I’ve never been good at sales. I’ve always hated it. When I was in fifth grade I had to get so many pledges for the Jump-Rope-a-Thon. While I did get some, I didn’t get as many as other kids did. I did, however, manage to jump-rope nearly three hours. Man! Was I sore the next few days.
One of the big things in Christianity is witnessing, a.k.a. soul winning. I never liked it. To me, the way it was presented made it sound like the pastor was giving his annual (or however often pastors do this) pep talk so that the church would grow. Since I was always rather shy, it was exceptionally hard for me ti “witness” to others. Besides, what if I didn’t know the answer? But the whole way it was presented seemed just “off” to me.
I remember reading in Matt 28:19 how it said to go out and make disciples of all people. To me, it didn’t seem right, to go and “win” a soul and then drop them off at the local church. It always seemed like the “soul winner” was shirking their responsibilities and leaving it up to the church.
It wasn’t until when I was in high school, where I lead my first person to Christ. This friend went to the same high school as I did, and we became good friends. He was agnostic to start with. He said that what he found interesting was whenever I talked on other subjects I’d contradict myself, however, he said that I never contradicted myself when it came to biblical stuff. My closing “pitch” was to point out to him that by following Jesus, life would not get easier, but harder, that he’d be painting a bulls-eye on himself, and then walking in front of the front line. Some closing pitch huh? Doesn’t that just make you want to say yes? I had said that to him on the bus ride home. Later that day, he made a decision to follow Jesus.
My friend knew that I didn’t believe in winning souls and then just dropping them off at church for the church to do the rest of it. For the next year I discipled him. We’d talk almost daily, either on the phone or face to face. I could tell he was serious about it because whenever I quoted a verse, but gave the wrong address, he’d correct me.
See, it’s not about winning souls, as much as it is about discipling people. I hear people all the time say that they plant, another waters and yet another harvests. While I’ll concede that to some extent it is necessary to plant, water or harvest, but that’s not the primary model. The church has done a terrific job pushing on us this scheme, this structure for winning souls. The flaw in it is that no one takes responsibility to disciple the person.
Maybe a better analogy would be to imagine a garden. In a garden the person plants, waters and harvests, all the way through. That’s because gardens are usually small enough to manage with one person. Some bigger gardens may have a couple helpers, but if it gets bigger than that, then it becomes something else. It becomes more like an industry. Yeshua never wanted us to industrialize soul winning. Rather, what Yeshua wanted, was for us to spend time, to invest ourselves, personally, into peoples lives and to see it all the way through. From start to finish.
Discipleship is much slower, and certainly costs more of your time. But think about this, perhaps, some of the reason that people would “backslide” was because no one invested in them, to disciple them. It was too much like a used car sales experience. Think about it. Did Jesus just “win” souls? Did he just “water” or “plant” or “harvest”? No of course not! He was there from beginning to end. He invested time with his disciples. Maybe it’s time that we do it the way he did, the way he told us to, and not worry about winning souls.
In Yeshua’s service
Torah Rocker 
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