“I believe we, as followers of Jesus Christ, are to take the gospel to the people around us,” Eyman said in an interview. “In God’s sovereignty, He has placed people around us who are there for a reason. It’s not a manipulative thing on our part; we are to be like Christ.” So he tries to share what he believes with others “in an authentic, sincere, friendship kind of way.”
One thing he has tried: talking to servers in restaurants as he orders a meal. (He got the idea, Eyman said, from a member of Presbyterian Elders in Prayer, who said that “he and his wife used to do that” and who encouraged others to do it in her memory after she had died.)
After he is seated at a table, Eyman often tells the server that it’s his practice to pray, and to give thanks for the food before he eats. And he asks if there’s anything the server would like him to pray about. Often, the server seems surprised and puts him off, saying something like, “Let me think about it.”
But sometimes, Eyman said, the server will come back to the table later asking for prayer for someone who’s ill or suffered a loss, or for the needs and concerns of others who work in the restaurant.
He isn’t pushy, and “I always make sure I tip well,” Eyman said. If he comes back to the restaurant another time, the server often remembers him, and they’re able to talk again.
Eyman said he worked for Campus Crusade for Christ for a few years — he knows what it’s like to stop people cold on the street, and try to talk to them about God. Sometimes there’s a lot of focus on the moment of conversion. But he’s also convinced that if the conversation grows out of a sincere relationship, “all kinds of doors open … The vast majority of times, it is the relationships we have with the people we see every day that really make the best disciples.”
David Hackett, of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, said he’s heard author Michael Green, an Anglican, give this advice for evangelism: “Do the orthodox thing in an unorthodox place.”
Often, people don’t speak of their faith because they don’t know what to say. “A lot of the fear that people have about evangelism is suddenly somebody is demanding that we do stuff that we don’t know how to do,” Hackett said. They think, “we’re not preachers … so they freeze.”
So Green suggests that people do what they already know how to do, but in a different place.
“Take your choir, go down to the park and sing,” Hackett said. “Or do Bible study at the tavern. Or do baptisms by the river,” pray and worship there. Hackett said that Green told him, by the end of the day, “you’ll be baptizing people that you didn’t come with.”
