Steve Douglass has some big shoes to fill, stepping into the role long filled by Bill Bright as president of Campus Crusade for Christ. Since 2001, Douglass has led one of the world’s largest evangelistic organizations. An MIT graduate and Harvard MBA, Steve served Campus Crusade for more than 30 years prior to assuming the presidency. Preaching editor Michael Duduit recently visited with Douglass to discuss the place of evangelism in the 21st century, and how that will impact the preaching of God’s Word.
Preaching: Why is it important to do evangelism now?
Douglass: On one hand, it’s always important to do evangelism. I don’t need to tell a preacher that – it’s in season and out of season. That would be enough reason. But it is especially important now for two really fundamental reasons. Number one, and most important by far, is that God is moving. And number two, technologies and approaches are available today that were not available before.
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I think we have concrete evidence that God is stepping things up in recent days. One example is just the existence of the Jesus film. Here’s a film that has been translated into 933 different languages. That’s never occurred in history. The most translated film other than that might be less than 150. And here we have a film that’s been shown in every single country on earth and has seen 6 billion exposures to the gospel, 200 million decisions. Ralph Winter, the former director of the U.S. Center for World Missions, calls it the most effective evangelism tool of all history. Just the presence of such a film tells us God must be doing something special today for that to even exist.
The second evidence that God is moving is that He’s doing some rather unusual things in certain parts of the world. For example in the Middle East, we’re seeing dreams; God is actually causing people to see dreams of Jesus Christ. In one particular part of northern Africa, people there tell us that half the decisions they encounter are a direct result of or involv a dream about Jesus.
There was a woman in Iran watching the Jesus film on Sat 7. She had all her doors shut of course because it’s Iran and in the end she got a little confused on the close. She thought when Jesus said, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock," she thought it was the door of her room, not the door of her heart. So she got up and opened one of the doors there to the room, flooding her room with light -- blinding light that drove her to the floor. When she regained her sight, she saw Jesus in the center and He was saying, “Well, will you invite me in?” and she accepted Christ.
Another illustration of how God is moving today is in India. The government is very concerned about the growth of Christianity in India. In fact, I heard somebody say that they are concerned that maybe India could be moving toward becoming substantially Christian. And the evidence they have for that frightens them. Beginning in the year 2001, there were 2% baptized believers in India. At the end of the year 2004 -- so that is actually a period of four years -- there were 7%. That means that an additional 5% of Indians became baptized believers. You don’t really get the full impact of that until you realize it’s a country of a billion people. So that’s 50 million new baptized believers in just four years.