R.C. Sproul

What do you do with them after you evangelize them?

Doesn't Jesus say in the Great Commission to go into all the earth to make disciples?

That means students.

And so I have a tendency to think the most important enterprise in the church is the teaching enterprise of the church.

And the people who are gifted for evangelism and are giving themselves heart and soul to evangelism have a tendency to do what?

To think that the only important task of the church is evangelism.

or you have other people who are engaged in ministries of mercy.

They're feeding the hungry.

They're clothing the naked.

They're working in the inner city with street people and so on.

And they come back and say, oh, you guys are living in the realm of abstraction.

All you're doing is teaching and preaching while people are starving and while people are homeless and so on.

The real task of the church is to take care of the hungry and so on.

And this goes on endlessly.

because we have a tendency to think more highly of ourselves than we ought, and more highly of our positions and our vocations than we ought, and we get to be like the Pharisees of the New Testament who loved the front seats and all of the honor in the synagogue.

Whereas Paul is saying no, that there is a function

for everybody in the church, and all of these functions are necessary for the church to perform her mission.

Now there's a flip side to that.

I have talked to preachers who believe that every Christian in every church is responsible to be an evangelist.

And I said, I don't believe that.