The seeds of good deeds become a tree of life; a wise person wins friends. Proverbs 11:30
I had the privilege of serving as one of the pastors at Westside Family Church in Kansas City for ten years. It was a great stretch. During that time God led us to plant 400 plus international house and village churches that reached 17,000 people a weekend in their gatherings. And even more impressively, they would fill up one village church with 40-50 people and then send 10-12 out to start the next church in the next village. It was truly a God thing.
One of the key truths God taught us about international church planting was the importance of finding an indigenous person of peace in those international settings. The first person of peace we worked with in India was an older, godly man named Primdas.
Primdas was a part of the Dalit class in India – the “untouchables” who are shunned by their fellow countrymen. They literally were forced to live in their own villages, were rarely educated, and were looked down upon by all other classes.
When Primdas came faith to Christ, he instantly had a heart for evangelism. He wanted everyone in his part of India to know Jesus! He was a natural missionary. But because of his Dalit classification, sharing Christ verbally was almost impossible outside of his own class.
Primdas came up with a simple formula for sharing the gospel: good deeds, good will, good news. He concluded that to share Jesus, he would need to consistently do good deeds, in order to build good will, in order to get chance to share the good news of Christ.
Don’t miss that: do good deeds, to build good will, to share good news.
How did Primdas live out his mantra?
First – he identified one of the biggest needs of his ministry field – the lack of clean water. In rural India, 80% of illness is water born. Bad water is the major contributor to sickness and to short life expectancy in rural India. There are thousands of villages – especially those villages comprised of the Dalit class – who have no source of fresh water. I visited one of these villages where they only source of water was the cesspool of sewer water at the bottom of the hill. This is what they drank!
Primdas would find a community with no fresh, running water. Then he would raise the funds for a water well. And then he would give that community a fresh water well. I have been at a well dedication where the entire village gathers, and they see fresh water being hand pumped from the ground for the first time in their lives. Pretty powerful to hear Primdas tell the people “this gift of fresh water is given to you by Jesus, who is the Living Water.”
When Primdas had done the good deed of providing water wells for several villages in an area, he would reap the benefit of having built good will. He became a hero to many and friend to all. And that meant when he came to visit, they wanted to hear what he had to say. He literally was able to share good news because he had done good deeds and built good will first.
All of that is missional. All of that is being Sent. All of that is gospel.
And all of that still applies today.
Too many times we only see the sharing of good news – the telling, the declaring, the verbalizing – as the gospel. The gospel is also doing the good deeds, and building the good will, so we can share the good news.
There is a danger here. The danger is that when we realize that the gospel in not just telling, we swing the pendulum too far. There are whole denominations in America that have quit declaring the gospel verbally because they believe their only obligation is to the social gospel. They demonstrate their care but do not verbalize their convictions. It is the old “my life is my testimony” idea.
The gospel must be a three legged stool: