For six weeks this summer, Pastor David Wehrle and Seminary Intern Sung Woo Lee will lead Leonia United Methodist Church in an exploration of evangelism – regarded by many mainline Protestants as the dreaded “E-word.” This preaching series will take a deeper look at the Lilly Endowment study findings found in the book by Martha Grace Reese.
Evangelism books generally presume everyone wants to do evangelism, so they tell you how to do it. Four years of Lilly Endowment-funded research has demonstrated conclusively that most people would rather go get a root canal than think about evangelism!
On a scale of one to ten, how do you measure up? Are you tall enough? Pretty enough? Smart enough? Funny enough? And on that scale, which number represents enough? Do you have to score a ten or will a solid seven do? How about a five? It’s better than average, right? Most of us measure how we’re doing by how everyone else is doing. Not a day goes by that we’re not tempted to glance to the left and to the right to see how we measure up to the people around us. This is especially true at school. We see everyone else’s grades, clothes, athletic ability, talent, and popularity. And it’s easy to feel like we don’t measure up. So we adjust course, try harder, spend more, and then compare again. It’s exhausting. In this 3-part series, Andy Stanley explores the difficult—but not impossible—challenge of escaping The Comparison Trap.