Power does not make Evangelism easier...

The Power Team - Some time in the 90s

The more I've thought about evangelism, and how to get people rolling in evangelism, the more I've decided that it takes focusing on 4 things. The first focus is Developing the Right Mindset. Even though it's a little cringy, the other three focuses also start with "M"s, but I'll roll those out in other posts. 

For now, we'll focus on Developing the Mindset. There are a number of mindset shifts we may have to make in order to do evangelism: 

  1. Believing that evangelism is for everyone and not just for the pros 
  2. Understanding that the point of evangelism is not to win arguments or even to look knowledgable but to plant seeds of the Gospel. Sometimes, you successfully plant seeds of truth even when you get stumped. Sometimes, you plant those same seeds even when you pray for a sign or something that DOESN'T happen. 
  3. Coming to terms with the fact that Evangelism is just hard. This is the one I want to focus on today.
At RemCon San Diego 2026, I'll be teaching on Power Evangelism. No, that's not evangelism where you break a bat over your knee or tear a phone book in half (you're thinking of the Power Team). Power Evangelism is sharing the gospel accompanied by a demonstration of power like a healing, word or knowledge, deliverance, or some other sign. 

At the conference, I plan on opening my session with this statement: Power doesn't make Evangelism easier. Evangelism makes Power easier. I see more examples of power when I'm out sharing the gospel than in any other arena of my life (at least that's how it feels).  Nevertheless, here's a video of a guy who gets healed as a sign of the Gospel I just preached and then promptly goes on to NOT get saved: Akash Story: Get's healed as a sign, doesn't get saved. There aren't any real tricks that make evangelism easier. Everyone feels weak and scared at some level during random street evangelism, and adding a prayer for some kind of miraculous sign definitely doesn't relieve any of the pressure.

The fact is, the difficulty of Evangelism sets you up for God to come through in some way. 

One interesting way that God sometimes shows up in Evangelism is through what I believe is a "word of wisdom." The Bible mentions the word of wisdom only once. It shows up in the list of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, but there is no explanation of what it is. The first time I ever thought that I'd seen it was when I was sharing the Gospel with a young woman who said she was a Christian but she prayed to God using a crystal on a 999 vibration. Uh, what?

While we were talking, I found myself completely baffled about what to say, but all of a sudden, something came to me, and I began asking questions and making statements that came across very insightful. Click here to watch a video clip of that exchange: Talking to God with crystal on a 999 vibration?

The video clip should start the moment this potential "word of wisdom" came to me. I know you can't listen inside my head, but if you could have heard my thoughts, you would have heard me saying, "Oh God, oh God, what in the world do I say now?" However, when I go back and watch this interaction, I'm surprised at how confident I sounded through out the exchange starting with this clip. That's what makes me think it was a word of wisdom. It wasn't secret knowledge. It was something anyone could have said, but it seemed to plop into my head when I felt ill-equipped.

I am a big fan of cleverly crafted apologetic arguments, but in this case, I was stumped, and I really feel like God showed up in my weakness. 

RECAP: Evangelism in just hard. Everyone get's stumped. God shows up in those moments of weakness...


Sometimes. 


Other times you just get stumped, you replay the conversation over and over in your head, and you learn what to say next time from the greatest teacher God gave to the natural world--failure. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Prophecy that made this guy LEAVE Wellspring!

Image
Shawn Lazar's testimony  Last week, I posted A Sad Story with a Surprise Ending  about the topic of fake prophets manufacturing things that look like prophetic words. At Wellspring, we had to make a decision about what to do with the invalid prophetic trickery that's going on out there. We decided it would be an overreaction to stop our own ministry. We decided it would be an under-reaction to just carry on without mentioning anything.  Instead, I made last week's post as a step toward transparency and addressing this issue head-on. On Sunday, when we do our own stage prophetic ministry, we will address the fake stuff going on and invite people into critically testing every word.  Today, I want to do two things. First, I want to give the link to a video and a paper that I put together to explain how to categorize prophetic words and subsequently test them. Click here to watch the video and/or read the paper Types, Tests, and Shelves for Prophetic words . Second, I wa...
Read more

This couldn’t wait...

Image
Jerry, serving in the snack room at VBS As of the writing of this post, it’s 3:00 am. I woke up, realizing I hadn’t actually organized strategic prayer for Jerry Slagle yet, and this is no small matter. The original plan was to send out a VBS recap email, but that can wait until next week. Jerry has been fighting cancer for more than two years. Recently, he was given a very sad and scary report from his doctors that he only has limited time left, less than a year. However, two weeks before he got the report, a person on our prayer team had a dream that we believe was from God, telling us that “we need to pray for Jerry.”  Here is the text from that dream: Two weeks ago I had a very intense dream about Jerry Slagle.  In the dream, I knew that he was in a life or death scenario (I assumed the cancer). I was outside somehow gathering people together. We (church members) began urgently alerting each other one by one. Instinctively we began to form a path with people strategically ...
Read more

VBS and Plasma Cannons

Image
  Two weeks ago, we had one of the largest VBS weeks in Wellspring history. This year, as in other years, we heard testimonies of kids starting their discipleship journeys with Jesus, encountering God, and hearing his voice. One of the things I love about VBS is that everyone gets really into it. I am usually in the Bible Drama Room, where we put on skits that include a fun science experiment and end with a moment where we minister to the kids.  I never get the idea that the BDR people are "too cool" to get really into it. On the contrary, sometimes I step back and marvel that a bunch of tired, working adults would spend so much time working on a skit for kids. This year the the Main Stage actors worked even harder! They were up at the church rehearsing numerous evenings and afternoons. The fact is, the whole church comes together to pour themselves out for the kingdom, and the love and care shows.  Click here to see Photos from VBS 2025 - Kingdom Climbers Click here to s...
Read more