“Jesus died to pay the price for our sins. He wants to have a personal relationship with you; to show you an abundant life! What do you think of that?”
“Um… cool I guess.”
I was sitting on the floor with a PDF Gospel tract open on my phone. I had just given what felt like one of the most clear and explicit proclamations of the Gospel I had ever given. I had the greatest news of all time and I was eager to share it with one of the ninth graders in the youth ministry I was leading. How could he not be viscerally overwhelmed by the powerful message I had for him?
Have you ever experienced this kind of response?
“Thanks for sharing. I’m not really interested/ready/open to that right now.”
“That sounds like it’s been really impactful. I’m happy for you.”
“That’s nice.”
When his response didn’t match my unbridled enthusiasm, I was shaken to the core. The Kerygma, the core Gospel message, is undeniably powerful. I had been well equipped to share it with fantastic training and resources. I had prayed for boldness. I was ready to proclaim the Gospel.
The only problem was that he was not ready to receive it.
For years before, I had lived with an unshakeable, self-imposed pressure to proclaim in my relationships. I understood that it was urgent for people to be awakened to the love of Jesus but with deeper examination of my own heart, it seemed that I was more motivated to proclaim the Gospel out of fear that people would go to hell than out of love and a genuine desire for them to experience the Good News.
I remember sitting on a bus with my headphones in and next to a complete stranger. The entire bus ride, I pressured myself to take my headphones off and bring the person next to me into the Kingdom. There was no prompting from the Holy Spirit, only my own anxiety.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I walked away asking myself why I couldn’t have been more bold. I told myself that without my witness, that stranger was likely headed for hell. I worked through my obstacles to having a missionary heart and started praying even harder for boldness.
I brought my internal wrestlings to a friend working in parish ministry and asked her what she thought. How could I grow in my boldness? Her response changed the way I approached relational evangelization.
She said “sometimes I think we confuse boldness for recklessness.”
In my floor conversation with the ninth grader, I realized that I was being reckless. I barely knew him as a person, let alone the level of his openness to the Gospel. I did not know where he was at in His walk with God. Instead of listening to him and to the Holy Spirit with an open heart, I tried to push him forward out of fear for his eternal soul.
I have come a long way from my years of anxious evangelization. In Jesus’ parable of the sower he tells us that only one in the four seeds that were sown took root. Without losing our missionary zeal, we must realize that it’s just as important to know the soil as it is to know the seed. We can proclaim the Gospel articulately with a clear invitation to follow Jesus but if the heart we are proclaiming to is not ready, it will not bear fruit.
A simple tool we can use to help us know when to proclaim the Gospel is the five Thresholds. The thresholds were first noticed by two campus ministers with Intervarsity named Doug Schnaupp and Don Everts. After analyzing the stories of thousands of students who had come to Christ, they recognized five common obstacles people had to overcome on their way to receiving the Gospel.
They published their findings in the book “I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus.” The Thresholds were then popularized in Catholic circles by Sherry Weddel in her landmark work “Forming Intentional Disciples.”
The Five Thresholds are:
1 - Trust
Before someone starts to trust Jesus, they usually develop a relationship of trust with someone who follows Jesus. This shows them what following Jesus looks like and opens their hearts to begin considering it in their own life.
2 - Curiosity
Trust leads to curiosity when the life of the Christian inspires questions about Jesus and His teachings in the heart of the individual.
3 - Openness to Change
At this stage, the individual is not yet ready to give their lives to Christ but they have come to a point where they are open to the possibility of change. They still have questions to evaluate but conversion has appeared as a potential destination on the horizon.
4 - Seeking
When a person crosses this threshold, they begin actively seeking a relationship with God. They move past openness into genuine desire for Jesus.
5 - Conversion
This final threshold brings someone into relationship with Jesus and starts them on the path of following Him with their whole life as a missionary disciple.
It’s important to note that these thresholds are not meant to be a framework to push people through. What they do instead is give us cues on how to love the person in front of us where they are at as we patiently wait for the Holy Spirit to do something wonderful and mysterious in their hearts.
If we are paying close attention to the person and how the Holy Spirit is at work in them, we will hopefully see them come to the fifth threshold, where we can joyfully proclaim the Kerygma and invite them to follow Jesus. If we follow His promptings and walk alongside Him in all our missionary efforts, we can accompany the lost with boldness, free from anxiety, internal pressure, or fear.