As Christians, we know that evangelism is important. But most of us feel that we’re not very good at it and that we don’t do enough of it.
In this episode, Peter Orr speaks with Dave Jensen, who works as an evangelist for Evangelism and New Churches Sydney Anglicans. Dave helps us think about how we can increase in our fervour and ability for evangelism, and how we can do it as Christians together.
Links referred to:
- Evangelism and New Churches Sydney Anglicans
- Study at Moore Theological College
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 23:57 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: As Christians, we know that evangelism is important. But I imagine that most of us Christians feel that we’re not very good at evangelism and that we don’t do enough evangelism.
In this episode, I speak with Dave Jensen who works as an evangelist. He’s going to help us think about how we can increase in our fervour and ability for evangelism. I found it a really helpful, encouraging conversation, and I hope that you do too.
[Music]
PO: Welcome to Moore College’s Centre for Christian Living podcast. I’m Peter Orr. Today I’m very pleased to be joined by my friend Dave Jensen. Dave, welcome to the podcast.
Dave Jensen: Thank you very much, Peter! I’m a bit upset: am I the last Jensen in my family to be interviewed here on this podcast?
PO: Well, to be fair, I’ve interviewed your brother Michael. I haven’t worked through the others.
DJ: Oh, you haven’t done the others!
PO: I haven’t done the others.
DJ: So you’re building up.
PO: I’m building up!
DJ: You’re going through—starting at the bottom rung up.
PO: [Laughter] That’s right!
DJ: I understand. Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me, Peter!
Walking away from Christ
PO: Dave, you, at the moment, work for Evangelism and New Churches. We’re going to talk a little bit about evangelism. You obviously grew up in a Christian home—a high-profile Christian home—but you spent some time walking away from the Lord. What was it that triggered that drift away from Christ in your own life?
DJ: Yeah. There were two things. The first one was that I was not a Christian. That was the hard reality of it. Now, fascinatingly, I’m a twin, and my twin sister has never known a day not being a Christian, which just reaffirms continually the go-to passage for us in evangelism: 2 Corinthians 4—that it’s God who opens blind eyes. If you’re not a believer, the god of this age, the devil, has actually blinded your eyes, and that means that the gospel is really, in the language Paul uses, an odour: it will not get through (2 Cor 2:15-16).
Now, in many senses, I say all that not to abdicate responsibility, but rather to say my journey away from Christianity was entirely narcissistic, built around a desire for praise, adulation, self-contentment and happiness. I never would have considered it in those ways.
Thankfully, my family are wonderful people—wonderful Christians. That meant, I think, that they were one of the key parts that contributed to me never hating Christianity. I never hated God. In fact, I always identified as a Christian a little bit—on census forms and that kind of thing.
PO: So if someone had asked you, “Are you a Christian?”, would you have said “Yes”? Or would you have known enough to know that you weren’t actually a Christian?
DJ: Oh, it depends who I was talking to. [Laughter] If I was talking to a Christian, I would have been, “Oh …” If I was talking to a non-Christian, I would have said, “Yeah, because my religion’s Christian and your religion’s Christian and whatever.” But I knew that I wasn’t. I knew that I wasn’t, because I knew what a Christian was, and that wasn’t me.
As time went on, that meant my life went in a particular trajectory. In my late teens, I became a father. I joined the Australian army for a bunch of years and served as an infantry officer around Australia. I went through a divorce. A bunch of things happened.
But if you fast forwarded my life to the age of 28, I probably hadn’t thought about God for five or six years. My life wasn’t terrible at all. It wasn’t collapsing. I’d been divorced for years. It wasn’t this horrible things. I was a captain in the army. I was a playing a bit of footy. I was doing the things I wanted to do. But that was the problem: I just had never paused to think about it, and when I did, I realised, “Hold on: how come no matter what I do, I’m insatiably desiring more? I always want more, more, more. Is it possible that there’s more to life than what I’m first considering?” That led me to investigate Christianity and become a Christian.
Walking towards Christ
PO: So the trigger was the sense of, as much as you had a good life and you had everything that you could want, there was something lacking. Then you say you investigated Christianity, but you’d grown up in a Christian home. You’d been taught the Bible probably every day. What did investigating Christianity mean for someone who probably could have articulated the gospel and many doctrines better than a lot of Christians?
DJ: That is a wonderful question, because it strikes right at the core of what happened. What happened was I woke up one morning. I’d begun to think about it. My twin sister had given me an old laptop, which had sermons logged on it that I couldn’t delete. [Laughter] It was just the most irritating form of evangelism ever! She’d do this sort of thing all the time: she’s like a mosquito. Mosquito evangelism: zzzz!
I was living in Darwin and I watched a couple of sermons. These sermons very clearly articulated the gospel—God made it, we broke it, Jesus fixed it—in a very clear way, and yet no clearer than I had heard every single day. Yet for the first time, I got it! What it was that I initially got was my sin.
Sin had never been an issue for me at all. I’d never considered it, really. I felt guilty but that wasn’t sin; I just felt guilty about being caught. As I began to think on that day, it was, “Oh my goodness!”—the conviction of sin and the desperation of my plight before God. I called someone who I knew was a Christian who took me to Romans 5:6-8—that Jesus died while I was a sinner. So for the first time ever, I understood the cross and the resurrection.
It’s interesting: as you say, I could recite the catechisms and so on. I could have said the gospel. I taught Sunday school as a teenager. I did all these sort of things. And yet it wasn’t until I was converted that I realised I wasn’t a Christian’s monkey—ever! I’d never understood the gospel. Now that is a wonderful, affirming truth that we can discuss later about me as an evangelist—to know there’s no second part of the gospel [Laughter], a secret truth that you’ve got to show someone. No, no: it’s the same old story: when God illuminates minds and his Spirit opens eyes, that’s how people are saved. That’s how it happened.
Walking with Christ
PO: You become a Christian. I’m curious: all of that Christian truth—did it suddenly become activated? [Laughter] Did it suddenly become like “Oh, all this stuff that I’ve known all my life, it now makes sense!” Or did you feel like you were just a baby and you were having to learn everything from scratch?
DJ: Yes and no: there was certainly a sense of “Ohhhhh!” That meant, for example, immediately, with evangelism, I knew moment I became a Christian, “I have to tell everyone I know about this.” Number 1: I know that because I’ve been taught that my whole life. Number 2: Oh, I really now know that this is the most important thing [Laughter], so I was thinking about that. And I knew other things—about the place of Bible and the differences. Many of the things I was not biblically ignorant of.
However, very quickly, I realised I was a like a baby. I was like everyone else. It was almost like—I’ll use cricket as an analogy. In cricket, you learn the game by playing the game, not by reading about it. Now, you can read as much as you want. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to become a great cricketer. The only way to do that is to play it. It was like that: oh, I had head knowledge, but it wasn’t until I became a Christian that I realised that’s meaningless unless it’s applied to what it tells me about the real true God who I now know in my own life. Those things really fell by the wayside, and I had to start like everyone else who becomes a Christian—on my knees before God. Then it was up, down, up, down, falling short, failing, falling short, and that’s continued now [Laughter], of course—on and on.
Yeah, so it was there. It was very helpful. It connected a lot of dots quickly. The process of living as a Christian was the same process as it is, I think, for everyone who becomes a Christian.
PO: It must have been a very sweet phone call, calling your parents and your sister to tell them you’d become a Christian.
DJ: Yeah. I actually saved the news for when I was on leave. Two weeks later, I was in Sydney. It was sweet—although, Peter, you know we are highly reserved, middle class Australians, and having any emotion is very, very difficult. Even thinking about it makes me uncomfortable. But yes, I had to—for the first time and only time—be emotional with my parents. [Laughter] No, it was a beautiful time and that’s just continued.
Walking with Christ in the army
PO: How long did you spend in the army after you became a Christian, and how was that? I imagine the army would be a challenging place for a Christian.
DJ: Yeah, I stayed in the army for, I think, roughly another three years. It was a very challenging place for a Christian—which is funny, because there are chaplains in the army. But it’s really also a very—well, at the time, certainly—masculine, macho and often degenerate culture. Alcohol, promiscuity, violence—those things—are often par for the course for soldiers, and they were for me. Also, religion in general is viewed with suspicion. There’s a bunch of nicknames for Christians and others in the army that were used.
It was interesting: I think it was a great exposure to the complexities and difficulties that evangelism produces, because I was full of zeal and I wasn’t a coward; I was very quick to tell people. And yet I faced rejection—severe rejection—quickly. That was incredibly discouraging. Yet in God’s grace, I also saw one or two of my friends become Christians, and that meant I was able to persevere.
I think one of the huge issues that we face in evangelism is that the vast majority of us—most of us—hardly ever see anyone become a Christian in front of our eyes or anything like that. We might see people at church. But I was able to see it, and it was this very addictive, encouraging thing that spurred me on.
But it was very hard. In hindsight, I remember giving a Bible to someone. It was one of the first things I ever did. He said, “What should I read?” I said, “Oh, the Book of Romans is my favourite book.” My goodness! Anyway, he came in the next day and he threw the Bible at my head, and he said, “This is about circumcision!” [Laughter] I was, like, “Is it??” It was great point, actually.
Can I say to reflect, one of the things I picked up very quickly, because that had been my upbringing, was the essential nature of church. That’s not always implicit to every brand new convert. Many brand new converts don’t see the place and importance of church, but I knew it, because—well, I knew myself, but I also had been brought up knowing that church is what Christians get to do. It’s a wonderful thing. But when I evangelised people, I realised they didn’t have that background, and it was trickier for people as they came to know Christ, to know what next steps to take.
[Music]
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PO: And now let’s get back to our program.
Evangelism and New Churches
PO: Since that time, you’ve done a few different ministry roles, and you’re now working for Evangelism and New Churches Sydney. Tell us a little bit about that organisation and the role that you have.
DJ: Yeah. Evangelism and New Churches used to be called the Department of Evangelism. Some of your listeners may know of John “Chappo” Chapman, Australia’s greatest evangelist. He headed up the Department of Evangelism. It’s actually been in the Sydney Diocese for well over 100 years.
In essence, it’s quite—[Laughter] it’s not hard to explain; it’s just a bit weird to explain. In essence, it is an organisation that exists at the heart of the family of churches that are the Anglican Church in Sydney that exists for the purpose of encouraging parishes in evangelism so that we will see more people find life and hope in Jesus Christ across Sydney. Encouraging: that’s a big term that includes a bunch of things. That’s the evangelism piece.
20 or so years ago, the “New Churches” part was added to it in recognition of the essential nature of evangelism to church planting. So a wing of Evangelism and New Churches is to champion and encourage, but also to help establish new church plants across Sydney. I work specifically in the realm of evangelism in that place, and my job is really to help pastors, but also Christians, engage with non-Christian people to think carefully about how we’re doing evangelism so that more people become Christians.
Help for evangelising Christians
PO: Can you help us as listeners to the podcast?
DJ: Yes!
PO: How can we be better evangelistically, engaging with our non-Christian friends—both at the individual level, but at the church level?
DJ: Yes I can!
PO: Thanks! Okay. Next question! [Laughter]
DJ: Yeah. I think, brother, the first thing that we need to understand when it comes to evangelism is we need to understand the deflection. By that, I mean to say we need to understand what stops us doing it. Now, I’m going to make an assumption that if you’re listening to this, you are a born again believer who is probably an active member of your local church. That means, statistically, that 90 per cent of you will be convinced that evangelism is something Christians should do. There’s the gift of evangelism, but also the broad encouragement of the New Testament—that we are witnesses to Jesus across the world until he returns. He’s with us to the end of the age (Matt 28:20).
So 90 per cent of us believe we should do it. But what percentage of people, according to the data that we have—NCLS and otherwise, Peter—what percentage of people do you think actually are proactively involved in evangelism?
PO: A little bit lower than 90 per cent?
DJ: Slightly lower. Flip it on its head: around 10 per cent. So you have this disparity between conviction and action. The question really is, “How do we get people to go between that and move from conviction to action?” I think the way we do that is primarily identifying why we don’t do it.
I would offer that in my experience, but I think this is biblically explained as well [Laughter], the thing that prevents most of us doing evangelism is fear: we’re afraid. With good reason: Jesus promises that it will be scary (Matt 10:16-22), so when it is a scary, that’s a fulfillment of that. We see what happened to Jesus; he promises his followers that they will hate us as well (John 15:18). If we look at what happened to the Apostles in the Book of Acts (we’re doing a sermon series on that at the moment), the continual response they get is persecution, imprisonment, torture and death. So when we face rejection, firstly, it’s important that we understand that that’s not evidence of incompetent evangelism; it’s evidence of evangelism. That’s what often happens—more often than not. So when we understand that it’s fear that’s stopping us, how do we stop fear? How do we deal with the fear?
I think the most important thing I’ve seen in churches where you’ve got higher than usual levels of people involved in evangelism—and I just know from my own life as well—is that I think there’s three things.
Conviction
Number 1 is not to assume that the conviction that we should do it is a sufficient conviction. I think the bigger conviction that we need is not just that we should do it, but that no matter what above all else, it’s worth it, because eternity matters more than today—because you’re captured by the eternal realities of life that Jesus offers. Why does Jesus go to the cross? He goes because of the joy set before him, which is what Hebrews 12:2 says. When he says, “The Son of man must suffer”, what does he end with? “And rise from the dead” (Luke 9:22). Jesus dies because he knows he will rise from the dead. He knows that crucifixion works. But he also knows that eternity awaits for those who trust in him. It’s worth it. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he doesn’t want to do it, but he does it because it’s his Father’s will (Mark 14:35-36) and he knows it’s worth it.
Now, that means how do you get that in someone? Well, the good and bad news is there’s no short way to do it. I think it’s a continual drip feed of Bible preaching in small groups and in personal devotion, and in seeing the value of eternity and letting that be the compass that drives you: eternity, eternity, eternity!
I’ll give you an illustration of that. Not long ago, I was moving house and I had some removalists there, and we’d had a bit of a chat. They knew I was a minister. We began to speak about these things. I then went inside to get a little gospel tract to give to them, and then I walked across the garden and I felt this terror up my spine. You know, “Ohhh, what am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?”
How did I deal with that? Usually—often, more often than not—I felt I would go, “Ohhh, I won’t do it.” But I stopped and I thought, “Eternity. Eternity. Eternity. It’s worth it. It’s worth it.” That’s a split-second conversation I’m trying to have with myself all the time. It won’t happen intrinsically; I think we’ve got to teach ourselves.
So that’s the first one.
Action
The second thing I think that can really drive us towards more evangelism in our lives and in the lives of others is practice. Doing it—but not in the way that we may potentially think. Peter, if I say “evangelism” or “Let’s go do evangelism as a church”, what do you think many Christians hear? What do they think we’re going to be doing when we say, “Let’s do it”?
PO: Knocking on doors. Walking up to people on the street—that sort of thing.
DJ: Yeah. How do you think that makes most Christians feel?
PO: Ah, a little bit nervous? [Laughter]
DJ: Yeah. [Laughter] Slightly nervous! I like to have an assault rifle with me if I knock on someone’s door. I don’t like knocking on people’s doors! I don’t like standing on street corners and doing it. That’s socially embarrassing. That doesn’t mean I’m ashamed of the gospel; it means I’m ashamed of standing on the street corner and knocking on the door. I think understanding that that’s how most people feel is helpful: they feel like evangelism is like falling off a cliff. We need to help them realise, “Oh no. It’s not. It’s bungee jumping. But Jesus is with us. He’s with us forever. He’s with you right now.”
But also, therefore, as a church family, we need to think through ways in which we can lower the bar of entry into evangelistic activity in a way that’s actually not utterly paralysingly terrifying—such as, encouraging each other to bring people to church, to bring people to an evangelistic course, to drive their friend to and from, to chat about it on the way, and to actually be involved in that process with the church family.
Prayer
So we have conviction and we have action. The final one is, in essence, prayer—that we pray to God that he would give us courage, because it does take courage. It’s not easy; it’s hard. Don’t pretend there’s this easy version of it. There isn’t. But we pray to God to encourage conviction and to give us opportunities.
For the sake of the gospel
PO: That’s so helpful, Dave! Those are some very basic Christian convictions. But it’s so easy to forget them. It’s so easy to put them to the side. Reading the New Testament, I’ve been struck by how often particularly Paul defines “Christian” in connection with the gospel: we are gospel people. In other words, we are people who are concerned for the gospel to go out. Even in Philippians 1, Paul wants to hear that the Philippians have been standing firm in one Spirit, striving side by side for the faith of the gospel (Phil 1:27). Even Jesus, when he calls people in Mark 10 to be willing to renounce their families, it’s striking that he says, “Renounce your family for my sake and for the sake of the gospel” (see Mark 10:29-30). So this gospel conviction is really who we are, but we need to be reminded of it, as you say. These ways of doing evangelism are ways of making sure that we are and remain gospel people.
DJ: Yeah, big time. I think that’s right. Philippians 1: just as you said, Paul says,
I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now … (Phil 1:3-4; emphasis mine)
Yes, there’s a financial aspect to that. But there’s also a proactive evangelistic aspect of that—that we partner together, and not just with one another, but with God! [Laughter] It’s his gospel! And we also partner with the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus, who is with us always. We are in partnership with God in his mission to see his gospel proclaimed across his world for his people. Talk about a bungee jump security blanket! It’s just like, “Ahhh.” Whatever the response, it’s going to be okay.
Evangelising as a church
PO: This is also, as you’ve mentioned, something we do as a church. This is something that we do together. Obviously, I’m the one who’s going to have conversations with my friend or my family member. But evangelism is something that we do together, and we encourage one another and we pray for one another. That’s something that I’ve found helpful to reflect on.
DJ: My journey into effective evangelism [Laughter] happened through church. Our church encouraged triplets—prayer triplets—in evangelism: there’s three of you, you all come up with a friend to pray for, and there was a course coming up—a Christianity Explored or whatever it was—in a term’s time. The idea was to meet together or just message each other, and pray for each other’s friends. That changed everything for me! It meant I was able to think really intentionally, “Hey, what am I doing?”. It helped me to know that I’m not alone. I had friends to encourage me, support me and know about me. Even better, my friend Sam actually did come to that and was converted, and my friends who were in the prayer triplet came to the course. That meant they were there with me and Sam, and they knew all about him. They weren’t weird about it. I was able to partner together with them.
They say that the last thing to be a converted in a man is his wallet. Have you heard that before? It’s not true. The last thing to be converted in a man is his desire to humiliate himself in evangelism. He hates that so much, he’d pay any amount of money to get out of doing it! [Laughter] So I think we just need to continually encourage one another to do this. We’re better together.
Conclusion
PO: Wonderful! Well, Dave, I really appreciate your time on the podcast today, and I also really appreciate the work that you’re doing as you seek to encourage churches and Christians in their evangelism. Thanks very much!
DJ: Thanks very much! Thanks for having me!
[Music]
PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
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We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
[Music]
Bible quotations are also from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society, www.ibs.org. All rights reserved worldwide.
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