For almost the entirety of my adult life, I have had the gift of working in full time ministry. Like most people labouring in the vineyard of evangelization, my call to ministry started with a powerful encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. He has moved powerfully in my life, sometimes asking me to make radical decisions that were terrifying at the outset and wonderful in hindsight.
Why then would I not desire for others to encounter Him too? And if I hope that other people would encounter Jesus and be transformed by Him, why would I not hope that those closest relationships in my life would also have this experience? Certainly my motivations here are good - I want people to encounter Jesus.
At the little university chaplaincy where I work we have a saying: “the heart we work from matters as much as the work we do.” Of course my desire for people to encounter Jesus is a good thing and my desire for my close relationships to encounter Him is good as well. That said, it’s possible to have a good heart for evangelization but not the right heart for evangelization.
I would posit that the right heart for approaching evangelization is not (just) a desire for others to experience a conversion. While this desire is certainly part of it, the right motivation for evangelization can never be anything less than love. What do I mean by this?
So many of us, with a good heart, desiring Jesus for our friends, try to find tactics and strategies to navigate conversations into spiritual territory. While these techniques might not be inherently wrong and can sometimes bring about real spiritual fruit, some of our friends can also end up feeling manipulated by us. Not only that, approaching our relationships with an agenda can leave us with an off feeling – even though we wanted the right thing, something about our approach felt wrong.
Love, in contrast, opens us up to freedom, both in relationships and in evangelization. Rather than constantly looking for the opportunity to slip in the Gospel, we can have the best interests of our friends at heart and know that, if we are fully and authentically living our faith, opportunities for evangelistic conversations will arise. If you’re worried that you may have unintentionally manipulated a friend in the past, that’s okay - don’t get too caught up in rumination; instead, try to love them well where the relationship is now.
I LOVE movies. I like watching critically acclaimed films, hosting movie nights with my friends, and reading movie reviews. In my relationships with others, if I’m being fully myself, I can’t stop myself from sharing about the movies I’ve seen. Additionally, if I love my friends and really desire their good, I won’t be able to stop myself from recommending these movies for them to watch too.
In the same way, if we really and truly love our friends and really and truly love the Lord, we will not be able to help ourselves. We won’t need to find ways to bring God into the conversation - He will make Himself present through our zeal for Him.
It’s natural that some of us will experience resistance to this idea. If you’ve ever tried to talk about Jesus with a close friend, you know how difficult it can be, even if you’re really convicted by the Good News of Jesus Christ. Saying to make love the aim and not an agenda can feel like an easy out of our evangelistic duty.
It should be said firstly that pursuing love first does not exclude the explicit proclamation of the Gospel - in fact, it makes it all the more necessary. The shift we must make is to focus less on strategies for bringing up Jesus with our friends and more on the cultivation of a deep interior life and a firm resolve to express that life externally without shame - certainly no easy way out.
One area in my own life where I’ve seen this happen is the regular practice of the Sabbath. At first, I committed to this practice for my own good - we could all use a weekly day of rest! Over time though, I noticed that the more intentional I was with this practice, the more curiosity it evoked in my friends, even those who didn’t share my faith. This intentional cultivation of my interior life and a willingness to share my conviction became a natural opportunity for evangelism.
If the goal then is to love the Lord and to be unafraid to share that part of ourselves with the ones we love, how do we know that we are loving well? We can always return to the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas “love is to will the good of the other.” Of course this means maintaining our desire for their good even when they don’t desire it for themselves! It might be frustrating to love someone and hope for them to encounter Jesus when they don’t desire that too but in those moments, the call is to soften our hearts towards our friends and wait patiently for the movement of the Spirit.
In the end, this is the only thing that should motivate our evangelistic zeal - the good of our friends and family, not merely another conversion (good as that may be). Even when it feels like we’re making no progress in our works of evangelization, we should remember that ultimately it’s the Holy Spirit who is the primary agent of conversion. Sometimes in evangelization we are “reaping the harvest,” but other times we are simply sowing seeds by our love. We may never know what fruit that will produce over time.
Jesus said at the Last Supper that the world would know we are His disciples by the love we have for one another. More than any agenda, strategy, or method, love is the most powerful tool of all.
