Cheap, Easy Believism is Detrimental to Modern Missions!

“Some might ask in all sincerity, “Why complicate anything as simple as the task of winning men to Christ? The facts are clear: ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ ‘The wages of sin is death’ and ‘Christ died for our sins.’ Ask if the man believes these truths. If he does, get him to assent to the Scriptural proposition: ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.’ If he believes, he is automatically saved, right then and there, It is as simple as that. Why complicate it?”

While it is a sad fact that in American Evangelical circles today, the gospel tends to be simplified to the irreducible minimum of believing three facts and agreeing to a simple proposition that appears to make automatic the whole matter of becoming a Christian, this is in sharp contrast with the method employed by our Lord. In fact, a careful study of his method will reveal how inadequate is the popular concept of getting a man to “take Jesus as his own personal Savior.” It is not with out reason that whereas many go through this “formula” and profess to receive Christ, not a few subsequently fall by the wayside and manifest by their lives that they never really experienced the new birth. We stand against this “easy believism” and “cheap grace” and turn to the sequence of our Lord’s method for “making disciples.”

(Crucial Dimensions on World Evangelisation, Arthur F. Glasser, Paul G. Hiebert C Peter Wagner, Ralph D. Winter. William Carey Library 1980 pg 12,13)

Personal Note:

Many a field missionary have experienced the short-termer, who comes with a powerful message, or shows the Jesus film, and asks people to pray a formula prayer. When asked how many in the group said this prayer, hundreds will raise their hands. The "missionary goes home reporting a brilliant success with hundreds and hundreds turning to the Lord. The Reality is that with little ground work and use of local churches, That very Sunday will see little change in attendance. Where are the hundreds on Sunday? They have not flooded the local church.
We have every right to question the substance and depth of such methodology that sees little or not integration of these "converts" into the local church. This occurs scandalously often on the field today.