Note: I wrote this for an evangelism course I took while in Seminary.
Abstract
The purpose of William Fay’s book is to provide freedom and encouragement to his readers and empower them to share their faith and never fail[1]. According to Fay, the prevailing situation among church members is that only “as few as 5 to 10 percent of the people in an average church have shared their faith in the past year.” That “means 90 percent of us have chosen the sin of silence” while “in the meantime, one hundred thousand churches will close their doors this decade. Why? Because those church members chose the sin of silence.”[2]
The author begins his book by assuring readers that they “can’t fail”[3] when they share their faith. He is able to reassure his readers because, as he puts it, Christians are “not responsible for causing a person’s heart to turn toward God.”[4] He tells his readers, “Success is sharing your faith and living your life for Jesus Christ. It has nothing whatsoever to do with bringing anyone to the Lord. It has everything to do with obedience.”[5] Next, he presents a vision for sharing Christ and gives advice to help readers overcome their fear of sharing Christ. The heart of Fay’s teaching is found in chapters four to seven, where he teaches his “Five Share Jesus Questions”, “Seven Share Scriptures”, “Five Commitment Questions”, and “Ten Questions to Ask a New Believer.” These, the author believes, will equip the believer to share Christ effectively by letting the scriptures speak to the unbeliever while the evangelist only asks questions to guide the process along. The book concludes with chapters that provide advice on how to handle common objections, develop and keep non-Christian friends, pray for nonbelievers, and urge the reader to get out and start sharing Christ.
Concrete Response
Reading this book brought to mind my experiences doing door-to-door and street evangelism several years ago. I was very passionate about sharing Christ and made significant efforts to do so. I wish I had read a book like this one at that time. This approach would have made life so much easier, and I think, would have increased the success rate of my evangelistic efforts.
In those early days, I used to try to persuade people with logical arguments to see why they needed to trust Christ. I made the case that they, as well as all other humans, had sinned and come short of the glory of God and that the consequence of that sin was eternal death. I explained that Christ was the only way to salvation. Because I loved science and had read quite a bit about Christian apologetics, I could present good arguments for the existence of God. The expanding universe shows that the earth started as a big bang. The fine-tuning of the universe and many other similar arguments. In the end, I do not think it came across as powerful as letting the word of God speak to the person and simply asking them questions.
On several occasions, the encounters ended up in a sort of tug-of-war between my ideas and the unbeliever’s opinions. Faced with what they might have seen as merely my opinions, they wanted their opinions to be right so they could maintain their sense of dignity. Even though some of their arguments were very incoherent, they did not change their positions. They were in the fighting mode, trying to defend themselves.
Reflection
Even though the lessons taught in Fay’s book can be used by any Christian, an observant reader could reasonably assert that the best audience for his book would be evangelists, pastors, and other Christians who are called into clerical ministry. The protagonist in the book, the author, is shown engaging in encounter evangelism in numerous settings with tremendous success. While he presents some examples of non-clerical believers participating in encounter evangelism, his experience is the major focus. It’s amazing to follow him through the book. He appears so good at evangelism that it could actually make it harder for the average lay believer to relate to him. In the end, who a book is written for can be deduced from the examples highlighted, most especially the key figure of the story. When readers see someone just like themselves as the key figure in a book, they can relate to that person better. It’s easy to say the evangelist is so successful because all he has to do is pray and share Christ-like. They might say the evangelist does not have a “real” job and family to contend with. From the book, it’s easy to deduce that the author is a full-time evangelist, which makes his book all the more suited for others who want to be full-time evangelists like him. Most people going through this course are likely going into clerical ministry, so the content of his book is very fitting.
However, one wonders what it would look like to have an evangelism book that follows the life of a lay believer who is considered very successful in his workplace (vocation), family life, and evangelism. Since the author argues that over ninety percent of Christians do not share their faith, and most of these are non-clerical Christians, a book with a hero that they can connect with will make it easier for them to appropriate the lessons. One wonders how the author might have practiced evangelism had he continued as a full-time businessman doing some type of business that better suited his Christian faith.
Action
I recently used the approach taught by William Fay in his book Share Christ without Fear to share Christ with someone and found it to be quite effective. I had to use my laptop for the exercise because I do not currently have access to a hard copy of the Bible. In order to make it easy for me to share Christ with people at any time, in the next two months, I plan to condense Fay’s “Five Share Jesus Questions”, “Seven Share Scriptures”, “Five Commitment Questions”, “Ten Questions to Ask a New Believer,” and “New Believer Questions and Directions” into a format that I can print and have in my wallet for use at any time to share Christ with anyone at any time. In addition to printing a small wallet card that I will carry in my wallet, I intend to create a digital version that will be stored on my iPhone as well as Google Drive. If done well, the wallet card and digital copy can be shared with new believers so that they can, in turn, use that to share Christ with others. I would need to make sure that there wouldn’t be any copyright issues involved in giving such cards or digital copies to others. I already know how to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign to design flyers and brochures, and will use those skills to get the job done. Uprinting.com is a site I have used in the past to print business cards, brochures, and newspapers. They are cheap and do excellent work. I could use them to print these cards when the time comes.
Even though I do not currently use a hard copy Bible at this time (because of my reliance on digital versions on my phone and the internet), in the next two months, I plan to get a small pocket-sized New Testament Bible that I can carry around for this purpose. I think that even though a digital version would do, it would be more powerful to have someone turn the pages and actually read from a physical copy of the Bible. There may be some places that offer free pocket-sized New Testament Bibles. I will seek such organizations as the Gideons not because I could not afford a copy but because it would be good to know a ministry like that and then work with them to help other new believers get such Bibles as well.
In the next few weeks, I will resume consistent daily quiet times. This is something I did for years but have abandoned in the last four years. During those times of meditation and prayer, I will start regularly praying for wisdom and opportunities to share Christ. I will also begin praying for the souls of family members and friends that I know.
Finally, in the next six months, after I am done with my Master of Arts in Evangelism and Church Planting degree at Liberty University, I plan to work with my team at Shaping Destiny to teach them some of the methods I am learning. The organization is a charitable and evangelistic organization. I would like to work with the team to create a well-tested approach to sharing the gospel and then teaching that to our leaders so that they can practice it and also teach it to others. Since the organization was founded in 2005, God has used it to lead hundreds of people to Christ, mostly using the servant evangelism model as we work in communities to care for orphans and vulnerable children. I think an adaptation of Fay’s approach would work well in Cameroon, where we do most of our work.
[1] William Fay, Share Jesus Without Fear (Nashville: B and H Publishing Group, 1999), Preface, https://app.wordsearchbible.com
[2] Ibid. Chapter 2
[3] Ibid. Chapter 1
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.