Describe your own conversion experience. What made it unique?
When I was a teenager, I started hanging around evangelical Christians. The gospel they proclaimed was that I could be “born again” and have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” I had never heard that kind of language before in my life. I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense to me.
Fortunately, I met a pastor who recognized my dilemma. He never once came to me and said, “Rick, you need to make a decision.” What he said was, “Why don’t you just come and hang with us at our youth group?” The teens at his church had all kinds of great discussions and conversations about God and faith. Two years later, alone in my room, I prayed to God. I didn’t even know the words to use, so I didn’t pray anything like “Jesus, I am inviting you into my heart.” All I knew was that God wanted to be in a relationship with me. And I claimed that promise.
The next morning I opened the door, walked outside and saw a new world. It was like the scales fell of my eyes. I remember standing there thinking, Woah! The power of God came upon me in such a dramatic way that I went to the church the next day and told everyone that I met God the night before.
They were more than ecstatic, but very quickly the message evolved. In short order it became, “Good, now get to work.” And it very quickly turned into a “works salvation.” The message I got was that the evidence of the Holy Spirit in me was not tied to my personal relationship with God, but rather to what I could produce. Years later I woke up and said, “I’m producing an awful lot for God, but I don’t know where God is anymore.” It’s that work mindset—in all the things we have to do for the Kingdom, including evangelism and social action—that can leave us spiritually dry. As a result, we no longer do relational evangelism. We only do mechanical things because there is nothing vital and alive in us.
Clearly salvation is not just about “good works.” But how do you know if what you’re doing is truly making a difference?
I often say that evangelism is nothing more than the overspill of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s life. If the Holy Spirit indwells us, then we should be like a cup filled with water. If somebody knocks the cup, the water spills over onto them. In the same way, when God indwells us and people bump up against us in some way, God should spill over. And because we are not perfect, God doesn’t perfectly spill over—our anger spills over, our bad temper spills over and our sins spill over. Hopefully there is enough of the Spirit of God in us that people will say, “I think I just encountered God.”
I don’t care if somebody comes into the Yonge Street Mission and says, “I just came to Christ.” I would rather hear people say, “I think I may have just been some place where God was” or “I think I might have just met people that truly believe.” That gentle touch of the Holy Spirit is far more powerful than any tool we will ever use.
For me, evangelism is a deeply spiritual experience. How can you do evangelism if you can’t discern? How can you do evangelism if you don’t have some sense of what the Holy Spirit is doing in another person’s life? In the end, real evangelism is discerning where God is at work in someone’s life and journeying with them until they are ready to say their own “yes” to God.
So is salvation an event or a process?
In my life, it’s both. I hope something about my relationship with Jesus is different now than it was 30 years ago. If I get another 20 years, I’d like to think that the relationship would continue to evolve. I’m aware that Jesus is constantly saving me, but also acknowledge those “divine appointment” moments.
Years ago, I used to travel with a Christian music group. There’s a wonderful woman in that group who used to be embarrassed because she “didn’t have a testimony.” One day when I asked her what that meant she said, “Well, I’ve always been a Christian. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t.” She felt inferior because she couldn’t point back to a particular moment when she was saved. But I think she had the best testimony. What’s better than being able to say, “I’ve never known a time when Jesus wasn’t a reality in my life”?
God is big enough that how we encounter him is unique to each one of us. When we get to Heaven and have a new language to describe our encounter, I think there will be a wonderful sameness about all of our stories and a wonderful difference. We have all encountered the same divine Creator of the universe, but each in our own individual way. To me, salvation is simply the assurance that we are journeying in relationship with Jesus.
What is the best way for Christians to share the gospel?
Compassion may be the only current credible witness left for the North American church. Where compassion is done for its own sake and for the sake of righteousness, there is no more powerful evangelistic tool. At Yonge Street Mission, we now do less “evangelistic” acts, but because of the compassion of our workers we have more people in discipleship programs, Bible study groups and church services than ever before.
In 1900, the first red-letter Bible was published, showing the words of Jesus in red ink. I think this trend has done enormous harm, because it suggests that what Jesus said is more important than what he did. By extension, we can sometimes think that what we say is more important than what we do. I think if we highlighted everything Jesus did in red, our understanding of faith would be very different today. It would actually be more congruent with The Salvation Army’s mission. Faith is lived out in the way we engage people.
I have a wonderful friend in the Maritimes who works with marginalized people. Every time she goes to preach or speak, people want to know how many she is leading to Christ. Her answer is quite profound. She simply says, “All of them,” because she knows that everything she does is an evangelistic act. She understands that the best evangelism is social action and the best social action is evangelism. Nothing is going to change a person more than acts of compassion and grace in their lives from people who are close to Jesus.
Are there specific Bible passages about evangelism that resonate for you?
The word evangelism doesn’t appear much in the Bible—at least not in the same sense as we use it today. Let me tell you my influences. First is the Incarnation. Jesus is Immanuel, which means “God with us.” When God wanted to reach the world he became incarnate and dwelt among us. I think evangelism means being with people.
Much of civil rights activist John Perkins’ model of community development begins with relocation―being in the place where people are. He is thinking geographically, but if I think of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father also has to emotionally get in the space of his son. You don’t just voluntarily give your child all his inheritance if you haven’t gotten into his emotional or spiritual space—unless you’ve concluded that this may be the only way to save him. The Incarnation has to do with God being “with us” to the point where he understands us at our level.
Recently one of our staff members met someone new and within the first 15 minutes was trying to share faith with this person. It became very confrontational. When we begin by saying to people, “I’m different and better than you,” we can’t do anything but create barriers to the Kingdom. But when we begin by saying, “I’m the same as you, I struggle too, I have my own problems;” when we hang out with people and are known enough to them that they feel safe with us, then we can say, “I’m like you, but there is a different part to my life.” Then evangelism makes sense. Then it’s me sharing the fullness of my life, including the significance Jesus and the Word hold for me. In essence, identification precedes differentiation.
The other passage that has a significant impact on the way I view evangelism is Proverbs 11:11: “Through the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is destroyed.” Here I am obviously thinking of evangelism more as a community event as opposed to a one-to-one event. How do we bless the city? We bless it when we are upright, when we have an ethic, when we teach it how to live rightly. We bless it through our integrity, not a false morality. We bless it when we stand for justice for our most vulnerable people. We bless the city through acts of compassion. And we bless it when we are a people of faith, whose faith overspills to all the people who live in it.
Rick Tobias is best known for his life-long advocacy on behalf of low-income and marginalized people. His innovative work, Yonge Street Mission’s Evergreen Centre for street youth, led to his position as Yonge Street Mission’s CEO. Sought after as a consultant and coach, Rick has spoken hundreds of times on Canadian poverty, urban ministry, youth at risk and strategies for community-wide change. In the first of this two-part interview, Rick explains why traditional evangelistic methods often drive more people from Christ than they attract.