“If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.”
Charles Spurgeon understood the weight of the evangelistic task—and the temptation to abandon it. In the final years of his life, he watched his own denomination drift from the moorings of orthodoxy. Beginning in 1887, in the pages of his magazine The Sword and the Trowel, he sounded an alarm about what he called the Downgrade—a creeping theological liberalism spreading through British Baptist churches. The atonement was questioned, the authority of Scripture was denied, and the punishment of sin was treated as superstition. Men who shared a denomination with Spurgeon abandoned what he called the old faith for a new religion that was, in his own words, “no more Christianity than chalk is cheese.” He withdrew from the Baptist Union, his association censured him, and the controversy broke his health and hastened his death.
The same convictions that drove Spurgeon to defend the faith drove him to proclaim it fiercely. For him, those two concerns shared the same root: a sober view of what was at stake for souls who died without Christ.
We too face our own downgrades. There are theological downgrades—hedging on the deity of Christ, softening the atonement into moral influence, treating the resurrection as metaphor. There are ethical downgrades—dismissing the Christian sexual ethic as bigotry, dissolving the categories of male and female, subverting the authority of Scripture by exalting lived experience and therapeutic preference. There are epistemological downgrades—standpoint epistemology teaching that knowledge is inseparable from social location, exalting the subjective over the objective. There are civic downgrades—confusion about the rightful place of God’s law in civil life and whether Christians have any legitimate public witness at all. But one of the most persistent and subtle downgrades in the contemporary church is not theological, at least not obviously. It is the downgrade of the evangelistic task itself.
What Evangelism Is
To be clear: I am not talking about the downgrade of the gospel. That is its own crisis. The gospel is regularly corrupted—stripped of its offense, its substance, and ultimately its Savior. We are told the cross was a demonstration of solidarity rather than a substitution for sinners, that Christ’s work at Calvary primarily exposed systems of oppression rather than bore in himself the wrath of God against sin. These corruptions are serious. But they are not what I am addressing here.
I am talking about the temptation to downgrade the act of evangelism: the duty to proclaim the gospel to those who have not heard it.
The word itself tells us what we are talking about. Evangelism comes from the Greek euangelizomaii, meaning to announce, herald, or proclaim good news. The root is euangelion: the good message, the glad tidings, the gospel. The word belongs to the vocabulary of heralds and messengers, of news that is given forth rather than quietly implied. Evangelism is the act of telling someone the news of what God has done in Christ to save sinners—sinners who stand under his righteous judgment, who cannot save themselves, and who can be justified freely by his grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Evangelism is the act of telling someone the news of what God has done in Christ to save sinners—sinners who stand under his righteous judgment, who cannot save themselves, and who can be justified freely by his grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
A Measurable Decline
Google Trends data tracking US search interest in “evangelism” shows a steady long-term decline since 2004. At the start of that period, interest was indexed at 100. By the mid-2020s, it had dropped to roughly 22 to 27—a decline of more than 75 percent over two decades. Related terms “sharing the gospel,” “preaching the gospel,” and “soul winning” remained flatlined in the low single digits throughout, showing no compensating surge under alternative vocabulary. Every major search query related to the gospel’s proclamation trends the same direction: downward, consistently, with no reversal in sight.
Search volume does not tell us everything. But it is one indicator among many that evangelism—as a category of concern that people think about, write about, or seek instruction in—has declined in the public consciousness of American Christianity. This matters because the language we use shapes the habits we form.
Euphemizing Our Duty
In many churches today, the vocabulary of evangelism has been quietly replaced. We no longer proclaim the gospel—we “share our faith.” We no longer call sinners to repentance—we “invite someone into our faith journey.” We do not confront a lost world with the claims of Christ—we “give Jesus a try.” The blunt language of announcement has been exchanged for the warm, nonthreatening language of sharing and suggestion.
Consider Andy Stanley, founding pastor of North Point Community Church and one of the most widely influential church leaders in America. Stanley has spoken openly about his shift in evangelistic approach. “I stopped using specific language,” he said. “I quit saying: ‘The Bible says,’ ‘the Bible teaches,’ ‘the Word of God says,’ ‘the Word of God teaches.’” His rationale was strategic: post-Christian people do not accept biblical authority, so leading with the Bible amounts to speaking a language they cannot hear. His explicit summary of personal evangelism explains that he is “convinced following Jesus will make your life better, and it’ll make you better at life.”
That is not the gospel. It may accompany the gospel or serve as a doorway toward a conversation about it. But Christ did not die to make someone’s life better; he died to reconcile sinners to a holy God, bearing the curse of the law so that those who are in him would not face the judgment they deserve. Following Jesus does not primarily make your life better. It makes you a new creation, dead to sin, alive to God, and a citizen of an imperishable kingdom.
Now contrast that with the charge of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, the 18th-century Moravian bishop who sent some of the first Protestant missionaries into the world. His instruction to those he commissioned was bracing in its simplicity: “Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.” Or consider how J. C. Ryle, Anglican bishop and tireless defender of evangelical religion in Victorian England, described the minister’s duty:
What would you say of the man who saw his neighbor’s house in danger of being burned down, and never raised the cry of “fire”? . . . My notion of charity is to warn men plainly of danger. My notion of taste in the ministerial office is to declare all the counsel of God. Fire. Fire!
We are, to borrow a phrase Tolkien gave to Aragorn and apply it here, the lesser sons of greater sires. The gap between that spirit and the spirit of our own day is not a gap in culture or style. It is a gap in conviction. How do we restore it?
The Theological Nature of the Task
To restore a robust spirit of evangelism, we must first understand it as a theological concept, not merely a practical one.
The evangelist does not proclaim himself. He proclaims Christ. Paul is the model: “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). The evangelist is a steward of a message that belongs to God, entrusted to frail human messengers who neither add to its efficacy by their cleverness nor subtract from it by their weakness. “The word of God,” Isaiah declares, “will not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11). The Spirit does the work. “The flesh is no help at all” (John 6:63). The evangelist’s responsibility is faithfulness to the message, not management of outcomes.
The evangelist’s responsibility is faithfulness to the message, not management of outcomes.
This is liberating. The anxiety about relevance—about whether the gospel will land in terms that will connect, in a tone that will not offend—is, at some level, a failure to trust the gospel’s own power. As Spurgeon put it: “It is not our way of putting the gospel, nor our method of illustrating it, which wins souls, but the gospel itself does the work in the hands of the Holy Ghost.” We are stewards of the mysteries of God, not content creators or brand managers. The Word does not need our help; it merely needs our lips.
What the Verbs Reveal
The verbs we use as substitutes for evangelism are not neutral. They reveal what we actually believe about the task.
“Sharing our faith” frames the gospel as personal property—something we own, derived from experience, offered as one perspective among others. But the news of what Christ accomplished at Calvary is not our faith in the first place. It is an announcement about an event that happened in history, outside of us, which we are privileged to deliver.
“Inviting someone into your faith journey” is worse. It makes the believer the subject and subordinates Christ to a supporting role in someone’s personal narrative. The gospel is not an invitation into a journey. It is a summons to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is raised from the dead and who will one day judge the living and the dead.
Paul’s vocabulary for proclamation is consistently more muscular: herald, announce, declare, testify, hold forth, cry out. “By open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Corinthians 4:2). A news anchor does not suggest the day’s headlines; he reports them. The way we euphemize evangelism today reveals that we have conceived of it in far more effeminate terms.
The Objection of Diversity Within the Body
One may object that Paul himself teaches that the body of Christ has many members with different functions (1 Corinthians 12). Not everyone is a preacher. Surely the duty to evangelize looks different for different people.
This is true. But the diversity of function within the body affects the manner and volume of evangelism, not its essential nature. The nature of evangelism—the announcement of news that is not our own—remains constant, whether it happens over coffee, in a hospital room, or from a pulpit. So-called “proclamational” evangelism is not an elitist ideal for the spiritually advanced. It is a description of what evangelism fundamentally is: the giving forth of a message. The person who tells a coworker plainly what Christ has done to save sinners is doing the same thing—at a different scale—as the preacher who declares it from a platform.
Being Honest About the Task
If we want to recover a genuine spirit of evangelism in our churches, we should start by being honest about the language we use—or do not use—for one of our most fundamental callings. The words we choose reveal the convictions we hold, and sometimes the courage we lack.
If we want to recover a genuine spirit of evangelism in our churches, we should start by being honest about the language we use—or do not use—for one of our most fundamental callings.
Ryle wrote plainly:
“All the simplicity in the world can do no good, unless you preach the simple gospel of Jesus Christ so fully and clearly that everybody can understand it. If ‘Christ crucified’ has not his rightful place in your sermons, and sin is not exposed as it should be, and your people are not plainly told what they ought to believe, and be, and do—your preaching is of no use.”
That is as true in a one-on-one conversation as it is from a pulpit.
Let us be honest about evangelism, so that we can be honest with the unbelievers around us.
