Why the “Perfect Evangelism Model” Is Failing (And What Replaces It)
When it comes to mission and evangelism, we Adventists loooove a good old “model”.
A one-size-fits-all outreach blueprint we can copy and paste without having to work too hard while still guaranteeing results.
I can already hear the advertisement:
"Discover the ultimate evangelism shortcut! Our New Model guarantees baptisms without requiring personal connections or time-consuming relationship-building. Simply follow our proven, step-by-step formula and watch your church grow - no friendships needed!"
Whoever designs this new model is guaranteed to get SDA rich! (Remember me when you make it big 😅)
Jokes aside, depending on what your particular task and context are, blueprints can be helpful.
But when it comes to mission in the secular, post-church age I need to be super clear:
There is no blueprint. No one-size-fits-all. No standardized model. No copy-paste system.
Yes, there are basic principles.
But outside of those basic principles, there is no system you can mindlessly inject into your local context and expect wild results. And here is the main reason why:
Secularism is fragmented.
I know, I know — what on earth am I talking about with my fancy-schmancy words, right?
Let me put it this way: If you are a missionary in a Buddhist society, you will find there are a diversity of Buddhists.
However, you will also find a general “worldview”, a single thread if you will, that unites all Buddhists. Same in Muslim countries, or really any religious society.
But in the secular, postmodern West, there isn’t really a single thread that people unite around. Not in the way you find in a religious society. There are shared instincts, sure—about autonomy, identity, justice, freedom—but they don’t knit into one agreed-upon story. So most people end up building a worldview on the fly. And when a worldview is built on the fly, it often becomes a patchwork. It’s not that secular people have no convictions. It’s that the convictions don’t always share the same foundation. Which means “secular” can look totally different from one house to the next, let alone one city to the next.
And that’s why you get these strange collisions in the public square. Movements can rally hard against “kings” and tyranny in one season (“no kings” protests), then turn around and champion—or at least excuse—authoritarian figures in the next (“free Maduro” protests), because the organizing logic isn’t always a consistent ethic of power. It’s often a shifting map of allies and enemies. Same with the way some voices will speak passionately for queer dignity, while also protesting on behalf of Hamas or the Iranian regime, even though queer people are systematically imprisoned and killed under those powers. I’m not trying to score political points here. I’m pointing to the structural problem: when a culture has no shared story, it constantly rearranges itself often in ways that make no sense for those of us who interact with reality from a shared center (ie. “the gospel”).
Now, to be fair, that isn’t “postmodern philosophy” in its most careful, academic form. The thinkers are usually more nuanced than the street slogans. But what shows up in the streets and online often borrows the mood of postmodernity: suspicion of metanarratives, suspicion of “objective” language, suspicion of institutions and the stories they tell. And that mood can be useful as a critique. It can expose propaganda, hidden interests, and the way power hides inside “neutral” claims. But it also comes with a cost: it doesn’t naturally produce a stable center. It tends to generate bricolage—a collage of moral impulses held together by momentum, emotion, and opposition more than by a coherent worldview.
And if you’re trying to build an evangelistic blueprint, you can’t build it on a collage that keeps rearranging itself.
Unless…
When I was a soldier training to go to Iraq, a lot of the cadre used to say that whatever they taught us was likely to be outdated by the time we made it into the combat zone.
The reason was insurgents studied the tactics used by the Army and would develop counter-tactics specifically designed to frustrate our most well developed plans.
The only way to stay one step ahead of them was to develop a culture of “elasticity” where we anticipated their counter-tactics and counteracted them before they had a chance to implement them.
Sounds confusing, I know. But the bottom line is this: Our enemy was so smart, so ahead of the curve, so creative and innovative that unless we abandoned our love for strict military structure and embraced a flexible approach, we would lose lives.
So we switched tactics. Uniformity was out the window.
Strict plans were out the window.
Elasticity (flexible, adaptable tactics) was in.
And its the same in secular mission. While secular people differ from house to house and city to city there is at least one thing we can always count on being true no matter where we go and its this: they will be fragmented.
To put it in plain english:
“The only thing that makes secular people the same is that they are never the same”
And because of this, we can count on the fact that secular mission must look different everywhere we go. Once we embrace that simple paradigm shift, we can begin to develop new missional approaches that are flexible, adaptable, and contextual.
This, I believe, is one of the primordial keys to mission in our secular, post-church age: elasticity.
It’s time we threw away the unformity. The standardization of local church ministry. The blind allegiance to a manual. And the copy-paste model of evangelism.
In fact, its time we threw away our desire to find a blueprint altogether.
Instead, lets get back to kingdom basics: raw, on the ground relationships where we listen deeply, adapt accordingly, and connect contextually.
