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THE KING’S BUSINESS
you get an individual in a corner and de liver your message to him he cannot get away from it. It is the m e ssie for him; he cannot give it to anybody else. Beecher said, “Give me the audience of one man, where one man is the audience, and where everything I say goes straight to the heart of that one man.” Close observation shows that the preachers who are known as great soul-winners and church-builders lay spe cial emphasis on personal evangelism. Dr. J. O. Peck is quoted as saying that if he had the certainty that he had but ten years to live, and as a condition of his gaining heaven at the end of that time he, was to win a thousand, or even ten thousand souls for Christ, and he was given the oppor tunity of winning them by preaching ser mons or by individual effort, he would choose individual, evangelism evéry time, and stand a better chance of winning ten thousand. FOR THE MINISTERS. , Brethren in the ministry, here is the individual message for us. Hâve you ever thought what would happen if every min ister in every denomination would win one soul a month for a year? One million six hundred thousand would be brought into the kingdom of God. Is that important? It took five preachers one year,-according -to certain church statistics, to bring'one person into church fellowship, and that does not always mean bringing that person to Jesus Christ. It took thirty-three and one-fourth church members to bring one member into the church in a year. It took four Sunday School teachers to bring one scholar to the Sunday School in the same length of time. We are told that one hun dred and nineteen churches in New Eng land reported not one single accession to the church on confession of faith in a sin gle year. They toiled a whole year and caught nothing, yea, some of them did not even hold their own. In the face of such facts and figures, brethren, why is it that we do not engage in work of personal evangelism ? Is it because we are not taught it in our semi-
was going up to the Conference with an addition of seventy members during the year, and fifty of them were men, the most of them being received on confession of faith. The other pastor was going to the Conference with two additions to the church, both women, and they were by letter and not by confession Of faith. Said the pastor with two to the pastor with seventy, “How did you do it? How did you get so many men into your church-?” The successful pastor answered,' “Let me ask you a question: What did you do for the men? Have you called on any busi ness men in their offices?” “Well, no,” answered the other pastor, “I haven’t.” “Do you spend any evenings with men in their homes?” “Well, not to speak of. I have been so busy with committee meet ings and officers’ meetings.” Said the other pastor, “I have spent hour after hour, day after day in the office, in the store, and in the homes of men.” O brothers in the min istry, we may tap doorbells, sip afternoon tea with the ladies, and even hold babies, but if w6 are going to get men into the church, we must go after them and by per sonal effort win them for Jesus Christ. THE GREATEST FORCE Preaching will not always win them. If we want men in our congregations, if we want men to know the Lord Jesus Christ, there isH’t any force in the world like per sonal evangelism to accomplish that re- - suit. In preaching, the intensity of the ap peal is in inverse proportion to the area cov ered, so the psychologists tell us. The larger your audience, the smaller the prob ability of your appeal going to the individ ual heart. For instance, if you have twenty persons in your audience, your message is divided among twenty; if you have a thou sand in your audience ytrnr message is divided among a thousand. Thus you see that the larger your audience, the smaller the probability of your message being effec tive, because your message scatters. Audi ences are usually very liberal. They put up their umbrellas and let the showers of truth run down somebody else’s neck. But when
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