A few months ago I started a series of blog posts on personal evangelism. My goal in doing this was twofold: to motivate myself to share my faith more effectively, and to help equip other followers of Jesus to do the same. And it's working — at least for myself. I've had several opportunities recently to share my testimony with others, and it's almost like the Lord has been bringing people to me who are already moving towards faith on the Engel scale . (See also pages 54 – 57 on this topic in Wimber's book Power Evangelism ). What has helped me are the guiding principles for doing evangelism that I described previously and which can be summarized like this: The Lord wants everyone to be saved, and he's commissioned and empowered his followers (including me!) to help Him gather people into his kingdom. So let's get on with it! To put this into practice, whenever I go out into the marketplace I try to start by praying a simple prayer along these lines. But it's still hard. Often I don't know what to say to people and feel like it would be useless to even try to talk to them about Jesus. And instead of feeling I'm being led by the Spirit, I usually feel like God is a million miles away from this cold, dark world I live in. The answer of course is to persevere. But it's also important to build upon these evangelism principles by adding priorities and practices. It's just like when you're building a house, you first lay down the foundation and then you erect the walls. And that's what I'll try to briefly do here. Evangelism Priorities The number one priority for effective personal evangelism is to make time for people . You can't tell people about Jesus if you don't talk with them! Our world is so hectic nowadays, and we are so stressed out most of the time, that we tend to be more focused on the tasks we need to do than the people we encounter as we perform them. This is probably the major hindrance that prevents us from sharing our faith with those we encounter in the marketplace. Valuing people more than our tasks, goals and accomplishments is a huge shift for many of us, but it's essential if we're to become effective in evangelism. Another priority when doing evangelism is open, honest sharing of your personal experience of God . Sharing your testimony — what you were like before you were a Christian, how you became a Christian, and how meeting the Lord changed your life — is generally more effective in winning people's hearts than reciting the Bridge to Life (Navigators), the Four Spiritual Laws (Campus Crusade for Christ) or some other salvation formula. A third priority is to view evangelism as a lifestyle . When Jesus called his first disciples, he told them he would make them fishers of men (Matt 4:19). Then later after he rose from the dead, he instructed them to go and make disciples, that is, others who would do what Jesus taught them to do (Matt 28:18-20). And if we too are followers of Jesus, then clearly our main job is to fish — to work with the Lord to bring men and women into God's kingdom. Evangelism Practices While taking time just to talk with people must be a priority for those of us who want to become more effective in evangelism, it's even more important for us to learn how to listen . While the ultimate goal of evangelism is to bring people into the kingdom, our immediate goal when we share our faith with someone should simply be to try and lead them one or two steps higher on the Engel scale. If you can simply lead them from merely having some interest in Jesus Christ to deciding to investigate Jesus further, for example by reading one of the gospels or visiting your fellowship, then you've probably done your job for the day as far as fishing for that particular person is concerned, because they've gone from sniffing the bait to actually taking a nibble. To accomplish this, you must listen carefully how people respond when you talk with them as this enables you to determine what level of awareness, interest and involvement they already have with Christianity. A second practice that is important when doing evangelism is to use the J-word . For example, if you're in a conversation with someone and they offer some objection concerning what they perceive as negative in Christianity, you might respond with "Well, you have a point there. But Jesus says..." and simply quote some verse where Jesus said something that bears on the subject. Remember, the goal of evangelism isn't to win people to Jesus, not to your church or denomination or personal way of thinking. Finally, if you want to become more effective in sharing your faith you should make it a practice to ask God for boldness . When the early disciples did this together in Acts 4:23-31 the result was that they were filled with the Holy Spirit and with boldness to proclaim the gospel even in the face of opposition. As Ken Blue, the former pastor of Foothills Vineyard in San Diego once told us many years ago, "Evangelism is just guts." So ask God for guts.  Cheers, Mitch

I wrote this particular worship song way back in the mid-80s. This was a few years after Ingrid and I encountered Vineyard worship and the teachings of John Wimber. Although the Vineyard Movement has Evangelical roots that acquired a Charismatic flavor, my song actually derives from the Kyrie of the Catholic Mass. I'll explain why in a moment, but first here are the lyrics: Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Lord, have mercy upon a sinner. Christ, have mercy upon my soul. Man of Sorrows! Man of Sorrows! Like a sheep I have gone astray. May your wounds take my sins away. Bread of heaven! Bread of heaven! Feed me 'till I no longer hunger. Let me drink 'till I thirst no more. One of the things that attracted me to Wimber and the early Vineyard was how he often worked together with different denominations to advance the kingdom of God. An example of this with Catholicism is the conference that John did in the late 80s with Francis MacNutt, a Catholic priest who practiced and taught healing prayer and was widely regarded as a leader in the Catholic Charismatic Movement. MacNutt wrote several books including Healing (1974) to help equip other Catholics pray for people's healing, and Ingrid and I were blessed from reading this book and some other Catholic Charismatic equipping materials we learned about from the Vineyard's own magazine Equipping the Saints . Also, because I had been an unreligious pagan before I became a Christian ( read my testimony if you haven't yet) I was hungry to learn everything I could about Christianity. So as a new believer I visited many churches of different denominations and read all kinds of Christian literature from St. Augustine to John Bunyan, John Wesley, Charles Finney, C.S. Lewis, Smith Wigglesworth and many others. So I guess it's not surprising that some of the early worship songs I wrote were "seasoned" sometimes with the flavors of different denominations. But this song is special. Because it's simple. And Biblical. We sang it many times in our early home fellowships, often as a communion song as we shared the bread and wine together in remembrance of our Lord's death, resurrection and coming return. I hope you like it too. You can listen to a recording that I made of this song on SoundCloud , and you can download a PDF leadsheet that has the melody in musical notation along with lyrics and guitar chords. One more thing: the song is dedicated to the Reverend Dennis Dickson , a priest of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada who was a very good friend of ours and passed away some years ago. Blessings in Christ, Mitch P.S. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you can be notified whenever we put up a new worship song on our SoundCloud page. 

Besides the Ephesians 6 passage that I talked about earlier, another Scripture on spiritual warfare that is frequently misunderstood (and often argued about) is this verse from James: Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. (James 4:7) Many Christians take this as a promise they can claim in their personal struggle against temptation, accusation, and other kinds of attack they experience from the Enemy. Others, especially some Bible commentators, point out that the passage in which this verse is found has a corporate dimension: What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: "God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble." Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you — who are you to judge your neighbor? (James 4:1-12) It appears, these commentators say, that what James is actually talking about here is selfishness and how it poisons relationships among the people of God. And the antidote James appears to suggest is repentance, not "duking it out" with the Devil. Who is right? Both are, actually. For although the focus here of the exhortation to "resist the Devil" is to resist Satan's attempts to create disharmony and strife among us, the statement that the Devil will flee if we resist him is a general truth — a promise from God — that James is applying here to a particular situation involving the audience he is writing to. Look at Jesus for example. In Luke 4:1-11 when Jesus was "led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil" he experienced a whole range of different attacks from the Evil One of which the Gospel writer keys in on three in particular. Jesus resisted each attack however, and in the end after the Devil had emptied his quiver of flaming arrows, he left — probably to try and plan some other schemes to bring down Jesus. So the Scripture which says that if we resist (and keep on resisting!) the Devil, he will (eventually) flee from us — or at least walk away in frustration — is indeed a trustworthy promise. And it applies both on a personal level in our struggle against the Prince of Darkness and on the wider corporate level of God's people resisting together the attempts of Satan to cause division and disunity among them. Context is important when interpreting Scripture, but truth is true regardless of the situation it's being applied to. —Mitch

The other day I was browsing an architecture and design magazine, and suddenly I remembered what it was like before I met the living God. I was a young man at university, and the whole world was wide open before me. There were a thousand things that interested me, and a thousand ways I could have gone in life. A thousand ways I could have lost myself. Ten thousand ways I could have lived, loved, died, and yet never have found the Author of Life, and the true life that He offers to all of us. How can I possibly express my deep gratitude to my Father for revealing His Son to me ? I could have searched for a thousand years and yet never found God. Ten thousand years wouldn't even have been enough, for only when God reveals Himself to us can He truly be found. "Who do you say I am?" asked Jesus of his disciples, and Simon Peter said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 16:15-17). May the living God reveal Himself to you too though His Son Jesus. —Mitch