Fishing with Dynamite (A paradigm for evangelism)

Every week, I attend a bible study with several men who live in my neck of the woods. A while ago, my father-in-law (who also happens to be my next-door neighbor) mentioned how much he enjoyed fishing with dynamite.

Jerry worked for the Georgia Fisheries Department. They regularly collected, counted, and categorized the fish in lakes and rivers to examine the fish populations. One time, they needed to do a fish study on a section of river too big for their normal methods.

So they lined a portion of the riverbed with detonation cord and let ‘er rip. KABOOM! An enormous explosion ripped through a section of the river. All of the fish in the detonation zone floated to the surface. They had plenty of fish to count. Pretty much all of them.

Explosive bait.

I can’t get this visual out of my mind. A bunch of scientists sitting around waiting to push the big red button. They cover their ears and then, BLAMMO! Water and fish geyser into the air. Hundreds, if not thousands of fish float to the surface of the water.

As a fisherman, I bet that St. Peter would have really loved fishing with dynamite. Fishing in the first century took lots of time and energy. Late nights, stormy weather, mending nets. Heavy, weary work.

But when St. Peter became a fisher of men? That’s when he started to fish with dynamite. Starting with the descent of the Holy Spirit, St. Peter and the other Apostles acted with great power in the presence of the people, and thousands came to the faith.

St. Paul thought fishing with dynamite so important that he said, “…my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive [words of] wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” The Greek word “dunamis,” which the New Testament uses for the word “power,’ actually inspired the name “dynamite.”

God can blow our socks off.

Now, I’m not personally opposed to the kind of intellectual evangelism that people like Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire Ministries do. I think he’s brilliant and I love listening to his teaching. But I really only began to appreciate his genius after my conversion.

Back in my atheist days, my heart had the rocky constitution of a hardened secular materialist. To come to a knowledge of God, I needed high explosives.

The dynamite that God chose to use was a direct personal revelation followed by casting a bunch of demons out of me. I don’t think that this is the normal route to faith for most people, but it proved to be highly effective for me. (If you want to read more of that story, you can check out my book Demoniac.)

Retching out a bunch of foul black material in response to prayers forced me to admit that my worldview had to change. There are far stranger things in heaven and on earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy.

Manifesting God’s power.

Evangelists in our day and age need to be fishing with dynamite. Am I talking about performing miracles and casting out demons as a regular practice? Absolutely! Jesus did. The apostles did. The saints throughout the ages have done so as well. Why? Because people need to a personal experience of God’s power to enkindle the fire of faith.

The Jews in the first century longed for the coming of the Messiah. Our culture doesn’t care at all. The Romans, Greeks, and most other cultures of Jesus’ day held strong religious beliefs that involved communal worship. They just worshipped the wrong gods. Our culture has a growing segment of people who believe that religion enslaves the mind and hinders true human freedom.

I became an atheist because my heart grew cold to the idea that God might possibly exist. I couldn’t see past the suffering in the world to the Omniscient and Omnipotent God who holds everything in being. More than anything, I was completely unwilling to be convinced that God exists, and could have cared less about whether He loved me or not.

Experiencing God’s power directly changed everything for me. I had to confront the fact of my own religious experience, that I had encountered the God that I’d only read about in Catholic school.

Where’s the big red button?

There’s only one big problem. How does an evangelist learn to perform miracles?

I remember hearing a story about St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. He visited Rome for an audience with the pope. Pope Innocent III proudly displayed the wealth and power at his disposal and told the saint, “As you can see, I can no longer say, “Silver and gold have I none.”

The saint responded, “Neither can you say arise and walk.” Ouch. (To Innocent’s credit, he went on to support the founding of both the Dominican and the Franciscan orders… a bunch of demolition experts.)

St. Dominic performed many miracles that have been written down. I’m sure that many others are lost in history. It’s not about what he knew. It’s about Who he knew. “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14:13)

Miracles are not the manifestation of a superhuman ability like the Marvel movies that seem to be the only kind of movies that Hollywood knows how to make any more. They are the fruit of a relationship with the Creator of all things. When I pray for someone’s healing, I don’t do anything to make healing happen. But sometimes healing takes place because God hears my prayer and does something amazing.

Get close to Jesus.

I’m convinced that the saints like St. Dominic don’t perform miracles because they are holy. They perform miracles because they firmly believe that God is holy. They believe that Jesus speaks the truth in the Gospels. Their own holiness results from this belief, as do all of the miracles to their credit.

If our evangelists want to break open the crate of dynamite and get to work, their main task is to grow in faith. That means that they have to start by believing some of the outrageous things that Jesus said. “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12). If you stop to ponder that, it means cleanse lepers, cast out demons, raise the dead. It also means love a lot of sometimes unlovable characters, and irritate the people in charge.

This shouldn’t scare us. It should excite anyone who feels the call to be an evangelist. The call to evangelize comes with the keys to a heavenly storeroom full of Holy Spirit dynamite. Anyone else interested in hearing an earth shattering Kaboom?

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If you want to hear more about my conversion story, check out my book Demoniac, now available on Amazon.