As you may have seen above, I and some members of Ridgewood AG have been going out door to door this year. I wanted to share with you an experience we recently had. Our approach in this outreach is as follows. We first knock on doors and say, “Hi my name is _________ and this is __________ we are from the church down the road. We are just out to meet our neighbors and to offer to do an act of service. Would you mind if we wash your car windows for you?” If they turn us down, then we move on. We may stop buy again to offer them cookies just in case they just didn’t want their car washed. If they respond favorably to either one, we revisit them about a month later. During that visit we ask if they would mind us sharing with them why we did what we did. If they say yes, we proceed with sharing our testimony and why we go to church. Depending on the visit, we either proceed to share the gospel or arrange a time to return and do so. After that, we attempt to lead them to Christ and get them to attend a church and a small group. Now that is basically what we do. We are not pushy at all.

We have been working a particular street corner over the last few months. On a Saturday in late July, we decided to reattempt knocking on a door in which we had no answer the last time we tried. A man answered and we went through our routine. He turned us down politely, so we said, “Okay, have a nice day” and left. After knocking on a few more doors down the road another man came out of that first house and shouted “Hey, you’re not allowed to do that on this street. I’m calling the cops” and walked back in his house. I thought he was just trying to scare us off and I was not about to quit until a cop showed up. Sure enough a cop did show up and told us we were not allowed to do what we were doing without a permit. So I asked the cop how to get a permit and he said we have to go to the borough building.

We are still attempting to resolve the issues. In the mean time, eventually we may move elsewhere until the issues are resolved. However, we will still work to resolve the issues in that neighborhood.

Now they may had desired to prevent us from spreading the gospel thinking we were soliciting or had some other reason. Not everyone who brings minor persecution has it as the motive to stop the kingdom of God. Now that is not to say that there have not been people with those motives. However, I have the up most confidence that the enemy did stir that event up. Our last two outings leading up to that we had two people respond very favorably to us and we shared our testimony and the gospel with them. I’m sure the enemy was not very happy with that and was going to attempt to discourage us.

Now imagine if more Christians and more churches were actually going out into their communities and sharing the gospel. We would begin to uncover the minor laws that are set up to hinder door to door ministry. However, the Supreme Court ruled on such matters and there should not be laws that exist such as this, but I’m sure they are out there.

While we sit safe and sound tucked away in our church singing our songs and listening to sermons, the enemy is seeking a way to keep us permanently grounded. We don’t even notice because we do not even attempt to get out of the church and go to the lost. You may have seen the outreach effort of most churches. A lot of churches just try to get people to come to their church and they will share the gospel there. Jesus did not say, “get all the world into your church so you can preach the gospel to them.” He said, “GO [emphasis added] into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15). We are supposed to go to the lost, not expect them to come to us. The other thing many Christians do is just be nice to people and some how through some magic spell of being nice they will miraculously come to Christ because we smiled at them or said, “God bless you.” Too many Christians think that if we go to church, pray, read our Bible, live righteously, and be nice to people that we will change the world. Read the book of Acts and you will see that it did not happen that way. We need to get on the move when the consequences will be minor and while we still might be able to change things.

Also, regarding what to do if there are laws against witnessing, there is Scripture that teaches us about such an issue. In Acts 4:15-31, we see that the apostles resisted such laws and continued to preach. The conflict continued in Acts 5:16-42. The key verse is Acts 5:29 in which Peter told the authorities, “We must obey God rather than men.” Not to mention at the end of the conflict “from house to house they kept right on teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ” (Acts 5:42). We are supposed to submit to the authorities unless they order us to go against the word of God and specifically if they tell us not to spread the gospel. For more information on evangelism, please see the Evangelism training class on the right side of this blog. We must proclaim the gospel!