Cowboy Evangelism

I have done plenty of cowboy evangelism in my time. Lots of “yee-haa” but not much harvesting. We learned how to present the gospel with a little booklet. We went out on the streets of Westminster with tracts written by Arthur Blessit who led a training day in London in 1981. We tried to fill coaches with people from Hackney to go and hear Eric Delve preach in Walthamstow. We trained with Douglas McBain’s Mustard Seed to preach in the open air. We did sketchboard presentations at the local community fun day. Much energy expended. Few disciples.

When I led the “News Team” in Hackney we went out every week knocking on doors chatting to people about Jesus, inviting them to church etc. We would nearly always find someone welcoming who wanted to talk. I found myself offering lots of pastoral care and comfort to these lost sheep who never came near the church. We discovered after a while that about 1 in 7 households were receptive to visitors from the local church, but we did not spend enough time with these people. We kept trying to get them to come to us and got discouraged when they did not.

It is a shame that we did not hear the message of Luke 10:7 at this time. Stay in the house of the person of peace. ie spend enough time with this household that they catch the message of the Kingdom of God. Our vicar at the time had the best approach: he would go back week after week to his contacts with a beginners course in Christianity (similar to Good News Down Your Street). I remember thinking that we might learn from his example and do the same, but it never seemed to happen. I personally grew weary of seeing little fruit from the door to door ministry, and at about the same time I joined the FGBMFI which held evangelistic dinners. We saw lots of people get saved and healed at these events so I moved my energies into these instead.

Looking back I would say that the opportunities were there. Maybe we should have persevered in spending more time with those who were open. Maybe we needed to be less busy doing other church things in order to have the time and energy to go out and spend time with these people. After all Jesus did say "do not greet anyone along the road". A curious phrase that I interpret to mean we should be single minded and dedicated to the task.