I understand as I start this post that lately in our culture, the word “evangelical” carries largely negative connotations. It is connected (unfairly, in most cases) with a specific conservative perspective embraced by many conservative Christians. And because of this linkage it is viewed as a dirty word.

But, it really shouldn’t be. The dictionary (very broadly) says the word is “of or according to the teaching of the gospel or the Christian religion.” I say “broadly” because the specific teaching in question of the Gospel (which means “Good News” and refers to the fact that God loves us and gave Himself for us on the Cross, which is indeed “good news”) relates closely to the etymology of the word “evangelical” itself …

The word in English comes from the Greek εὐαγγέλιον (euangelion), which literally means “good” (eu) “angel” (angelion, or messenger, one who delivers news). It should be obvious this has nothing to do with politics, because (particularly in our current political climate) there certainly is no “good news” to be found anywhere in politics.

For my part, the name “Evangelical” is even in the church I attend (Elim Evangelical Free, the first church planted in the U.S. in the Evangelical Free denomination). And thankfully ours is one of the least-political churches I know of. We have conservatives and progressives, and many on the spectrum in-between. Considering where we live, it is even reasonably diverse, including non-Whites and all genders in leadership. If you come to our church expecting to be appalled by the fact it is “Evangelical,” I hope you will be sorely disappointed.

Anyway, back to the tile of this post: “My Evangelical Journey.” Really what I am talking about here is my journey from a person who was fairly timid about sharing the Good News of Jesus with others, to one who now attempts to share it in any good way I can in whatever short time I have left on this planet.

And I hope that doesn’t mean that I hammer people over the head with the Gospel! I used to do that when I was a teenager, as I attended a Baptist church that encouraged us (without much real thought about it) to get out there and annoy strangers in the mall, with our large Bibles in hand, or (even more annoying) to knock on doors and ask people where they would spend eternity if they were to die tonight! (Thank God none of them called the police on us … which might have been well-deserved.)

No, that experience really caused me to withdraw from the idea of “evangelizing” the world around me. As a high schooler newly lit on fire with excitement about what I was discovering in the pages of the Bible, I had very briefly lived on the edge as a senior in high school, witnessing freely to classmates and teachers, and trying very hard to convince them that Christians weren’t as stupid as most of them thought we were.

But then I went to Biola University, a college in La Mirada, California where all attendees were required to be confessing Christians, as well as staff and teachers. To a large degree that leaves literally no one to share your faith with! And so I found myself settling into the “comfort” of not having to take risks to share the Good News with people who had not yet considered the claims of Christ.

I went directly from there to World Vision, a nonprofit organization where employees were all also required to be professing Christians. Similar story there.

I had a brief sojourn (between leaving World Vision in 1983 then returning in 1994) of getting “out there” in the secular world, but later in my journey God began working on me to reignite my faith which had by this point grown fairly dormant. By the time the flame had reignited, I had returned to World Vision, and worked there until retirement, from 1994 to 2019 (with a brief year-and-a-half hiatus in 2016 and 2017).

During that hiatus, something interesting happened. I realized that I had (once again) grown very dormant in the practice of sharing Jesus with the world around me, principally because in my everyday world at work there was no one to really share with. Which had once again caused me to slide into the comfort of silence.

Once I realized this, I began to pray about how to correct this situation. And God gave me the key: Not to “get out there and knock on doors” and make myself annoying as I had when I was a young teenager, but to replicate and extend what I had learned as a senior in high school about seeking to use my gifts and skills to develop relationships with friends and neighbors, relationships which would naturally expose those friends and neighbors to the hope which lies within me (at many times buried, hopefully now less so) and raise questions that we could then deal with honestly and forthrightly.

There are several types of evangelism, and I deeply appreciate the courage and creativity of friends (like Mohammed Mussa, whose fascinating life story I am currently working on) who have used their God-given life experience to preach the Gospel to crowds of strangers, even healing and doing miracles to show how God works through faith in His power to save us. But I believe there is another way suitable for the vast majority of us “more-ordinary” Christians who are going about our daily lives. And that is relationship evangelism, or “friendship evangelism” as it is alternately called.

Our former pastor Dr. Tom Mercer and his “Oikos Movement” talks and writes much about this. He speaks about reaching those “15 people” in your close network (your Oikos, the Greek word for “household”) whom God has placed on the “front burner of your life.” And so as I began to learn this, I also began to pray that God would not only give me courage and “relational permission” to share with my Oikos, but also to expand that network.

I discovered that, for me, there were four principle ways to go about doing this:

1. When I was in my 20s I wanted to be the world’s greatest novelist. Years later I realize this is not what God had for me. But He has gifted me with skills in written communication, and I realized He did this so I can use these to help share the Good News. So I began to seek effective ways to do this.
   
   First I volunteered and became an “online missionary” for a great organization called Global Media Outreach. They have an interesting model for sharing the Gospel. They raise funds to buy internet keywords and use these to reach out to people who are struggling in various ways. When people respond to their appeals, they seek to connect them with “online missionaries” like me. For seven years, I daily connected with and sought to establish trust relationships that spoke into the lives of people who were hurting and looking for answers. I know that God has provided answers in His Word, many which have been proven effective in my own life, so I sought to share those from a position of love, respect, sensitivity and concern.
   
   Second, following up on a “historical fantasy” novel and many magazine articles I wrote in my 20s, I sought to retrench in my writing career and rather than seek to become famous, seek to become successful at helping people to see through my writing how Jesus is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Now I’m working on a second novel, this one science fiction. I love sci fi but the vast majority of science fiction novels do not seek to share Good News, so I feel like this reality creates a golden opportunity to help change the narrative a bit! I’m about halfway (10 years) into this second novel, and hope for the grace to finish it in the time I have left. Your prayers to this end would be appreciated!
   
   I’ve also sought to share His hope through articles and blogs. In fact, this blog itself is an example of that. And I am pleased at how many people have responded positively. (If you are one of them, and have read this far, please leave me an encouraging comment! Actually, any and all comments are appreciated!)
   
   Finally, there’s social media. I was a social media specialist for a few years during my final four years at World Vision, and partly as a result of this felt a little “social media-burned-out” after I retired. I find the way Christians (including myself, in the past) often use Facebook, Twitter, etc. for political argumentation and to convince people of the rightness of their own perspective, somewhat tiring (to put it nicely) and often offensive (more truthfully). I think little is accomplished as a result, and I think the recent history of our churches here in the U.S. has proven that this approach often does more harm than good.
   
   But I do think there are opportunities for positive reinforcement of the Gospel message through social media. One of these that I have been focusing on during the past 10 years is a website called Quora. During the past decade I have created and posted more than 470 responses to questions (generally on faith-related topics) that people on Quora have directed my way.
   
   The way Quora works is that if you post a response to a question, and it is widely read and upvoted and commented on, you gain traction as an “expert” in that question space. You will see on my profile that I am considered “expert” in more than a half dozen question spaces, including the Bible (207 posts), Christianity (146 posts), Jesus (57 posts), and the New Testament (12 posts).
   
   In the past 10 years, I have received about one-third of a million views to the content I have posted on Quora. That content has received more than 1,200 “upvotes” and several dozen shares to external platforms. I’m also “followed” by nearly 200 people who want to read anything I put out there.
   
   One of the things I have discovered is that when I tell an authentic and compelling story that points people to Good News, I get a lot more traction with it. An example of this is my “most-read” and most-liked post (by far), answering the question, “According to the Bible, what are you supposed to do when someone steals from you?” I shared the story of an amazing experience I had with someone who burglarized a business I owned in my 20s, and how that turned out for God’s glory. Nearly 58,000 people have read that post, 125 have upvoted it, 17 have commented, and 17 shared it externally.
   
   Secondarily, I also get good traction when I address controversial social topics. But I always seek to do this with love, sensitivity and gentleness, avoiding condemnation or guilt trips.
   
   Currently I am working to post at least one response to a question I receive each day (and I get many more than that), and also keep up with comments and following back those who follow me. Doing this I get an average of nearly 500 views per day to my posts. Quora has offered to pay me for my posts but I’ve declined, knowing that a paywall would limit my readership. Short of publishing a novel that sold much better than my previous books have sold, I can’t think of any better way I could use my gift of writing when it comes to sharing the claims of Christ. I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to preach, like Mohammed did, to stadiums full of tens of thousands of people. But neither did C.S. Lewis, and through his writings he reached millions.
   
2. One of the ways I have discovered to connect with the people around me is to hone an interest in something that many of them may also be interested in, and create groups that focus on this interest. That is why I founded “MushroomObsession.com.” Over the past two decades I’ve developed a keen interest in hunting exotic edible mushrooms, and the Pacific Northwest is one of the best places in the world to do that. After retiring from World Vision I realized I could use this “hobby” to reach people who share my interest. (And, as it so happens, there is a growing interest in exotic mushrooms happening all around us!)
   
   There are two ways I seek to cultivate (pardon the pun) this mushroom obsession. One is combined with my writing. I firmly believe unique characteristics exhibited by various types of fungi are one of many “proofs” of the existence of a creative intelligence, and so on my mushroom blog I have written several articles about how this is so. I also have used what I have learned in this regard in many conversations with skeptics. Once you have convinced someone that a creative intelligence is behind something that they previously assumed was fully “natural” (i.e., came about as a result of pure chance), the question “So who created that?” is begged. I’ve heard responses such as, “Do you think it was aliens?” Which begs another obvious question … if so, who created the aliens? The creator is always more complex and sophisticated and authoritative than the created. It’s a fundamental principle that intelligent Christians really need to be engaging their skeptical neighbors in discussion about: Creation (whether we’re talking feats of art, feats of engineering, or feats of nature such as the very cells that comprise our ridiculously complex human organisms, and the very universe all around us) always demands a Creator.
   
   The second way is engaging friends and neighbors in the hobby in more practical, face-to-face events. For instance, I created a group for exotic edible mushroom enthusiasts on the “Nextdoor.com” (neighborhood website) platform. Through this I reach hundreds of my neighbors who are interested in mushrooms. I have more than 150 members of this group and invite all of them to participate in free mushroom training forays in the woods. Google has also become a great friend in directing people with exotic mushroom hunting interest to my website.
   
   There’s nothing like taking an exhilarating walk through God’s beautiful creation, alone together for a few hours, to spark wonderful, relational conversations that have the potential to ultimately lead to people’s need for their Creator. I take care to shower the people God provides for these events (and I had more than 30 participants during the height of the Fall hunting season in last October alone) with kindness, respect, and give them a great experience … all for free! What a deal, right? God has used this to bless me with great relationships and conversations with neighbors with whom I otherwise would never have had the opportunity to meet and share my life.
   
3. Shortly after my first “retirement” from World Vision U.S., I trained to be a gig economy driver (with Uber and Lyft) and began to do quite a bit of driving of mostly total strangers in my car. It didn’t take me long to realize God had provided me with a “captive audience” for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour for these drives, depending on destination. But I knew I couldn’t simply “hammer” people with the Gospel (for one thing, “proselytizing” is understandably against the rules of these organizations and can get you quickly fired). So I employed a three-fold strategy in my interactions with my customers: First, from the moment I learned their names and where I was picking them up, I would pray for them — that God would open my eyes as well as their own to their need for Him and their specific life needs, and that he would use my words as another plank in the staircase that He was constructing in their lives that might ultimately lead them to knowing Him. Then second, I would try hard to give them a great driving experience … offering conversation if they were open (keeping silent if they weren’t), playing their favorite music, offering water and snacks, and getting them quickly and safely to their destination. Because of this, I achieved about as high of a driver rating as you could get on these two platforms. And of course I knew that actions (of respect and kindness) always speak louder than words.
   
   Third and finally, if they were open to chatting (and about half my riders were … I learned you could always tell by where in the car they chose to sit, either behind me or to one side, and how quickly they pulled out headphones or their handheld device), I had specific conversational strategies designed to help point them to God. For people interested in mushrooms, that was the mushroom conversation I referred to earlier. But for these and others, I always sought to ask lots of questions that were designed to help give them opportunity to talk about the critical pain points in their lives, and I listened carefully to how they responded. In combination with my prayers for them, and my listening, this strategy often yielded great results. Many times, after we had arrived at our destination and we had connected in conversation, I would conclude with, “Hey, I really appreciated what you shared with me. I believe there is a God who cares personally about our needs, and that He listens to us when we talk with Him. Would you be open to me praying with you about these things before we part ways?” People often were, and then I would find myself praying in my car with people with serious needs, nearly ever week.
   
   There were also others who connected with my love of writing … such as the young truck driver who told me he was the world’s biggest science fiction fan! When I told him I was writing a science fiction novel (not yet published), he was so excited I thought he might break my car (he was an absolutely huge guy and he could really bounce my Subaru around in his enthusiasm). He was very disappointed he couldn’t (yet) download the book I’m writing on Kindle, then and there. But instead he downloaded my historical fantasy novel, and I hope he enjoyed it!
   
   During the Covid pandemic I had to reduce my driving of passengers I didn’t know. So instead I did delivery driving (for Uber, DoorDash, GrubHub and Postmates), which still provided opportunities to serve and connect with people. But then, due to an insurance kurfuffle, I had to stop driving gig economy altogether, so now I am seeking other ways to serve and connect with people (through mushroom hunting, etc.).

Anyway, I guess my point in all this is a challenge. Please don’t wait as long as I did to try and figure out how to share the Good News of Jesus with others in your network of relationships (and even create new networks of relationships for this purpose)! How has God gifted and equipped you? We can all love, serve, and connect with others, if we are willing to rise above the busy-ness in our lives and get to fulfilling the true business that God has given us, as expressed in two passages of Scripture, the first known as “the Great Commandment” and the second as the “the Great Commission” …

³⁵ And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

¹⁸ And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Matthew 22:35-40 and 28:18-20

These two teachings of Christ’s, working hand-in-hand, form our primary job description as Jesus’ followers: 1) Love God above all others. 2) Love our neighbors as ourselves. 3) Make disciples of all nations.

In this “evangelical” task, Jesus Himself is truly “with us, to the end of the age!” Wow!