Mark Mittelberg, as executive vice president of the Willow Creek Association where you champion the area of evangelism, you're one of North America's recognized authorities on evangelism. In your book, Becoming a Contagious Christian, you and Bill Hybels write that people often have a mental image of evangelism which doesn't fit their personality. And so their passion to share Christ fades, because they assume they must act in ways which are contrary to what they're comfortable doing.

Let's talk about how Christians can find their fit for sharing Christ and other trends in evangelism.

On Mission: We hear a lot today about lifestyle evangelism. Is that a legitimate approach?

Mittelberg: I believe in lifestyle evangelism properly defined, but oftentimes people stop with the word "lifestyle" and leave out the word "evangelism."

To be effective, we have to be living out our Christianity but with the knowledge that we're on a mission. We have to be intentionally raising spiritual topics and engaging people in conversations and encouraging them toward Christ. Unashamedly, we're trying to persuade people to follow Christ. The key verse I use on this is Romans 10:14 where Paul says, "How are they going to hear unless someone goes to them and preaches?" My paraphrase is that your friends are not going to see it unless you go to them and say it.

On Mission: Tell us about today's seekers.

Mittelberg: Today's seekers are more secular, which means they do not share our beliefs or our values to nearly the degree they used to. I grew up in an evangelical heritage, a Baptist church in North Dakota. I was taught the Bible. Even during my prodigal son era, I just sort of thought everybody knew John 3:16, thought it was innate knowledge.

But later in my life when I started working among more secular people here in Chicago, I would often say, "Well, you know what John 3:16 says." But five of the first six people I said that to didn't know.

[Researcher George] Barna's statistics bear this out, saying 54 percent of the average church attendees don't know what John 3:16 says or means. So when you see someone hold up a John 3:16 sign at a football game on TV, the average person doesn't have a clue what that sign is about. That's the culture we live in.

If you ever watch Jay Leno do his bit where he goes out on the street and asks people questions like "So who got swallowed by the whale?" people will answer with things like "Pinocchio." They're serious. It's kind of funny to watch, but it's sobering to realize that we live in a biblically illiterate culture. And I think we're headed more and more in that direction.

Also, the secular culture doesn't share our values. When someone stands up on a talk show and upholds the biblical value on some moral issue, what happens? They tend to get laughed out of the room. It's like, you've got to be kidding! Someone still believes that? How narrow-minded, how homophobic, how judgmental, how old-fashioned.

On Mission: So compare evangelism today to 20 or 30 years ago.

Mittelberg: The people we're trying to reach are all over the place on the secular spectrum. We can't assume they know too much. The old evangelism that people responded to 20 or 30 years ago consisted of kind of reminding people what they already knew and challenging them to do something about it. In our culture today you don't remind them of what they know. They didn't know it in the first place.

Also, the old evangelism was often an event approach where you hit them hard, you challenged them and they came to Christ--right then. I think the more our society secularizes the more we need a process approach to evangelism, something that takes them step-by-step from their spiritually distant position to the point where they're close enough to really respond to the gospel. Some of the ways we do that go back to what we've been saying about building relationships, getting up close to people, building trust and walking with them gradually toward Christ. Not that we want to slow them down. If someone's close and ready, we'll want to lead them to Christ right then.

But if they're not ready, let's not try to push them too quickly, too far, because if we do, they'll abort the process. They'll say, "You're trying to get me to do something that I don't understand. I'm not ready for this. Give me some time. Let me think about this."

So I think reaching the culture we live in requires more long-term approaches, more relationship building, more trust building, and more willingness to patiently communicate the gospel and biblical teachings over the long haul.

On Mission: Willow Creek is huge. Can you reduce your successful "formula" down to a size that churches of, say, 100 or 1,000 members can use?

Mittelberg: The core strategy, each Christian finding the evangelistic approach that fits him or her and then taking risks to use it to present Christ in natural ways, works everywhere, because it's biblical. A little reminder: Willow Creek started as a small church with about 30 high school students, so size is not really the issue.

We take a three-step approach.

First, build a relationship, get up close to people--a friend listens to a friend. That's true everywhere for all time. Jesus was our model for this;
He was a friend to sinners. He pointed out that the sick need the physician to go to them, and He risked His reputation to get out among the people He wanted to reach. He was also condemned for it by people who didn't understand what He was doing.

Second, it's not enough just to hang out with people, to build a relationship. We've got to present a verbal witness. We've got to put what we're living out in front of them with words we speak to them. We have to articulate in natural language what Christ has done for us and for our friends, and then we have to tell them how they can come to know Him too.

Third, we provide outreach events that people can bring their friends to. We just feel that for the average Christian it's very difficult to do the whole process of evangelism by themselves. The woman at the well met Jesus, realized He was the Messiah, and she bore witness to that. But she also brought her friends to an "event," which was Jesus speaking at the well. Basically, the "church" was partnering with her to reach out to her friends. What we've found is that there is a synergistic, one-two punch when you have individuals in a church building relationships, sharing their faith, and then you provide a place they can bring those friends that will relate to them and speak the gospel in their language.

That's true of virtually any effective evangelism, even crusades. It's individual Christians getting out into the neighborhood, the community, building relationships, bearing verbal witness to Christ, and then using an event like a crusade, a concert, a worship service, a Sunday school class or a Bible study to supplement their effort.

On Mission: What about churches with very limited resources?

Mittelberg: It doesn't have to be complex or elaborate.

Maybe a church decides to start a seeker Sunday school class. It's for whoever is visiting the church who has no church background or a nominal church background or possibly came from a liberal church that didn't really teach the gospel. So in this class seekers learn the basics of the Christian faith, kind of a Christianity 101 class.

Or it could be a class called Tough Questions. Bring people who have tough questions, let them ask anything. Or open up Sunday evenings to an hour of Q&A and bring friends who have a hard time understanding how God can allow embassies to be bombed or children to starve or evil to flourish in the world. Or maybe they have questions about some of the bad examples in churches. Or they want to compare the New Age Movement to Christianity.

It doesn't matter if it's 10 people or 1,000. An open discussion like that might be more effective than 100 people in a choir singing for a big event. It may be that you're going to scratch where some non-Christians are itching and answer their questions.

How much programming does that take? Virtually none.

On Mission: Could you summarize?

Mittelberg: The important thing is it's a biblical model God uses.

The individual Christian finds the approach that fits, uses that approach to build relationships and bears verbal witness to Christ. Besides training people for this, the church can provide events that members can bring their seeking friends to. It may take a long time, but with prayer, patience and persistence, the Holy Spirit will get through to many of them, and lead them to Christ. Needless to say, the effort will all be worth it.