“Despite worries among evangelicals that Americans are set against attending church, most people would attend if invited in the right manner.”  That was the finding of a recent survey conducted by the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and Lifeway Research.  The nation wide poll of 15,000 adults last December asked people about their willingness to attend a church when approached by different methods.  For two of the methods over half of the respondents gave a positive answer.  They found that 63% were willing to receive an invitation from a family member, and 56% from a friend or neighbor.  Other approaches, including advertising or going door to door, scored lower.

This is another reminder that the best method of sharing the Gospel is and has always been personal contact with those in our social networks.  It’s the same method we see in the New Testament when Andrew went to find his brother Peter (Jn. 1:41) and Philip went to find Nathaniel (Jn. 1:45).   Jesus sent the man delivered from a legion of demons back to tell his friends and neighbors what God had done for him (Mk. 5:19). Cornelius gathered his household and close friends to hear Peter share the Gospel (Acts 10:24).  We see it again and again in the Bible and in church history.

Some time ago the Billy Graham organization did a study of the people who made decisions at their evangelistic meetings.  The vast majority of them had come because of the witness of a neighbor or friend.  So even “mass evangelism” is dependent on the witness of individual Christians.

What this means for us as individual Christians is that personally sharing our faith is essential to the fulfillment of the Great Commission.  We can’t rely on media or big meetings, and we can’t expect a few Christian leaders to carry the ball on their own.  This is a job for all of us.

Your witness matters.  Get out there and let your light shine.

Daniel Burritt owns a construction company in New York, and he uses his property in various ways to spread the Gospel. He has a trailer parked on his property, within sight of the highway, with a Gospel message on the side. The state highway department threatened to forcibly remove the trailer, even though other trailers with commercial messages on them were allowed to remain. After the Alliance Defense Fund filed a lawsuit, the trailer was allowed to remain.

I’m sure that some Christians will criticize his methods, but before your criticize him you should ask what actions you are taking to actively share your faith.  As someone who was criticized once said, “I like my way of sharing my faith better than your way of not sharing yours.”  Even though some people might dislike the message, they don’t have the right to single out Christians to suppress our freedom of speech.

A previously banned Christian group has been allowed to return to the campus of Wright State University in Ohio. The group Campus Bible Fellowship had previously been registered as a student organization for more than 30 years, but their renewal was rejected recently because they refused to incorporate certain nondiscrimination statements in their constitution.  The required statements would have made it impossible for them to require that voting members be Christians or that they adhere to their statement of faith.

Campus Bible Fellowship turned for help to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which informed the campus officials of the possible legal problems with their stance.  Upon receiving letters from FIRE, Wright State backed down and allowed the group to meet on campus until the end of the term in May.  The campus is avoiding putting anything in writing, and they may once again try to force the group to add the nondiscrimination clauses when they need to renew their registration after May.  It seems that this situation is still in flux, and we should keep this Christian group in our prayers.

According to their web site, FIRE does not engage in litigation, but fortunately there are another organizations such as the Alliance Defense Fund and the Christian Legal Society that do go to court to defend the legal rights of Christian groups.  A similar requirement for campus groups at Ohio State was changed after the filing of a lawsuit by the Christian Legal Society.  In fact, such requirements in many universities are illegal violations of First Amendment rights, but the policies won’t be changed unless they are challenged.

This post is in the new Rights Watch category, which I have set up to report on issues related to our religious freedoms around the world.  There are many efforts to curtail the freedom of Christians to live out and share their faith, and most of those situations never make their way into mainstream media.  We need to be aware of our rights, and to pray for those who are fighting efforts to silence their witness.