With anticipation and apprehension, I stepped onto a Greyhound bound for Harrisburg, Pa. Entrenched in work and social spheres that surrounded me with Christians but offered few opportunities to meet non-Christians, I had earnestly prayed about this bus trip. I petitioned God to place me next to people who needed the gospel.

As an introvert who once had been painfully shy, this request was a stretch, but my drought of having significant conversations with non-Christians had reached the point of exasperation. I boarded the bus convinced that God would answer my prayer.

As I had imagined this moment, my fear was that I’d see rows of empty seats and take the easy path by sitting alone. So I gulped when I saw a full bus and dozens of faces pointing toward me. I slid into the only available seat, next to a grandmotherly woman whose head was bent over her knitting. She was sending out the universal signal for “leave me alone,” and normally that would be the only hint I needed. But I trusted God against all appearances and uttered the most painful word in the introvert handbook—hello. She looked up at me with a start, her steely glare seeming to size me up. Then she responded with a warm hello—followed immediately by so many sentences that it was hard for me to find a gap for a reply!

The trip took about five hours. There was scarcely a second of silence. I tried to be a good listener, and this woman was easy to like and to engage. As she shared about her family and her life’s blessings and struggles, it became easy to share in kind. At many points in the conversation she cried as she told me about loved ones and struggles that weighed on her heart, and I shed a few tears as well—a rare occurrence. I brought up the matter of faith, and she, a committed Roman Catholic, spoke freely about God and her faith, as I spoke about God and my faith.

This was everything I had prayed for! It was a golden opportunity to talk about the good news of Jesus Christ. I had no doubt that, with this surprisingly fast friendship we had developed, she would at least listen to the gospel from me, even if it was something she didn’t believe.

At that very point, my tongue was tied. I had no clue how to bring this up.

The return bus trip also resulted in some good conversations, but I went home deflated and guilt ridden. God had answered my prayer beyond my imagination, and I had shown I was not worthy of His kindness and not equipped to help that precious woman. Sure, I had invited people to church over the decades and had even shared the gospel a number of times with friends and acquaintances. But when I compared those times to the number of non-Christians in proximity to me and the number of days I went without saying more than a few words to non-Christians, I was without excuse.

Around that time I had been discipling someone my age who had come to our church from a difficult and godless background. With the encouragement of adults, he had become addicted to marijuana at age 11, which had colored the rest of his life. After coming to Christ he gobbled up every Christian resource he could. That included radio messages, some of which had better theology than others. To him, evangelism should be done the way he imagined he would do it—walking up to people cold and telling them about the gospel. I gave him many defenses, including some scriptural reasons why evangelism was a broader task than he believed; but it reached the point where I was a stumbling block to him. He wouldn’t believe anything I said about evangelism if he didn’t see me sharing the gospel with strangers.

We agreed to distribute tracts in Squirrel Hill, perhaps the most religiously diverse business district in Pittsburgh. I found the best tracts I could, and we set out on foot with a stack for each of us. On the way, my friend told me that he would remain quiet and simply watch me to see how I did it. I had not imagined that was part of the bargain!

My heart fell. His eyes were on me to lead something I had no experience in. But we prayed for the work of God’s Spirit, and I did my feeble best. I tried to look people in the eye and speak kindly. We encountered a lot of return smiles and distributed many tracts, with little opposition except for a Jewish student who offered to burn all our tracts. Later when we walked down the street we rejoiced inwardly to see people reading the tracts!

Dozens of people in our congregation enthusiastically joined us over the next couple of years, and we distributed tracts in many of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. Some of us took our children along, and these enthusiastic young ones proved helpful in giving smiles, distributing candy, and making us look a lot less intimidating. One of my biggest hopes was that my children would get past, in their childhood and youth, some of the fears of outreach that had dogged me for dec­ades. Recently my oldest son mentioned those experiences fondly as we talked about sharing the gospel.

One day we were in Squirrel Hill when something unusual happened. Patrick, one of our most zealous tract distributors, spent the whole time talking to one stranger. It was common to have an occasional conversation with a stranger lasting a few minutes, but almost never in the hustle and bustle of the street did a conversation stretch past five minutes. The next time Patrick went out with us, the same thing happened. What made the difference?

Patrick had attended an Evangelism Explosion training seminar, which included four days of lectures, memorization of a lengthy gospel outline, and house-to-house witnessing. Seeing the resulting change in Patrick, it didn’t take a genius to realize that a big impediment to sharing the gospel had been not an unwilling heart but poor equipping. When I was a scholastic athlete I would never have suited up on game day without months of arduous preparation; yet in the much more critical area of witnessing, my preparation had been meager by comparison.

Soon my pastor and I went to a Presbyterian church in Ohio and received the Evangelism Explosion training. Those were four of the most intense days of my life, but each of us was buoyed by two prayer partners from that church.

At the end of the first day of training, their pastor led my three-person evangelism team. At the first door we knocked on, he spoke to a young mother of an obviously bustling household, and I was certain she would brush him off. Instead she listened carefully to the gospel. Thirty minutes later, still standing at the door, tears flowing down her face, she prayed to receive Christ. The pastor connected her to his church and to women who could follow up with her. At the next house we shared testimonies with a Christian couple, and at the third house the gospel again was shared—this time for assurance of faith for a woman whose gratitude was visible in her tears.

I am still awestruck when I recall that night. I had never seen a thorough gospel presentation made to a stranger who then made a credible and unpressured profession of faith on the spot. And to see the gospel bearing fruit with two strangers in one night—I could not rejoice enough to see that day. I went home inspired.

Part of our commitment to the training was to do street or door-to-door evangelism 10 more times after we returned home. The leaders of New Alexandria, Pa., RP Church heard about our training; they asked us to share about it with them and then knock on doors in their rural community. Still in student mode myself, I felt ill equipped and poorly qualified, but, like those who came into contact with Jesus in His earthly ministry, I could at least tell strangers what Jesus had done for me.

The day turned out to be one of the coldest of the winter, with unrelenting wind. At one home a high schooler answered the door, and I, as the “experienced” person on the team, was supposed to take the lead. I expected her to close the door after a few seconds, but she kept listening and interacting with me and so I continued. My speech was halting, my lips were half frozen, my nose was running, and my hands were numb; but I shared the gospel the best I could. To my astonishment, conviction of sin was written all over her face, and at the offer of the gospel she began to cry. I would have received a D-minus for presentation, but that left no question that it was Jesus Christ and His gospel that had changed her heart.

This thing I thought to be nearly impossible—for a stranger to hear the gospel and receive it by faith in my presence—had now happened in successive outreaches. What’s more, this time, despite all my stumbling, I had had the words to say to turn a conversation toward the gospel and share a full presentation of it. I would never again be that man on the bus with nothing to say to a precious soul.

Soon we provided evangelism training to others in our congregation, and then to visiting mission teams as well. Those teams were coming to give to us, but we wanted to give something back to them—the ability to share a full gospel presentation and the confidence of overcoming the fear of outreach. As a congregation we are not “stuck” on a particular evangelism program such as Evangelism Explosion or Share Jesus Without Fear. At best those are tools and need to be evaluated and taught with wisdom.

There is much I don’t know on this topic. Like the man born blind, however, I do know that in some areas of sharing the gospel with people on a regular basis, I was blind and now I see. Though criticisms and opposition arise, I will not go backward. To paraphrase a saying I’ve heard about evangelism, “I like the way I share the gospel now better than the way I didn’t share the gospel before.”

Drew Gordon is editor of the Witness.