When it comes to need-based evangelism, we have two extremes.

Meeting Physical Needs Only

On the one side, we have the people who focus only on meeting people’s physical needs. These are the social-gospel churches, which focus on need-based evangelism. They say things like, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” or “An empty stomach has no ears.” I would not argue with these proverbs, as they are true. But I would add a proverb of my own: “Don’t let busy hands tie your tongue.” Sometimes these churches get so busy loving and helping people that they never get around to telling others the truth about God, sin, Jesus Christ, and eternal life.

Meeting Spiritual Needs Only

The other church extreme criticizes such efforts as a waste of time and resources. What good is it, they ask, for people to go to hell with nice clothes and a full stomach? They argue that a person’s eternal destiny is more important than any earthly comfort. These churches say things like, “It’s our job to preach; it’s God’s job to save” and “People are destroyed from lack of knowledge, not from lack of food” (alluding from Hosea 4:6). There is truth in these sayings as well.

The Balance of the Gospel

But both sides, with their proverbs and passionate appeals, have missed the overarching message of the gospel, that it is good news for both the body and the spirit. For both temporal and eternal life. The gospel is not just about life here and now, nor is it about life in the hereafter. It is about both. The gospel is the full-orbed message about the claims of Jesus on both our present and eternal life. To focus on one life or the other is a serious mistake.

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One primary problem I have with Crusade Evangelism is that I am not sure the Gospel can be fully or adequately preached in a mass-evangelism setting.

In other words, I am not sure that the typical message which is preached at an Evangelism Crusade is actually the Scriptural gospel. The Gospel message of Evangelistic Crusades is not biblical.

The Crusade Evangelism Gospel

The Crusade Evangelism message usually focuses on these points:

1. God loves you.
2. You are a sinner.
3. The penalty for sin is death and eternal separation from God.
4. You can never be good enough to return to God.
5. God created a way through the death and resurrection of Jesus for us to be restored into a right relationship with Him.
6. If you believe in Jesus, you can be saved.

Point number six, of course, is stated in about a dozen different ways, with people arguing over what the actual requirement should be (repent and be baptized, confess your sins, say this prayer, etc, etc), but for the sake of this blog post, I don’t really care about that.

Here is my point: These six points, in this order, are not biblical.

By this, I do not mean that they cannot be found in Scripture. They can.

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There are lots of people who become Christians at Evangelism Crusades. There is no denying it. I believe that the number of conversions reaches into the millions. I have argued in previous posts that despite such numbers, personal relationships might be a better and more effective way of reaching even more people.

But there are additional problems with Crusade evangelism. The first concerns what we are teaching these new converts. When a person becomes a Christian at an Evangelistic Crusade, what is the first thing we teach them about Christianity and following Jesus? What theological ideas about God and church are we affirming?

The Gospel of Crusade Evangelism

The typical message at an Evangelistic Crusade follows this structure:

God loves you, but you are a sinner. As a sinner, you are alienated from God, and can do nothing to correct that alienation. If you continue in that state, you will suffer eternal alienation from God in everlasting hell. But God, out of His great love for us, created a way of escape from eternal punishment—you must be born again.

There is little agreement among evangelists about the method of being born again. The requirements often include raising a hand, coming forward, saying a prayer, signing a card, confessing Christ, repenting of sins, believing in Jesus, and getting baptized, which is altogether a separate issue…

Holes in the Crusade Evangelism Gospel

The message itself is not exactly wrong, it just leaves out a huge portion of the Gospel. The message is too otherworldly. It is a message about the afterlife only, about heaven and hell and what happens to us after we die. The message rarely has much application or relevance for life here on earth, unless it is some vague notion that God wants to help us with our needs if we will just pray, obey, and go to church.  I understand that the evangelist can only say so much, and that the message of eternal life is the most vital, and that the ministries encourage local churches to do the follow-up discipleship.

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I have been to a few evangelism crusades, and I always got the uncomfortable feeling that people were coerced into converting. These crusades reminded me a little bit of the “evangelism techniques” of the Middle Ages when Christian soldiers went on the Crusades to retake Jerusalem from the “heathens” and in the process “converted” many people at the point of a sword.

We don’t use swords today. We have other methods of persuasion.

Many of the techniques used in crusade evangelism were learned from the fields of marketing, sales, entertainment, and group psychology. The carefully crafted appeals to come forward at a crusade are often emotional in nature, based on success stories of people who converted, or tales of woe about people who did not. Sometimes these stories contain vivid portrayals of heaven and hell, where those who come forward can enjoy eternal bliss with God, while those who do not will suffer eternal torment in the flames and blackness of hell.

Barrel of Fluff or Barrel of Fire

I once saw a speaker at a teen rally have all the high school kids write their names on a piece of paper. Then, up on stage he had two barrels. In one, he put fluffy cotton, a Bible, and some gold (fake, of course). In the other barrel, he started a raging fire. Then he told the kids to come forward and drop their name in the barrel which signified where they wanted to go when they died…heaven (the fluffy barrel) or hell (the fire barrel). Not surprisingly, this speaker was able to go home to his church and report that every single teenager at this camp “made a decision for Christ.”

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Over the course of 50 years, Billy Graham may have helped 12 million people come to faith in Jesus and begin a life of discipleship to Him. That is a significant number, and I thank God for the work of Billy Graham (and other evangelists like him).

But have you ever stopped to think about the hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent for those 12 million converts? The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association currently spends about $100 million per year. I wonder if there might be a more effective way of spending hundreds of millions of dollars for evangelistic purposes than Evangelistic Crusades? For example, studies say that relationship evangelism is the most effective form of evangelism. What would have happened if hundreds of millions of dollars were spent training and supporting relationship evangelists?

Evangelism Math

The estimates for the number of evangelical Christians in the world range from 300 million to 700 million. Let’s just say that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had decided to spend their money on relational evangelism training instead of crusades, and that in 50 years of operations, they trained only 1% of the lower estimate of 300 million Christians worldwide, or 3 million Christians. Studies report that people who are trained in relational evangelism see about one friend, coworker, neighbor, or family member become a follower of Jesus every year. But let’s err on the side of caution here as well, and say it is only one every four years.

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