LifeWay Bible Studies for Life Series for November 25: Hit the streets

LifeWay Bible Studies for Life Series for November 25: Hit the streets focuses on Acts 17:16-31.

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Within the paradigm of the 20th century, churches were judged as successful or not based on how many people attended the church on Sundays and, loosely, on how many other people they could get to participate in weekday activities at the church.

For too many churches, this still is the operating principle of church growth. However, if we pole vault over 20 centuries of time back to the New Testament church, we find another paradigm at work.

In the 1st century, Paul modeled for the church the most effective methodology of true evangelism. He went out from the church into the world taking with him the good news of God in Christ. It could be successfully argued that Paul would have asked churches to think of themselves as successful or not by how many people were sent out more than by how many people came in.

Of course, in the 1st century, there were no church buildings to which nonbelievers could be invited. Churches mostly were small gatherings of believers in homes. Nonetheless, the principle of church growth can and should be the same.  

Evangelism’s mantra should not be, “Ya’ll come.” Evangelism’s mantra should be “Let’s go!” What would happen if churches kept no record of how many people were in attendance on Sunday but instead by how many people went out during the week into the community to share and live out the gospel?  

Paul’s model of going out into the world serves to model the work of God in Christ. The incarnation of God in Christ (John 1), the word becoming flesh, established forever the way in which we should think about ourselves in relationship to the world. It defines the way we should think about reaching the world with the gospel.

God took the initiative to redeem us by stepping from heaven into our world on earth. This is precisely what the Apostle Paul was doing when he stepped into the synagogue to engage the Jewish community there. Had Paul simply waited for the Jewish community to take the first step, it would have almost certainly never heard the gospel.

When Christian writer Madeleine L’Engle’s daughter was a little girl, she had the kind of experience of fear we all have as children, the kind we all have with our own children.

The child cried out in the middle of the night, and mama went running. She tried to comfort her with good theology: “Don’t be afraid, dear, God will be with you.” Her daughter looked back at her and firmly said, “I know that Mommy, but I want somebody with some skin on.”


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What the world needs now is love, sweet love—in the flesh, not just good theology about how God came, but how God still comes through you and me. In some ways, we’re God’s skin in this world for now, until Jesus comes again.

Paul’s theology, as he reported the good news to the Athenians, was as solid as granite. It even now is one of the finest points of reference in all the New Testament for a summary of the gospel. However, no matter how well Paul preached, it was his physical presence among the Jews that spoke volumes more about how God has come to us in Christ. He was living out the gospel before the eyes of those Jews and others who feared God gathered at the synagogue.

Paul then took the idea of incarnation a step further by the way he engaged the Athenians theologically. There was a great chasm between what Paul and the Athenians believed about God and Christ. Paul did not mock the beliefs of the Athenians, even though “he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (v. 16). Nor did he speak condescendingly to those whose beliefs were so radically different than his own.

Instead, Paul took a step toward the Athenians by affirming what they already believed, found something in common with that belief and then took it from there toward the gospel: “‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious’” (v. 22).

Paul could have allowed what personally offended him about the faith of the Athenians to become an obstacle. Instead, he found a way of taking what he and the Athenians had in common and used that to build a bridge from one way of thinking and believing to another.

Good teachers know this skill and employ it in every encounter with their students. They look for even the tiniest bit of knowledge in their students and use it, no matter how little or weak it may be, as a base upon which whole new levels of knowledge can be structured.

Most of us, looking back, would probably say that the most influential teachers in our lives were those never made us feel badly about what we didn’t know but instead celebrated with us the knowledge we did have. This principle also is a crucial key to successful evangelism.

If the American church community is to be effective in reaching the world with the good news of Jesus in the 21st century, it would do well to first reach back and take a lesson from the 1st century church. Effective evangelism demands we step out of our world into the world of those we seek to reach.  

It also demands we go into that world full of compassion not critique. Only then will we be able to model what God has done for us in Christ and share the good news with a broken world. If we focus more on how many of us go out, we’ll never have to worry about how many come in.


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