Evangelism’s best bridge is us Christians
Evangelical Alliance’s Rachael Heffer explains the 2022 ‘Talking Jesus’ report.
The 2022 ‘Talking Jesus’ report maps evangelism, believers and what non-Christians think of faith, Christians and the church in the UK. Rachael gives us an overview of the key questions and highlights from the 2022 report.
What were the headlines from the Talking Jesus report?
What came out of the 2022 research is overwhelmingly positive, although it does reveal challenges and opportunities for the church and individual Christians too.
In terms of headlines, one of the most encouraging is that 45 per cent of the UK population say they believe in the resurrection.
Another thing that excited me was that 53 per cent of non-Christians said they know a Christian, and predominantly those were friends or family members.
The third thing was that out of those non-Christians, one in three said they had had conversations about faith with a Christian friend or family member which were overridingly positive and that they would welcome further conversations about faith. That’s up from one in five in 2015.
What does it reveal about Christians and our relationships with non-believers?
Much of the report shows that the best bridge for evangelism is us as individual Christians, so while we’re sharing life together we need to be intentional about having faith conversations.
It shows non-Christians see their Christian friends and family positively – we gave them a list of adjectives to choose how they would describe the Christians they know and the top four answers were ‘friendly’, ‘good humoured’, ‘caring’ and ‘generous’.
The findings also showed the impact of the pandemic – in 2015, four per cent of people said the Christian they knew was a neighbour, but that increased to eight per cent in 2022, which might indicate how Christians got to know their neighbours during lockdown.
What else did you learn about non-Christians?
One of the really interesting questions was if non-Christians were looking to explore faith, where would they go? The top answers were that 31 per cent of the 4,000 surveyed said they would go to a local church, 28 per cent would go to the Bible and 26 per cent to Google.
That shows the importance of digital media for churches: what do our websites say about us? How inviting are they? How do we use Google, Christian websites and our own social media to help people engage with the Christian faith?
It was also interesting to hear the questions people are asking about life and faith – 18 per cent wanted to know ‘will everything be OK?’; 19 per cent were asking ‘what should I do with my life?’, but the key question was that 22 per cent were asking ‘what happens when you die?’
What about Christians’ attitudes to evangelism?
We asked those who said they were practising Christians how they feel about conversations with non-Christian friends.
Three quarters said it was important to share their faith and that they felt comfortable doing so. However, 40 per cent said they fear conversations where big questions might be asked that they would struggle to answer. So that presents a challenge to consider how we answer some of the big questions of faith or life.
What also interested me was 42 per cent of practicing Christians said they didn’t know enough non-Christians, or know them well enough to share their faith.
So there’s a challenge to look outside our churches and see where we can create genuine friendships.
What other challenges did the research uncover?
We asked non-Christians about their perceptions of church and it didn’t come out too positively:
• 26 per cent said they thought the church was narrow-minded;
• Another 26 per cent said they thought it was hypocritical;
• But 22 per cent did say the church was friendly.
We need to look at how we welcome or invite people into our church communities. We’re producing a Talking Jesus Toolkit which will have an ‘evangelism health-check’ in it for churches to benchmark where they’re at and where they’d like to be.
Then we can signpost courses and resources to equip people to develop a culture of evangelism within their church communities and grow in confidence in their own personal witness too.
What changes do you hope the report will provoke?
We know from talking to church leaders that the 2015 Talking Jesus report encouraged them to speak about evangelism within their church communities and shape their mission and evangelism strategies.
So we hope this new report will develop that culture of evangelism in 2022 and beyond.
We hope it will encourage individual Christians to release the baggage we carry when we think about what evangelism needs to be too – this report shows people around us know us, like us and are open to conversations.
Hopefully it will encourage individuals to be bravely intentional, to talk about Jesus, pray for their friends and find new places where they can also meet non-Christians.
Report’s key findings
Key pointers from the Talking Jesus report based on a survey conducted by Savanta ComRes, who talked to a nationally representative sample of 4,000 UK adults in February 2022.
• 53 per cent of non-Christians know an active Christian
• 45 per cent of the UK population believe in the resurrection
• 33 per cent of non-Christians want to know more about Jesus
• 20 per cent believe Jesus is God
• Six per cent of UK adults are practising Christians. 26 per cent of non-Christians would go to Google to find out about Christianity
• 40 per cent of Christians say the biggest barrier to sharing faith is difficult questions
• Four per cent of Christians came to faith through seeing Christian content on social media
• 42 per cent of Christians don’t know enough non-Christians, or know them well enough to share their faith
The full Talking Jesus report is available at talkingjesus.org. It is a partnership between the Evangelical Alliance, Hope Together, Alpha, Kingsgate, CV Global and the Luis Palau Association.
This article first appeared in the August 2022 edition of Direction Magazine. For further details please click here.
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