Thursday, February 24, 2005

Good Cop, Bad Cop

I was at a meeting earlier today and there was talk about visiting, it was suggested that one person should make an initial visit then two should go for subsequent visits. I don’t know why but this brought to mind the whole kind of good cop, bad cop type idea and maybe this would be a good technique for evangelism? Bare with me on this, it’s only a crazy idea but it would be interesting to see what you think. There is a statistic that says church attendance started to decline when preachers stopped preaching hell, fire and eternal damnation and I think most of us would agree that to stand in the street and tell random people that they should ‘turn or burn’ for instance is perhaps not the most effective let alone the nicest form of evangelism . But have we gone to far the other way, we preach a God of love and Grace for that is the God we worship, but He is also a God of Justice, and it s not only the old testament where we see Gods anger destroy people, Ananias and Sapphira, so is there a need to perhaps bring back an element of the wrath of God in our preaching to bring a balance with the grace we perhaps focus on too much?