Why evangelistic courses are like a good joke

I have a theory—admittedly it’s a little controversial, but I still think it holds good. It concerns jokes. In my opinion, jokes have a life-cycle of three stages. Stage 1 covers the first few times you tell it; it’s extremely funny, and you’re the life of the party. Stage 2 covers those situations where you continue to tell that same joke, and it all starts to get a bit boring. People roll their eyes and start looking around for the nearest exit. Now most people would stop at this point, cut their losses, and go searching for new material. Not me! I tend to push on through to the other side—to the third stage. Stage 3 is where the joke suddenly becomes funny again.

Evangelistic courses can be a bit like a good joke. Let me explain.

One of my ministry briefs at the church at which I serve is to promote evangelism. As part of this, over the past three years, I’ve led (or co-led) one or more evangelistic courses each term. These are courses that explain the gospel to people over a few weeks. The one I choose to use is called Christianity Explained. (There are, of course, a number of other good programs that we could use.) We run one session a week, usually on a weeknight, over four weeks.

We promote these courses as being good for three groups of people:

• long time Christians: to refresh the basics of the faith
• new Christians: to consolidate what it is that they believe
• interested non-believers: so that they can find out about the Christian faith in a non-threatening context.

In terms of their evangelistic impact, I recently “crunched some numbers” and came up with the following:

 Many comments could be made regarding these findings. I’ll just make a few. As you can see, a number of figures are dropping each year—the number of courses run, the total number of attendees, and the average attendance per course. However, a number of other figures have dropped... and then risen! These are the total number of people attending who are not from our church, the average attendance at each course by non-church people, the total number of conversions, and the average number of conversions per course.

In the first year, the course was new and perhaps something of a novelty. Most of the people from our church who wanted to do the course did it then. But it’s significant to note that the figures relating to non-church attendees and conversions rose from the second to the third year. The fact is, a small number of non-believers continue to attend these courses and continue to be converted. The temptation might have been to stop the courses once the total numbers started to drop, but that would have been very unfortunate for the 1–4 people who we think were converted in 2015.

Now for a few things you can’t tell from the figures. While our church is growing slightly, we have not seen many adult conversions in the last few years; conversions tend to happen more amongst the youth. Within this context, as far as I can tell, Christianity Explained is the organized church activity that has been associated with the greatest number of adult conversions since 2013—more than at special one-off evangelistic events (although these have been very helpful), and more than at normal church services. Thus, relatively speaking, the courses have been highly successful.

It is also interesting to note that almost half the people who appear to have been converted were people who were already attending our church. A few indicated that they thought they were Christians before starting the course, during the course concluded that they weren’t, and by the end of the indicated that they were now Christians. This suggests that many church regulars also need the gospel clarified for them.

While they result in people coming into the kingdom, I believe we need to persist with regular evangelistic courses, even when the overall numbers drop or when the novelty wears off. It is certainly possible to change from one evangelistic course to another, but in our cultural context, I would argue that they need to be a regular part of the church program.

Like a good joke, we need to break on through to the other side, to persist through to stage three... and then persist!

Photo credit: Allison Baltzersen