After Paul was finished sharing his testimony with Festus, procurator of Judea and King Agrippa he received what I consider a satisfying response. Festus said, “Paul you are out of your mind!” Agrippa said, “You almost persuade me to become a Christian!” Paul’s story of salvation was sufficiently radical enough to get both men’s attention. They knew they were listening to a story that was unlike any other account of a person’s religious journey.

Some years ago I took it upon myself to read up on the statements of basic Christianity that were put forward at the beginning of the last century. What were the declarations on the essentials of the Christian faith that were presented by those coming out of the evangelical age of the late 1800’s? What I found was a plain and directed terminology of faith rooted in an awareness God works internally in a person when He saves them. Six terms stood out more than any other: Awakened, Repentant, Faith, Conversion, Regenerated, and the Witness of the Spirit.

I began to suspect that these six terms/experiences were sufficient in giving evidence to a saving work of God in the life of an individual. Combined together they are experiences that are hard to fake or contrive. Could these provide a test for our faith according to 2 Corinthians 13:5? “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?” Using simple definitions for each term as a guide, I began to ask professing Christians to share with me their stories of salvation.

How were you awakened to Christ and your desperate need of His salvation? How did your life manifest a repentance before God, a renouncing of sin and self, at that time in which you became a Christian? How was your saving faith in the Lord Jesus correlated to your repentance? Did they go together? When you repented and believed in Jesus as your Savior was there a conversion experience that followed? What changes immediately began to take place in the way you lived and the choices that you made? Some consider that regeneration happens before you awake and repent and believe, other right after this; regardless how has your life been marked by the new birth? What traits have grown in your life that can only be explained because you became a new creature in Christ and not merely as the maturation of who you already were? How and when has the Spirit of God come to you affirming you with His witness that you are a child of God? Did the battle against temptation and sin change after becoming a Christian? In what way did the Holy Spirit witness to you that you were a child of God in the midst of those battles?

Surprisingly many of those I spoke with could find little evidence for any of these experiences in their stories of personal salvation. They instead had come to faith in a search for meaning, or community or an answer for a personal crisis and found that the Christian faith provide the best answer to these concerns. Few could testify of a desperate sense of need or an awakening to salvation. Few could speak of repentance beyond a simple change of mind to consider Jesus as a Savior who would meet or fill some void in their lives. Faith for them went no further than a comfortable place to settle their minds and concerns. As with these terms, so with the rest, their stories were largely generalized accounts of personal sentiments that led them to identify as Christians.

With most I could have easily altered their stories of salvation with the change of a few choice words and set them loose in a completely different religious setting; be it Methodist or Muslim, Buddhist or Baptist only a few words of location and custom and the stories would be almost identical. They were the stories of a cultural faith but not of a radical conversion. They were stories the enemy of all souls can easily mimic in any setting as opposed to those radical accounts that would have made them sound, “out of your mind.”

Here is why the evangelical community has largely lost its passion for evangelism. You cannot give witness to what you have not experienced for yourself! Here is why there is significant attrition in our churches. “They went out from us because they were not a part of us.” And here is where we must become more intentional in reaching the lost sheep in our own flocks.

In response to these matters I believe that the most significant evangelism before the church in the next decade may be within the evangelical church itself. With this burden we have constructed an interactive website: www.testyourtestimony.com or www.savingevangelicals.com. It is an attempt to provide a gracious, self-guided test for examining yourself to see if you are in the faith. Along with the site a booklet was developed to be used personally or in a small group .