Sharing the Gospel Contextually and Appropriately

Les Henson

Jesus didn’t use techniques or apply formulas but treated individuals as individuals and engaged them in context in a contextual manner. Now that’s important because people in a post-everything world and many groups and subgroups in our society are immune to modernistic approaches to evangelism. They sense and react against any attempt to make them an object of evangelism, and rightly so. However, they do respond to real authentic engagement that comes out of real-life situations.

If you take the time to study how Jesus engaged various individuals in the Gospels, you will see that he engaged them in the context of life in an appropriate fashion. He never used a formulaic approach. We may observe prime examples of this in the different ways Jesus engaged the Samaritan woman, Nicodemus, and the rich young ruler. He engages each of them in a completely different yet appropriate fashion. He takes their various needs, personalities and backgrounds seriously.

I have been a Christian for over fifty years, and I have never seen two people come to Christ in precisely the same way. We have to be careful that we don’t fall into the trap of sharing the gospel in a way that cheapens the gospel. We must not become peddlers of cheap grace. Like, Jesus, we are required to treat people as people with respect and dignity rather than objects of evangelism. To do otherwise is a negation of the gospel we are to communicate. Thus, we need to take context seriously and share the gospel contextually and appropriately. In so doing, the gospel never entirely comes out the same way twice.