What is Pre-Evangelism?

What is pre-evangelism?  Pre-evangelism is the tough work of tearing down objections and obstacles to a sincere hearing of the Christian message of the gospel.  Some persons have walls in their minds and hearts that simply will not allow them to give an open ear to the claims of the Christian faith.  When we do pre-evangelism, we may not be “sharing the gospel” with someone, but we are doing the necessary work of helping them clear hurdles that stand in the way of really hearing the gospel.

A few weeks ago I was reading an excellent book entitled Prelude to Philosophy by Mark W. Foreman.  In the forward, J. P. Moreland, a well-known Christian philosopher and theologian, writes these very true and powerful words which mention the important work of pre-evangelism. It’s a long quote, but it’s worth the 3 minutes it will take you to read and digest it:

“[O]ur culture is in deep trouble.  And while the causes of our malaise are varied, a core problem is the general inability of the American people to think carefully about things that really matter.  And the church of Jesus Christ, which is called to be the pillar and support of the truth, is just as anti-intellectual as the broader culture.  There is a straightforward application of the church’s anti-intellectualism for the body of Christ’s ability to affect the world for Jesus.  To see this, consider the fact that a person’s plausibility structure is the set of ideas the person either is or is not willing to entertain as possibly true.  For example, no one would come to a lecture defending a flat earth because this idea is not part of our plausibility structure.  We cannot even entertain the idea.  Moreover, a person’s plausibility structure is a function of the beliefs he or she already has.  Applied to outreach, J. Gresham Machen got it right when he said:

‘God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favourable conditions for the reception of the gospel.  False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel.  We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.’

If a culture reaches the point where Christian claims are not even part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to entertain the possibility that they might be true… This is why a vibrant intellectual life is so crucial to evangelism.  It empowers the church to be able to create a plausibility structure in a person’s mind, ‘favourable conditions’ as Machen puts it, so the gospel can be entertained by that person.  To plant a seed in someone’s mind in pre-evangelism is to present a person with an idea that will work on his or her plausibility structure to create a space in which Christianity can be entertained seriously.  If this is important to evangelism, it is strategically crucial that local churches think about how they can address those aspects of the modern worldview that place Christianity outside the plausibility structures of so many.” ¹

Churches should labor to teach and train their people to do pre-evangelism.  This is not purely an intellectual exercise, but it is no less either.  Every church can play a role in this great task, even if it’s doing something as simple as supporting ministries like Ratio Christi who focus exclusively on the important work of pre-evangelism, or attending and supporting events like next year’s Why Jesus? in Bangor, ME.