Scripture: Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21; Matthew 7:24-27; Matthew 28:19; John 1:46 Series: Easter
Preached on the 6th Sunday of Easter, this sermon redefines evangelism for a media-saturated age where ‘good news’ has been corrupted by an industry that always sells something. Drawing on Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17), who affirms the pagans’ instinct and offers a gateway rather than condemnation, and on Jesus in John 14, the pastor argues evangelism is a shift from reason to desire: love is what you want, and those who love Jesus keep his commandments. After tracing the loaded history of ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalist’ (Scopes trial, Carl Henry, Billy Graham), he urges hearers neither to ambush strangers nor to avoid speaking of God, but simply to share the genuinely good thing that has happened in their own lives, freed from sin and no longer alone because the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate, walks with them. Evangelism is ‘come and see’ — pointing back to Jesus, who alone transforms and converts.
Illustrations: news-media-sells-something, rare-cancer-treatment-news, scopes-trial-inherit-the-wind, carl-henry-billy-graham-evangelical-term, coffee-shop-deathbed-question, house-on-rock-and-sand, freed-prisoner-shares-news, sharing-about-a-baby, come-and-see-john-1
May 10, 2026
What is Evangelism?
6th Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:22-31 John 14:15-21
Acts 17:22-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
John 14:15-21
”If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. ”I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
Sermon Transcription — Good News: What Is Evangelism?
At the time of Jesus, there was no New York Times. There was no Fox News or Guardian or New Yorker or Time Magazine or MSNBC or CNN or Wall Street Journal or any of these. News as a noun — as we know it — didn’t exist. Sales and marketing wasn’t an industry.
There weren’t any marketing shops in the Roman Empire because there wasn’t a media to consume it. Letters and books and works were not mass-produced. They were targeted for specific audiences, so you couldn’t grow markets or market share in this kind of way.
When Paul was preaching in Athens at Mars Hill, the Areopagus, he wasn’t thinking about the camera angle or posterity. He was thinking about the people directly in front of him.
There are a lot of differences between our world and the world of two thousand years ago, but this is one that is often missed — that when we say “good news,” it sounds different today than it would have two thousand years ago. And I’m not talking about the English language versus Greek or Aramaic or Latin. The concepts themselves are different.
The challenge today is deception — a lack of trust about news. People profit from news, from new media, from old media. All of it is selling something. All of it is selling something. And sometimes it’s earnestly something you need. You have a rare form of cancer, a new treatment comes out, you hear news about it, and you’re able to join a study. That’s great. But this is not the majority of news of any kind. And I’m not talking about ideologies or parties or politics or any of that. Everyone who owns a media company wants to make money on the media company. Everyone who has an active following on social media wants to grow that following.
With all of that — what is evangelism?
Now, some of you have experienced more evangelical churches, the more charismatic traditions as well. Those aren’t identical, but often they overlap. Some of you have grown up Catholic or have been in mainline churches for all of your religious life.
“Evangelical” today is more of a political category than a religious one. The largest Lutheran denomination, the ELCA, is officially titled the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “Evangelical” was a phrase that Martin Luther would use, but I don’t think many of the cultural categorizers would refer to ELCA Lutherans as evangelical as a religious category.
The term came up especially in the 1950s, by people like Carl Henry, who started Christianity Today, as a way to differentiate from fundamentalists. “Fundamentalist” was a large category and a controversial one, especially in the twenties and thirties over the Scopes trial in Tennessee — when the former vice president and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan came to Tennessee and prosecuted a case against a schoolteacher who was teaching evolution in schools. Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer at the time, came to defend him. The story drew national and international press, became a Pulitzer Prize–winning play and an amazing movie, Inherit the Wind.
The incident culturally placed, a lot of baggage around the term “fundamentalist.” And so after World War II, as Protestants were doing missionary work again, they leaned on this term “evangelical.” Carl Henry, Billy Graham, and others like them were at that point specifically focused on an apolitical Christianization of places around the world, especially war-torn places and across the United States as the GIs were coming home. And this language shifts and moves sociologically throughout the next seventy years.
So much so that whatever tradition you come out of, there’s probably some baggage in your life about the word “evangelism” — about what it means, what it could be, what it should mean, why it matters.
Literally, it means good news. Good message. The good message — the good message that he has risen, that Christ is risen indeed, that our life is different now because of resurrection. What seemed impossible before is possible now. Death has been defeated.
There are a lot of models for evangelism and what it can look like today. I remember growing up, being at a coffee shop, and somebody coming up to my table, interrupting me while I was reading, and asking me: if I died at that moment, where did I think I was going? This is one model of evangelism.
I think Jesus himself also offers us a different one — that our model of evangelism should come from him. Now, sometimes, especially for mainline churches, that can become a complete avoidance of actually talking about God and resurrection. And I think we should be careful of that temptation too — so concerned about making other people feel uncomfortable that we don’t actually speak and say what we believe.
Paul, in Acts 17, is in Athens, and he goes to one of the centers of public debate. He speaks up in the middle of the debate, and instead of saying to the pagans how wrong they are, he says that the resurrection of Christ is in some ways affirmed in the completion of what was already going on in pagan Athens. God is the source in whom we live and move and have our being. Paul makes this connection, offering a gateway.
And so often this is the limit of what people think of as evangelism, or apologetics. Apologetics — apologia, a Greek word for defense, making a defense of the faith. Apologetics is usually seen as arguing for Christian belief.
But what Jesus does in John 14 is make this amazing turn that I think should radicalize how we understand evangelism, how we understand our own faith and life and walk with Jesus, how we understand mercy and sacrifice and service. It is the shift from reason to desire. That’s what love is. Love is about desire. It is not simply what you think. It’s what do you want? What do you desire?
“Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
Those who love me — who are those who love him? In the same verse he says:
“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.”
In Matthew, we have the parable of the house on the sand and the house on the rock. The ones who hear the word of God and do them are like those who build their house upon the rock. The winds come and the waters rise and they are secure. But those who hear the word of God and don’t do it — it’s like those who build their house upon the sand. The winds come and the waters rise and they are swept away.
Jesus tells us to go forth and make disciples of all nations at the end of Matthew 28. But what I think is really important for us today — and to understand how important it is for your faith — is to think about what it means to share your faith. We are so focused, in church language, on the institutional identity of the church: “Oh, we need more people. We need more members. We need all these kinds of things.” But how grounding it is for your own faith to be willing to share it and explain it to others. To be unashamed of it. To not assume that people will think you’re crazy.
It is important for us. Multiple times throughout the New Testament, it is remarked that we should be able to give an account of our faith. And this also gets back to desire — having a faith worth giving an account of. Believing in God to the point that you want to share it. That God has something to offer the people in your lives. That God is not a sociological category. That you are not here this day just because of who your parents were or where you grew up, but that in your life, at one point, when the veil was thin, you encountered the divine.
You realized that you were not your mistakes. You are not your failures. You are not your sins. You are loved already, and you don’t have to desire paths of destruction. You don’t have to give in to the Joneses. You are free. You’re free to love and free to share. Your chains are gone. You can rise, go forth, and follow.
If you were locked away for a long time and you became free, you would share it. You would share that news.
People like to share when they have a baby. People like to share when their kids have a baby.
You are freed in Christ. Before you share, it’s good to reflect about what you believe — about who God is, about how Jesus saves, about how your life has changed and can continue to change.
If you would like to talk more about this and about your own faith, please come talk to me. Let us find a time to meet.
Most of all, don’t think of evangelism like a media organization, or like an influencer, or like a desire for conversions. It’s sharing something good that has happened in your life. And if it resonates with someone, fantastic. But it starts with you realizing that something good has happened in your life that’s worth sharing. The God who created everything did not see our broken world as something to ignore. He became human to be with us, to live with us, and ultimately to die for us.
But death was not the end. Death, in fact, was the enemy that was defeated when, three days later, he rose again. And then, still unfinished, he sent the Holy Spirit — the third person of the Trinity — to be with us, to be in us, to remind us that God is the source in whom we live and move and have our being, and to give us life so that we can share life in this world, so that we can offer love.
The Spirit of Truth came to be with us — the Advocate, the one walking with us — so that we are not alone. So let us not act as if we are alone. Let us not act as if we have saved ourselves.
We may not be on Mars Hill, on that debate stage, but let us be willing to start with the basics. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, when Jesus goes up to Philip and Andrew and Nathanael, he says to them simply: come and see. Jesus is the one who transforms hearts, not us. Jesus is the one who converts, not us. Jesus is the one who gives life.
May we be willing to point, in our lives, back to Jesus — to show the love that has already come down to us. That is what it means to follow the commandments: to reflect in our lives and in our desires our love for God and our love for our neighbor. And then God will also respond to that.
May we be free — not slaves to the brokenness of this world and the anxiety and the worries that however we speak outside of our comfort zone, we will fail — but trusting that God is there for us, and the Spirit of Truth has been offered so that we are no longer alone.
Thanks be to God.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.