith. They usually think it’s about being good and doing their best. And lots of people know very little about the Bible. Some people know nothing at all. Zero! Nada! Rien! I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me after I have spoken and say something like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realise Jesus was a real person. I thought it was just a fairy story.’ Or they’ll say, ‘That’s a great story about Jesus. Did it really happen?’ But by far the most common reaction I get is this: ‘Why hasn’t anyone told me about this before?’ It’s eerie how many times I have heard this. I hope you find this encouraging because it shows that God’s Word has not lost its ancient power. People are often intrigued.
If you try reading a Gospel with a friend, you will find that the average person is really surprised by what they find in the Bible, even if they’ve had a good education. Usually, their understanding of what’s in the Bible comes via Hollywood, or possibly from school assemblies. On the whole, it’s not that our friends have considered Christ and rejected him – they simply don’t know much about him. And they are rich soil for sowing the good seed of God’s Word.
The world is in a mess right now. Ongoing worldwide challenges and crises at home have left people feeling worried about the future. Many are much more open to something new. Not necessarily Christianity, it can be anything – but there is a new openness.
But faced with this opportunity, many Christians are nervous and discouraged. Most of us are cowards and afraid of what people think of us. Isaiah 41:10 encourages us and promises us the presence of the Living God when we are afraid:
So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I love Jesus and you love Jesus – but we’re not always very good at explaining that to our friends and family. Sometimes it’s a relief to admit this. Many of us feel guilty. But feeling guilty is utterly counterproductive. Others don’t say very much for fear of getting it wrong. What we all need is help and encouragement. I want to encourage you and hopefully equip you to share the fantastic news of the gospel. It is uniquely wonderful news – and news that our friends and family desperately need to hear.
But I’m not an evangelist
Can you ride a bike? Or maybe drive a car? How did you start? Probably very slowly in an empty car park, with great fear and trepidation. Certainly not in the fast lane of the motorway. Learning to drive takes a lot of practice. We need plenty of encouragement along the way. But slowly, slowly, you keep improving until, after many years, it feels entirely natural. Sharing our faith is much the same.
Easy as pie
Some people say that evangelism is easy. They say that you just need three things: you need to understand and believe the gospel, you need the Holy Spirit, and you need somebody to tell. All Christians by definition have the first two – and unless you are on a desert island, you also have the third. Simples! No problem. No training needed. Off you go. Go and evangelise the world. It’s easy – like falling off a log.
But it’s not easy, is it? I think that evangelism is almost uniquely difficult and we need all the help we can get. How can we tell it’s so difficult? Because not many of us do it! How many of the highly trained graduates leaving Bible college in the UK go on to be evangelists? Almost none. How many of them go on to be Bible teachers or church workers? Almost all. And once they’re pastors, how much of their time do they spend in personal evangelism? Relatively little.
Why? Precisely because it’s so hard to evangelise! It’s much easier for pastors to sit in their studies consulting commentaries and producing finely crafted sermons for their congregations (an important task) than going out to find awkward, bolshy, uninterested non-Christians to talk to. It’s easier to attend conferences discussing how to unpack the Bible than reading the Bible with non-Christians who aren’t at all convinced. And the organisational demands on church leaders are greater than ever before which makes it hard to prioritise evangelism.
What about the rest of us? We don’t find evangelism very easy either. What makes it hard? Fear mainly. The fear that I can’t do it. The fear of a negative reaction from our friends. The feeling that nobody is that interested anyway. The thought that there’s no point in getting into a hostile conversation or risking a friendship for no reason. The worry that we might jeopardise the relationship by saying too much. For all those reasons, we can’t find it in us to cross what evangelist Rico Tice calls ‘the painline’.
Take heart
Training in the local church is, I believe, the best way to overcome fear. I’m not talking ivory towers and 16-week evangelism courses and I’m certainly not talking head knowledge. I’m thinking about teaching a child to ride a bike – a hand in the small of their back, encouraging them along.
Take heart from the disciples. They were truly terrible evangelists and pretty much everything they touched in this area turned to disaster. They turned away children who wanted to come to Christ. They wanted to unleash destruction on people who didn’t accept them. They were fearful and lacking in faith time after time. When the soldiers came for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, they ran away in blind panic. They constantly missed the point of what Jesus was saying. They argued about which of them was the greatest.
And what was Jesus’ reaction to their (and our) ineptitude and incompetence in evangelism and discipleship? Incredible patience and incredible training! Jesus models, encourages, teaches, rebukes and coaches them in evangelism. This is why they were ‘good to go’ in Acts – plus, of course, they were now armed with the power of the Holy Spirit. As J. M. Boice points out, every time we read in Acts about someone being filled with the Holy Spirit, the next thing that happens is that they teach others about Christ.
A word to the pastors
Pastors, are you modelling evangelism to your church family? That’s how the Lord led his disciples. Are you helping your congregation overcome their enormous fears about evangelism by doing it yourself? Otherwise, there’s a danger of being like generals in the First World War safely behind the lines in their chateaux, sending the poor old privates ‘over the top’. Those of us who are pastors should be coaching, encouraging, supporting, helping, advising and mentoring those we serve and modelling how to share our faith. The local church is the lifeboat to reach the drowning world and the volunteer crew needs to be trained. Otherwise, they will remain safely but ineffectively tucked up in the harbour!
Dear leaders, do what you can. It’s hard because many leaders are busy, tired and discouraged. Is there someone nearby who you could meet for a coffee and find out what they think about faith and gospel? Could you find one friend and, after a while, invite them to look at a passage of the Bible with you? Might someone you know come to an event that your church is holding? Even if they decline (as they may well do!), you have started to be a model to your congregation. Tell your church about your failures. When we teach our children or a friend to drive and they keep stalling, we don’t say, ‘Why did you do that? I never stalled when I was learning.’ More likely, we’ll say, ‘You should have seen my mum teaching me to drive, it was like a mad kangaroo had got into the engine!’ Leaders can encourage their flocks by sharing their stories of personal evangelism – and especially their failures!
A word to the church family
Just in case you thought that evangelism was just for pastors, take a look at the Bible and the early church.
Pastor Jonathan Griffiths points out in Preaching in the New Testament that ‘the New Testament expects all Christians to engage in word-based evangelism.’ In other words, in the New Testament, it’s clear that we should all be talking to others about the good news of Jesus Christ. Preaching in church is a particular activity to which not everyone is called, but there are many other words in the New Testament about evangelism such as ‘announce’, ‘teach’, ‘admonish’, etc – and we can all be involved in that. Jonathan Griffiths talks about the interplay between the word ministry of Christians in general and the word ministry that church leaders do. We, the congregation, receive instruction from our pastors and learn about the Bible, then we pass it on to our friends in an easily accessible format. And we have opportunities and credibility with our friends that the pastor doesn’t have and, of course, our conversations with them allow for questions in a way that a sermon doesn’t.
This was what happened in the days of the early church. As Michael Green says in his excellent book, Evangelism in the Early Church, ‘Communicating the faith was not regarded as the preserve of the very zealous or of the officially designated evangelist … The ordinary people of the Church saw it as their job: Christianity was supremely a lay movement, spread by lay missionaries.’
So don’t think that you need to wait until you’ve got a formal qualification in theology or evangelism. That’s not the kind of training I’m talking about. Evangelism is something we learn by practice. That’s what we do when we do sport, of course. We learn as we play. We don’t just study the theory of football, we play football – and as we play, we are trained by the coach and we get better at it. Nobody says you have to study the theory of football before you play it – we just get on and play, and learn as we go along.
But, equally, nobody says you don’t need any training. We learn by kicking the ball – and being told how to kick it better and further and more accurately. Most training is like that – it’s continuing and continuous encouragement, advice, mentoring and coaching. It’s giving it a go. Hopefully, this book will be a part of that training.
Evangelism is also a team sport – and the team should be, above all, our local church but also the whole Christian community. As far as I can recall, every person I’ve introduced to Jesus has had some kind of prior Christian interaction. Someone else has often started off a conversation about the gospel and then I’ve found that I’m the one to take it on another stage.
Why do we need training and encouragement in evangelism? Because, along with prayer, it’s the hardest thing in the Christian life. Only with God’s help, the power of the Holy Spirit and useful training, in the sense I’ve described, will we get better at talking about Jesus Christ.
A personal word
God has put us all in different circumstances – with a unique circle of friends and contacts. We all have different backgrounds and a different story to tell. We all have advantages. I am very aware that I have been given many.
I have a very big circle of friends and I love talking – perhaps more than listening?! I grew up in a strongly Christian home where the Bible was poured into us morning, noon and night. Each Sunday, I would have at least three hours of Bible-based teaching from my father who was the pastor. At the time, I hated it and found it exceptionally boring – as I told my father! But it means I have a very deep knowledge of the Bible. At university, I studied History and when people started asking me about the ancient world in which the Gospels are set, it was right up my street. I was CEO of a bank. I’m 6 ft 2.
And I have incurable cancer. Yes, that is a big advantage – though a very painful one, admittedly. But it is an advantage because it makes people compassionate and sympathetic to my predicament and often intrigued by my story.
Now you are not me but, if you think about it, we all have something that God has given us which can be helpful. We also all have a unique circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances – those we rub shoulders with regularly who we might begin to reach.
One word of warning. The advice in this book comes from my experience of how to talk to friends in an easy and relaxed way. And yet, despite all my advantages, I sometimes talk to someone who reacts very negatively and gives me a ‘right hook’. There is an innate offence to the gospel and, however skilfully we talk about Jesus and the gospel, sooner or later someone will attack us, usually verbally. When that happens, please remember that our identity is in Christ. What matters is what the Lord thinks of us – not other people’s opinions. He warns us to expect hostility and he promises to be with us and help us when that happens.
At the end of each chapter, I have included a couple of things to help you think and pray about how you can share the gospel with the many, many people around us who do not know the wonderful love of Jesus for themselves.
Jeremy Marshall was the former CEO of the UK’s oldest private bank, C. Hoare & Co. He died in 2023 after a decade-long battle with cancer. During his final years he dedicated his life to sharing the Bible and explaining the Christian faith. His two posthumous books, Scattering Seeds of Hope and Meeting Jesus are due to be published by 10Publishing this November.
