In a recent meeting of mission executives and Bible college professors, the subject of evangelism came up. While our ministries professedly exist to win the lost to Christ, few reported having won anyone to the faith in quite some time. We live in culture that thrives on specialization. Not surprisingly, we tend to define our duties in very limited ways. While specialization is valid and sometimes necessary, we should never become so microscopic in our outlook that we miss important spiritual duties, like evangelism.
Balance is of the essence.
We should guard against tendencies that constrict our ministries very narrowly to preaching, teaching, administration, or flying airplanes in the jungle. These certainly require time, but if their temporal requirement yields little time to evangelize, we run the very serious risk of imbalance. If evangelism is truly a priority, perhaps something else in our schedules should go, to make room for it. Christ exempted no one from the Great Commission, not even Bible college professors. We theorize, sometimes quite passionately, but are, in fact, so far removed from life as it really is that we hardly know how to seriously relate to the ones we professedly aim to reach.