Look for opportunities to share stories, author tells UMs

By Rachel L. Toalson
Staff Writer
Evangelism is about sharing stories.
One doesn’t have to “spill his guts” during the first conversation with a non-Christian, said the Rev. Martha Grace “Gay” Reese, director of the Mainline Evangelism Project.
One simply has to share a faith story, she said. And each person has many.
Reese, author of the best-selling book Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism, addressed the Southwest Texas Annual Conference session June 8 in Corpus Christi as part of the Council on Ministries report.
In addition, she led a smaller dialogue session on faith sharing, spoke at a dinner and talked to people one-on-one during several book signings.
During her June 8 address, Reese cited findings from the four-year Mainline Evangelism Project. It involved interviews with more than 1,000 people from 150 mainline Protestant congregations,
including United Methodists.
“What I found is that most of (those interviewed) would rather get gallbladder surgery than evangelize,” Reese said. “We have this horrible sense that we don’t want to impinge ourselves on people. It seems so rude.”
The church today, she said, has a “build and they will come” mentality—the belief that if they build wonderful churches inside and out, people will inherently know about Jesus.
It’s not working well, she added.
“We’re doing badly reaching those who didn’t grow up in church,” she said.
Of some 30,000 mainline Protestant congregations in the United States, only 150 reported baptizing five adults per year, Reese said.
But the churches evangelizing well had something in common, she said. They loved Jesus, had a deep relationship with him and shared that story.
“We have to have a relationship with God that is alive, vibrant and on edge in our lives, or (faith sharing) won’t happen,” Reese said. “Every member has to have a love relationship with Christ, with the Spirit, that is so rich it overflows in our lives. And we have to have people who are praying and teaching their people to articulate their faith.”
Reese, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) pastor and director of GraceNet Inc., a church consulting organization in St. Louis, said evangelism can happen in simple ways—such as praying for the people God wants to reach.
“You could just ask them to lunch, and there just mention that you go to church,” Reese said. “People are terrified of going to church alone.
“If we will be willing to be used—and it may not be that we’re comfortable with what God is nudging us to do—we don’t know what our lives will be like, but we know they will be real. And I can promise you this: This conference will have an increase in attendance that will make jaws drop.”
Reese was led to Christ when she went to Spain for a year in college. She said she stayed with a girl who “talked about Jesus as if there was one.” The roommate encouraged Reese to read Ecclesiastes and then John, so she did.
“I had a mystical experience that made the windows rattle,” Reese said. “I’m sure God cared enough about me that he would have worked through someone else, but no one had for 20 years.”
Reese encouraged others to look for opportunities to share their stories.
Carol Loeb, Council on Ministries chair, said Reese spoke to a deep desire expressed in feedback forms gathered at laity summits this year.
“The laity are hungry to know how to do evangelism,” Loeb said. “I don’t believe that we, as Methodists, have done a good job teaching how to do evangelism and how to tell our story.
“I have read (Reese’s) book. I think it could do wonders to transform our churches.”
Besides being a pastor, Reese has been an attorney and a judiciary executive. She has spent the last decade as a congregational transformation coach.