Evangelism is NOT a Gumball Machine

I walked through the restaurant and at the front door, there was a gumball machine. My 8 year old looked up at me as she always does when we go by gum ball machine and asked if she could get one. Usually I don’t carry any quarters, but today, I had one in my pocket. I pulled the quarter out, handed it to her, and she proceeded to put the quarter in the machine. She pulled the lever, and a gumball began gliding down the roundabout to exit hole. She grabbed her gumball, popped it into her mouth and we headed out. She had completed the process of procuring a gumball.

As a professional Pastor, I spent years of my life trying to understand the secret of a successful evangelism ministry. Early in ministry, I began to think of evangelism sort of like a gumball machine. Pop the quarter in and out comes the product. This was the way that I handled sharing God with others. If I gave them the ‘right’ information and made sure that they processed it correctly, it was surely going to end with a Christian rolling out of the exit hole. Sometimes this worked wonderfully, and sometimes it ended with abysmal results. When the process didn’t end the way that I had hoped, I would form my own theories as to why it wasn’t working.

Not the Right Data

Clearly, I wasn’t giving the correct information to the person that needed to become a Christian. I began to do a thorough search of various strategies of presenting what I thought would be the correct material. I practiced saying these incredibly important words out loud to myself. I offered copious amounts of time trying to refine my presentation. I used various gospel presentation that were ‘guaranteed’ to create a convert. Strategies that touted great success seemed to yield the exact same results that I had experienced prior to my quest for correctness. The only ‘success’ that I found was when people were asking questions regarding faith already and I was able to correctly answer them.

Not the Right Person

Was it possible that I wasn’t going to the most ready people to accept such a presentation? Trying to share the correct information with a neighbor wasn’t working. In fact, it was having negative effects on my relationship with them. I tried going to the homeless population in our city, thinking maybe that those that were down and out on their luck might find some reprieve in good news. I found homeless people everywhere in our downtown metro area, and began sharing my correct data with them. The results were terrifying. I could directly correlate my positive results of someone coming to faith with providing food for someone who was starving. Providing cigarettes for the nicotine addict also yielded conversion in our community. It was a bit crazy.

Not Enough Spirituality

Admittedly, I was not practicing what I was preaching during this period of my life. My spirituality lacked and my passion for God had waned. Somehow, I was still convinced that I needed gumballs to drop from the exit door in the form of conversion and I kept trying. With each ‘failure’ in my attempts, there was a nagging feeling of spiritual inadequacy. I wasn’t praying enough. My bible study and reading had all but disappeared in the effort to find the ‘magic bullet’ of evangelism. God may not have been happy with me at the time of me sharing the faith with others.

Or something else?

When my life imploded with addiction, I was put away by the local church and found myself attending AA meetings for those that struggled with addiction. In rooms full of addicts, I began to understand evangelism in a very different way. The addicts were there acknowledging their own dysfunction, in front of other people. They were sharing their own experience with addiction and recovery. I found new life in these stories, one of new passion and hope, that I hadn’t had for years. The addicts that shared with me didn’t have their ‘data’ correct. I wasn’t really the correct person that they should be sharing with and God knows most weren’t ‘spiritual enough.’ But they had something that I needed. They had life and hope and I was drawn to that.

Furthermore, the people that I found in recovery were honest. They were being themselves in a way that was refreshing and genuine. They invited honesty back, regardless of the consequence of that honesty. This was something new for me that I didn’t find in my quest for the perfect evangelism strategy.

My life is not like a gumball machine. No one put a quarter in and had me fall out as a perfect circle from the exit door. I’m still spinning in the cylinder bumping along trying to figure my life out. But there were other gumballs along the way who helped smooth some edges, and for them I am grateful. I call them my hero. And they correctly evangelized me in the ways of recovery.