Growing up attending a conservative evangelical church, I was taught that I should invite the “unsaved” to church so they could hear the Gospel preached and have a chance to “get saved.” If they didn’t respond, at least they’d had a chance. It would be their fault if they ended up in hell. I had done “my part.”

After my wife and I married and began attending another conservative evangelical church, we were surprised to learn that “personal evangelism” was the new fad. Somehow the responsibility for getting people saved had landed squarely in our laps. We were told a few people were occasionally getting saved at the end of a sermon at church, but that plan wasn’t working well. Therefore, it was now our personal responsibility to “lead our unsaved friends, family members and neighbors to the Lord.”

Most of us Are Failures at Personal Evangelism

Some churches may still emphasize personal evangelism, but I have rarely heard the term mentioned in the past twenty years. Most of us have never “led anyone to the Lord.” So we’d prefer not to be told we should. If our church tries to pressure us in this way, we can always find another church.

What About Proverbs 11:30?

However, doesn’t Proverbs 11:30 tell us “He that winneth souls is wise”? Should we understand this to mean it is our responsibility to win souls, our responsibility to lead people to the Lord?

Not everyone understands the verse to mean that. Matthew Henry commented “The righteous are as trees of life; and their influence upon earth, like the fruits of that tree, support and nourish the spiritual life in many.”

Providence Baptist’s online Bible study course teaches “Some build a whole system of theology on this verse, believing that they can win men to Christ by their own powers of persuasion. But nowhere else in the Bible is this taught…. ‘Winneth’ is nowhere else so rendered. The Hebrew word appears over 1050 times and is most commonly rendered ‘taketh’ or ‘taketh away’…. Truly God’s people are to witness of Him to others, but the Spirit alone can win them to Christ.”

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“Lord lay some soul upon my heart. And love that soul through me. And may I always do my part. To win that soul to thee.”

Some of us who grew up in church grew up singing that song. We were told it meant we were to be soul-winners. We should do everything possible to “win” people to the Lord.

How might that look? – For many of us that meant we should invite people to church so they could hear the Gospel preached and “get saved.” Once they’re saved, God and the church would take care of them and we would find someone else to invite to church.

Here are some other ways we are taught to engage in soul winning:

Lord, Lay Some Soul Upon My Heart

Feel a burden for someone I know who isn’t saved. Pray for them. Give them some Christian literature that talks about salvation, and something that would make them want to attend my church.

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The following is an actual conversation I had with a man today. He came into my office and requested to sing some songs he wrote in the next church service.

“Possibly,” I said. “I would like to read them first.”

“Read them?” he asked. “Why?”

“Just to see what they say, what they teach, what the content is.”

“Oh. Well, they don’t really have any content. They’re more like choruses — just one sentence sung over and over.”

“Ah.” Alarm bells are going off in my head. “If you don’t have any written down, give me an example of one of these sentences.”

“Well, my favorite is, ‘Resting on the bosom of Jesus.'”

“… Yeah… we’re probably not going to sing that.”

“Why not?”

“Do you know what a ‘bosom’ is?”

“Yes. It means ‘chest.'”

“Right. And while I know that the KJV sometimes uses ‘bosom’ to refer to men’s chests, the way the word is used today, it primarily refers to women’s chests.”

He looked at me blankly.

“You know,” I explained, “breasts.”

“But Jesus is a man. He doesn’t have breasts.”

“Right. And since that is what the word ‘bosom’ means in most people’s minds, we don’t want to sing about the bosom of Jesus. It’s confusing. But more than that, even if people understand that Jesus is a man and doesn’t have breasts, we would still be singing about resting on his chest, I don’t think this is a song most men want to sing. Most men do not want to sing about resting on the chest of Jesus. We don’t want to feel his breath on our cheek, we don’t want to sit on his lap, and we don’t want to rest our heads on his chest.”

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