Your Vision Determines Your Approach to 'Evangelism'

The hinge-point moment of Ruth’s entire life happened when, after bearing witness to Naomi’s authentic faith, she pledged, “Your people will be my people and your God my God, (Ruth 1:16). But as we look at all her hardship and doubts, it’s hard to think of what Naomi did as evangelism. There was no program, no training, no Four Spiritual Laws, and no ‘Sinners Prayer.’ It was just an authentic life with Yahweh.

Perhaps Naomi did not need those things because she had clarity around what God was after, and it wasn’t simply pitchforking souls into heaven and discarding the remains of people. Perhaps Naomi’s faith was lived in light of eternity - of her God, Yahweh, whose name means ‘I Am’ - a statement of eternal, and yet knowable, being. One scholar puts it this way:

[How you treat people who are not part of the family of faith will] depend dramatically on what your vision is of the end. If God’s hope is that a bunch of souls will populate heaven, then everyone should take Evangelism Explosion. If God’s plan is to renew the whole cosmos, then everyone should learn what it would look like to do their work, engage in their relationships, embed themselves in their communities, in such a way that the whole-orbed future of God begins to impinge upon the present. - Daniel Kirk

What is your vision of God’s preferred future? How do you think of heaven? How does that impact how you treat others who do not share your faith?