You’ve heard them, I’m sure. Some well-intentioned but thoughtless man of God stands before a gathering of the Lord’s people and in urging us to evangelize our communities will overstate the case.

“Jesus told us to become fishers of men! He did not tell us to be keepers of the aquarium!”

Invariably, especially if the audience is made up almost exclusively of preachers, the statement will be met with a chorus of ‘amen’s.’

The only problem is while that may sound good, it simply is not so.

Jesus did not send His disciples just to reach lost sheep–He certainly did that–but commanded that we are to “feed my sheep.” In John 20, He gave that command to Simon Peter three times.

It’s not enough to reach the sheep. They must be cared for, protected, provided for.  Nurtured.

In Acts 20:28, Paul tells the pastors of Ephesus that they are to “shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood.”

And here’s another one, the one that ticks me off.

In trying to motivate church members to get into the community with the gospel, the WIBT preacher* will say, “The Bible nowhere commands the people of the world to come to church. It does, however, command us to go into all the world with the gospel.” (*Well-intentioned but thoughtless)

That’s so true, it’s almost totally true. But it is missing something critical.

Think of all the parables our Lord told in which the king or a father instructs his servants to go into the highways and hedges and “bring them in.” If that is not a word for the servants of Jesus, it is meaningless.

When we go to outsiders with the love of the Lord and the word of the gospel, we are to “bring them in.”

Clearly, the people of the world are indeed to come to church. Our assignment is to bring them in.

The legalist in our midst will argue that there is no point in their coming to church until they are saved. We respond that experience has shown repeatedly that bringing an unsaved person into the fellowship of Christian people is one of the strongest and most effective methods of reaching them for salvation.

Question: How many techniques does the Holy Spirit have for reaching the lost?

Answer: As many as there are grains of sand on the seashore.

Does the Lord use soulwinners who go armed with the knowledge of the Word and a learned technique of witnessing? Absolutely. Does He use mass crusades? Clearly. Does He use the college student who opens a booklet and shares with a friend step-by-step how to be saved? Thankfully, He does.

There is no limit to the Lord’s methods.

So, let’s quit putting limits on them.

Let’s stop burdening God’s people by telling them unless they are going out into the community with memorized plans of soulwinning, they are disobedient and failures.

It is not so.

God often chooses to use something as simple as one friend telling another friend that “I think you would love our church.”

God has used something as elementary as a teenage girl saying to her beau, “I’d like you to come to church with me.”

God has used family problems to get people to the minister for counseling and He has led them to Christ.

God has used child-behavior problems to get parents to the minister for help, and willing to try anything, they start coming to church and soon come to faith in Christ.

Let’s quit discouraging God’s people from being light and salt.

Let’s stop telling them unless they do it a certain way, they might as well not do it at all.

Many have believed us and have gone silent. The well-meaning-but-mistaken pastor is the culprit.

Let’s stop scaring them into believing if they don’t present the entire scope of salvation at one time and call for a decision, they’re failures.

We have so frightened the people of the Lord about soulwinning that they are afraid to bear a simple witness.

Meanwhile, our communities are filled with families and individuals who would love to come with us to church. They know there must be something better than what they have found, but assume by our silence about Jesus and the church where we attend that whatever it is they lack, we haven’t found it either.

I’ve heard preachers harangue their congregations with, “Sometimes silence isn’t golden; sometimes it’s yellow.”

The problem, I submit, is not that our people are cowards. It’s that they have been convinced by our preachers that their simple invitation to church does not count as witnessing and will not accomplish anything.

When Bill told a fellow carpenter that he had a hunger in his heart–and that’s precisely how this 30-year-old man described it–his co-worker may not have known how to lead him to Christ. But he did something every bit as effective.

He invited Bill to church.

The fellow carpenter said, “Bill, come go to church with me Sunday.” And that’s how Bill came to hear the gospel and step forward during the invitation and come to faith in Jesus. My pastor friend Mike baptized Bill as a brother in Christ.

Bring your friend to Jesus.

And if you can’t bring him or her to Jesus by yourself, then bring them to church and let us help.