
When I caught a cold as a child, my mother would make me a soothing cup of hot honey lemon tea. The lemon juice cleansed the back of my throat and gave me a medicinal dose of vitamin C, and the honey made the lemon juice go down easier. Now that I’m a pre-diabetic grown- up, I have to face the fact that honey is a luxury, an optional extra to tickle my taste buds. It’s actually the lemon juice that is doing the hard work to fight my cold. It was the lemon juice that built my immunity and infused me with vitamins.
If you want evangelism to be a central component of your movement, it must be dominant from the beginning. It sets the flavour and the tone. Christians won’t adopt it later. Perhaps they should, but our experience is that they won’t. That’s because Bible studies and prayer meetings are like honey – thick and rich and sticky with sweet, sweet fellowship. Sweet Christian fellowship overwhelms the palate and leaves you with little interest in the tart lemon juice of evangelism. But if you’ve been sucking on lemons since infancy, it’s not such a stretch to keep that going when you have recruited more lemon-suckers.
Evangelism is one of the major distinguishing factors of a movement, but it’s arguably the hardest thing for many Christians to do. It nudges Christians out of their comfort zones to relate to people who might be a little acerbic themselves. Like sucking on a lemon (or in the northern hemisphere, chowing down on haggis), evangelism is the “dare food” of ministry – it takes courage and initiative and outward focus. But the rewards are sweet and build the body. A group that is growing from new converts is electrifying for older Christians to be in, and can galvanise them to further action.