What Should Our Evangelism Look Like?

16 August 2026  Isaiah 56:1,6-7

“…for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

 (Isaiah 56:7)

If God’s house “shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:9), what kind of evangelization does that suggest?

For the Jews, from Isaiah’s time to now, it has suggested forming the kind of holy community that people will be attracted to. That attraction will draw them to Judaism. For the Jews, therefore, evangelization is mostly a matter of being a conspicuously holy people. Christians have felt a powerful obligation to go out and “make disciples of all nations.” Christianity is the preeminent “missionary religion,” so evangelization means mostly going out and showing the world how the Gospel is Good News, how it explains more about this world, and how it leads to heaven. 

Jews and Christians agree that materialism – the view that all reality is no more than interactions between physical substances – is an utterly incoherent worldview, despite its immense popularity.

For the Jews, therefore, evangelization is mostly a matter of being a conspicuously holy people. Christians have felt a powerful obligation to go out and “make disciples of all nations.” The New Testament is committed, and commits all believers, to both kinds of witness because that is the clearest testimony that God’s house “shall be a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins has been fond of saying that we humans are no more than machines that exist to pass on our DNA, driven by our “selfish genes.” Of course, he also calls on people to “rise up” against our selfish genes so that we can “upset their desires, something that no other species has ever aspired to” (The Selfish Gene, p. 215). But if we are just chemicals and electricity blindly programmed to replicate, what can it possibly mean to “rise up” against anything, as if we have will, morality, or purpose, none of which are real, but are just chemicals and electricity, too? You don’t have to push on a view like that very hard before its silliness and incoherence become clear.

Neurosurgeons sometimes perform an operation called a “corpus callosotomy,” in which they cut the corpus callosum and physically separate the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Strangely, this doesn’t create two separate persons, or two distinct forms of consciousness. People who have had a corpus callosotomy function as unified persons who can think and reason normally. Clearly something is compensating for the loss of the corpus callosum, something independent of the brain, something like the mind, or perhaps the soul. Neuroscientists have wondered what accounts for a mind or soul that can do this, that is somehow independent of the brain. One of the possibilities neuroscience considers is that God would be a good explanation, that a relationship with a divine Mind would be just the thing that explains what neurosurgeons see daily (cf. The Immortal Mind, Michael Egnor).

The Jews are committed to being the kind of community that believes this, that seeks to understand, through prayer and the careful study of scripture, what the Divine Mind is, and how we can identify features of the Divine Image in us. Christians are committed to examining the research from neuroscience and other fields, and being clear about their implications for religion; commited as well to studying the philosophical claims of materialism, being clear about their inadequacies, and showing secularized people that Christianity offers a worldview with greater explanatory power.

The New Testament is committed, and commits all believers, to both kinds of witness because that is the clearest testimony that God’s house “shall be a house of prayer for all peoples.” The world needs to know what we are, and so we must be, as conspicuously as possible, people of deep holiness and equally deep compassion, and so a true household of God (cf. 1 Timothy 3:15). The world needs to know as well what we see when we look at them, and so we need to examine the world carefully, and just as carefully treat the wounds we see with the medicine of grace.