04/04/2026
Why don't we proclaim the kingdom of God?
More than 20 years ago, I was seriously worried about evangelism. Not only was I unable to preach as I had done before, but almost all Christians seemed to have given up on evangelism. When I was about 17 years old, I devoted myself to serving the Lord, but even in my late 30s and 40s in America, I could not share the gospel with other people. In fact, most of the ministers seemed to be preaching and teaching only within the church, and it seemed to me that nobody was preaching the gospel to unbelievers. Maybe I might be wrong, but I felt deeply worried, even to great fear. The people on the ship could drown while Jonah was sleeping on the ship. But the church has been shrinking and shrinking, while the whole society has been sinking into a deep ungodly water. But I did not try to research and invent a better way of evangelism. My instinct told me it was not a problem with the methods. I felt we do not know what the gospel and its power are, and their sharing.
Until 1990, when I was working with Campus Crusade in Korea, the Korean church devoted all its full efforts to evangelism in every possible way. It was a time of amazing growth in which the church grew explosively, and many missionaries were sent to the whole world. The message of evangelism at that time, whether it was a church evangelism revival meeting, a large-scale gathering of hundreds of thousands, such as a Billy Graham Crusade, a small group evangelism, or an individual evangelism, was to present the atonement of Jesus' death on the cross and to receive Jesus as the personal Savior. After that, I moved to Canada and later to the United States, where sharing the gospel was no longer welcomed by people, but rather considered a nuisance. I seemed to even the church agreed that the era of evangelism was over. It seemed everybody knew the gospel. They knew Jesus died on the cross for the payment of sins and resurrection, eternal life, salvation, and the grace of God. Quite rarely do I see very bold evangelism with picket speakers, writing on the car or truck, or even placards flying in the sky of a stadium.
We don't know if such evangelism will bring people closer to Jesus or push them further away from the Lord. But what is clear is that Christianity continues to decline. Moreover, the church in this era used the advantages of the peak of civilizations, such as architecture, transportation, publication and communication, the Internet, electronics, and culture, but the results were going the other way around.
If our message to the world is flawless, there can be no hope in the world. Because the church has already done all we could do. But I have felt we missed something great from the message of Jesus from the beginning. Which can be the very cause of the confusion we have experienced. I did not have the whole picture of what the message meant. I just try to read the Bible with child-converted eye. And it was so easy to find what the difference was between Jesus’ message and our message. Quite naturally, a strong question appeared: “Why don’t we speak to the world that the Kingdom is at hand?" No! I do not understand and do not have the whole picture. But still, I thought I could do what Jesus’ disciples who were no better than me, sorry to them, obeyed and did.
