What is Creation Evangelism?
Quoted by Ken Ham from The Genesis answers magazine online:
‘Do you know what these students are being taught in most of their classes? That they’re just animals that evolved ultimately from some primeval soup millions of years ago. They are being indoctrinated to believe that evolution is scientific fact. Growing up in a world full of wonderful technology, they have a great respect for real science. They don’t realize that evolution is not observable, repeatable science.
‘So to them, the Bible is just an outdated religious book. After all, they are taught how the solar system formed by itself from a dust cloud over millions of years, that the earth is billions of years old, and the fossil record is the history of the evolution of life. They are shown pictures of ape-men, considered to be their ancestors. In history, they hear of “primitive man” going through a stone age in this onward, upward evolutionary process.’
In other words, I explained to the pastors, day after day, class after class, even without the Bible being mentioned, these students were being inoculated against believing what the Bible has to say about our origins.
So I said:
‘Pastors, here’s the problem. The students know that evolution and its teachings contradicts the Bible’s teaching about Adam and Eve. Then they come to your religion classes and hear you teach from the Bible. However, since they think that the Bible is an outdated book which has been disproved by science, why should they be interested in listening to what you have to say?’
I suggested that before they could really teach effectively about the other issues, they needed to get the students’ attention that the Bible was the infallible Word of God, and really could be trusted.
After all, if the first book in the Bible can’t be trusted in their eyes—why should any other? As one lady put it to me 20 years later:
‘When my church told me that I had to accept evolution, and that Genesis couldn’t be believed as written, I asked, when does God start telling the truth, then?’
Working with the pastors, we devised a series of lessons that showed the students that evolution was just a belief—there weren’t any ape-men—evolutionists had not proved the earth was billions of years old—there were major problems with their theories about the origin of the solar system.
When the pastors presented these lessons—they were astonished. The students sat up and listened. They were extremely interested—and they had lots of questions. ‘What about carbon dating, then? Where do dinosaurs fit in? Why don’t our teachers tell us this information?’
What a difference it made! Many of the students showed intense interest in spiritual things. Later, when the pastors began teaching about Jesus in the New Testament, they had much more success in getting these young people to listen and take note.
At the time, I didn’t realize that I was involved in developing a method of evangelism that I later came to understand as ‘Creation Evangelism.’ Not only is this based on the Bible, but it is one of the most powerful methods for reaching today’s world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
