“Therefore I have reason to boast in Christ Jesus regarding what pertains to God. For I would not dare say anything except what Christ has accomplished through me by word and deed for the obedience of the Gentiles, by the power of miraculous signs and wonders, and by the power of God’s Spirit. As a result, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is it that causes the Gospel to grow and spread? If you look much into it, you’ll find all sorts of evangelism methods and programs. The most popular of them are marketed well and cost a pretty penny to get your hands on. But while these aren’t entirely without merit—and indeed, some of them are pretty helpful if implemented well—these aren’t the things that cause the Gospel to grow. Paul speaks to some of what does here. Let’s take a look.

Sharing your faith can be a scary thing. The reasons for that don’t have much of anything to do with the message itself—it’s called “good news” for a reason. Rather, they have everything to do with our perception of reception. Satan works overtime to make sure we have an unhealthy even if not totally irrational fear of rejection. We might get laughed at. We might lose relationships. We might get persecuted. We might be asked a question whose answer we don’ t know. We come up with all sorts of excuses not to share our faith.

In the same vein, getting a church to do real outreach is hard. Many churches (including mine) do big community events. And many churches (not including mine) are comfortable thinking these represent meaningful outreach. They don’t. Most people aren’t going to start coming to a church because they attended one of its large-format community events (i.e., a Trunk or Treat-style event).

Personally, I long ago stopped describing events like these in those terms. We host an enormous Trunk or Treat event each year. I invite several other pastors to join in the fun with us. In each conversation, though, I am as clear as can be that this is simply an event to express our love for our community and not an outreach event. I tell them right up front that the great likelihood is that no one is going to start coming to their church because of the event. It’s not outreach.

Real outreach is personal. It requires having actual conversations with people. It doesn’t happen by big event osmosis. But having those conversations brings back up all the same fears that are associated with sharing our faith. We don’t want to get put in the same category as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is especially true for introverts, a club of which I am a proud, card-carrying member.

Now, extroverts and pastors with a strong gift of evangelism don’t tend to understand this very well. They don’t tend to have any of these kinds of fears, and they have trouble grasping that others genuinely do. I remember a church service one time where the creator of an evangelism method called “How to Share Your Faith without an Argument” was the invited guest speaker. I was eager to hear his message as I had been through his curriculum several years before and really liked the idea of it. (Admittedly, I had never actually used it.) At the end of the service he called on all the believers in the room who were not actively sharing their faith with every single person they met like he did to come down front to kneel before the altar in a posture of repentance. It was an incredibly awkward moment that didn’t fit the culture of the church. I stayed rooted to my spot.

Okay, but if all of this is the case, then what is it that causes the Gospel to advance and the church to grow? Jesus does. His Holy Spirit moving and working through the faithfulness of His people does. In our last passage Paul highlighted for the Roman believers his call to be a minister of the Gospel as an apostle of Jesus Christ. Here we still find him celebrating that. “Therefore I have reason to boast in Christ Jesus regarding what pertains to God. For I would not dare say anything except what Christ has accomplished through me by word and deed for the obedience of the Gentiles, by the power of miraculous signs and wonders, and by the power of God’s Spirit. As a result, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem all the way around the Illyricum.”

Paul is clear here that if the Gospel has been advanced by anything he has done, that was God’s work in Christ through the movement of His Holy Spirit. All Paul did was be faithful to go and do and say what He commanded. Beyond that, the work was all God’s from start to finish. And even that much was empowered by God’s Spirit. The results were pretty extraordinary, but when God gets involved in something, extraordinary results become ordinary. In Christ we can and should fully expect the miraculously unexpected.

If the Gospel is going to be advanced through you and through your church, it is going to be because of the unleashing of the power of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. You aren’t going to be able to sit back passively while that happens. But neither will you have to get involved on somebody else’s terms.

There are plenty of programs that are set up for you to get involved this way or that that feel terribly uncomfortable. I’m connected to one ministry that a few years ago put out a program that was all about having church members prayer walk through a neighborhood and putting door hangers on every door as they passed by. Many involved in the ministry wrote in of the great success they had seen with the program and how it was just wonderful. Personally, I couldn’t imagine doing something like that and would not even consider connecting with a church who left something like that on my door. I posted a comment to that effect on the ministry’s message board and several years later still get responses from people telling me in one way or another how wrong I am.

And yet my church is growing. We are growing because we’ve made long term investments in our local school. We have members who actively invite friends and neighbors and even strangers to church. We have a vibrant kids and youth program and word of mouth advertising is some of the best there is. We have members who are active on Facebook community pages and when someone posts to ask about a church, they are quick to sing our praises and invite them. Personally, I am involved in various community things and am intentional about having Gospel conversations with the people I have built relationships with through those.

In other words, we are doing outreach, we are working to advance the Gospel, in the ways God has designed us to do it. We are being faithful with the gifts He has given us. And we are slowly but surely seeing the fruits from those endeavors come to bear. This doesn’t have anything to do with us, though. We “have reason to boast in Christ Jesus regarding what pertains to God.” For we “would not dare say anything except what Christ has accomplished through [us] by word and deed for the obedience of [unbelievers in our community], by the power of miraculous signs and wonders, and by the power of God’s Spirit.” As a result, we may not have shared the Gospel with everybody in our sphere of influence just yet, but we are working steadily in that direction.

God grows His church. When we are faithful to do what He commands and to follow His Spirit’s lead, proclaiming Christ as we go, we will indeed see His kingdom advance.