Why Evangelism (and Revivals) Mattered: The Primacy of Persuasion, in the Church and in All Human Society

We have not because we ask not.

by Rod D. Martin
December 1, 2024

I actually think evangelists and revivals were valuable. I wish we still had them.

I grew up in churches that brought in evangelists, and had revivals regularly. I can distinctly remember at least one who was quite manipulative. He was never brought back. The rest seemed valuable to my young mind, at the very least for shaking things up and causing people to actually bring other people to church.

Oh, and they were also useful for proclaiming the Gospel.

It seems to me that the reason Southern Baptists (and specifically, the North American Mission Board) killed their evangelism and revival emphases was a growing dismissal of such things among then-younger seminarians and their “cool” younger professors. Perhaps I’m mistaken. But it seems to me that this growing culture was the leading edge of the trend away from all such things.

That hasn’t worked out very well. There are many reasons for the loss of 3 million Southern Baptists (out of 16 million) over the last 15 years. There are many reasons for the inflation-adjusted collapse in Cooperative Program giving (never mind that Nashville never adjusts for inflation: the real numbers are ghastly, but never reported). There are many reasons we’re baptizing fewer people than we have in over half a century.

But wouldn’t it make sense that one of those reasons might be that we no longer ask people to become Christians? You know: actually ask them.

We did. Now we don’t. And the difference in results is pretty clear.

Nothing I say here is intended to step on anyone’s soteriology. I affirm that God is sovereign. I’m talking about what is expected of us. I would argue this just the same with Tom Ascol as I would Jerry Vines (although with the former, I’m sure we’d veer off into a discussion of the Regulative Principle).

The thing is, the Great Commission teaches us one particular lesson of universal applicability: that for us, God commands persuasion rather than force. This applies to economics, to politics, and certainly to discipling the nations.

At the Final Judgment God will use force. But in this life, he does not send Paul to Mars Hill with a sword (like a jihadist); and at the same time, He does not refrain from sending Paul to Mars Hill (like a Zoroastrian). He does not plead like a beggar (as some maintain, shamefully), but he pleads nevertheless, as a Father who knows the fate of His wayward children and earnestly desires their return .

He would have been entirely right to kill Adam and Eve in the Garden; and likewise, to give no warning to Noah and let His greatest of resets be complete. He would have been entirely within His right and His power to create men who would entirely choose Heaven.

He did not. And He chose persuasion as His mechanism of action. We are commanded to persuade. By implication we are also commanded not to compel.

Now anyone who’s sold, or been sold to, recognizes what’s happening when the salesman hands his prospect off to his manager. And likewise, the Holy Spirit must close the sale. None of us are that persuasive.

Yet persuade we must. And I invoke the Great Commission as a universal principle, because it informs everything else. If God would entrust the most important matter in all of life to persuasion (humanly speaking), that fact teaches us how He addresses other lesser matters too. Government must be by the consent of the governed. There is a time for force (as there will be at the Judgment), but it is limited. Even the offerings for the construction of the Tabernacle and the Temple were voluntary, and God Himself (in 1 Samuel 8) limits the government’s legitimate taxing power to less than the tithe, leaving the state with very little capacity for compulsion. We should live as free men. We should reason lovingly with our wives and children as we disciple them. We should organize our economies on market principles rather than state planning. In all things, we should be imitators of Christ, applying God’s own chosen priorities.

So as Zig Ziglar would have said, we are all salesmen, and everything is selling.

Now if God has made persuasion a guiding principle in virtually all arenas, how much more so in that core arena of the Gospel, in which He states it boldly and explicitly?

I am persuaded by our many Calvinist friends that invitations, and revivals, and evangelistic appeals may be manipulative. I have witnessed it myself. But I am equally persuaded by our many Provisionist friends (and what Calvinist could disagree?) that the mere fact that there are bad evangelists should not abolish evangelism.

Church planting is wonderful, and sometimes involves evangelism (though it often relies far more on proselytizing). But it is not itself evangelism.

Our numbers bear out our neglect of such things. We are told our prior numbers were inflated by the aforementioned emotional manipulation, and perhaps that is so. But is the current system working? And did the prior system actually fail? Or are these two assertions without adequate evidence, and once we examine the evidence, we find that it was the innovators who were wrong?

The Great Commission commands persuasion. We grant that the Holy Spirit must “close the sale”, but “how will they hear without a preacher?” Evangelistic meetings and revivals incentivized members to invite their lost friends (and to come themselves) to hear the Gospel, night after night. They came, they heard, and many were unquestionably saved. They multiplied. They were made new, they went about making new converts, and the world was made better with them.

The less we do of this, the more we preach only to the faithful. Except even that is not true, because in fact, our churches now hardly meet at all. Where is Sunday night? Where is Wednesday night? Prayer Meeting is gone. Church Training is gone. How can we even consider whether or not to give an invitation at a service that never takes place?

The first rule of political advertising is that a voter must hear your message seven times before it connects. How many fewer times do average people hear the Gospel message now than they did 25 years ago? Than 50?

I think this all began — well-intended, of course — at NAMB and in the seminaries. It culminated in the SBC’s ill-fated “Great Commission Resurgence”.

I think we are failing by our own hand. I think we are losing America — and with it the world — in precisely the same way so many businesses have failed: by ceasing to do what we originally did that succeeded.

It’s not too late to change course.

We could start at your church.

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