Discipleship should go far beyond a few weeks of membership classes. Great patience and effort is needed to love our neighbors and help them in honoring their membership vows before Christ. Ministering to those exiting evangelicalism will by no means be an easy endeavor, but it very well may be the unique mission field that Lord is calling us to serve.

What I am about to describe is something I’m quite sure every pastor has experienced at some point in his ministry. A visitor approaches immediately after the service and is ecstatic about what he just heard. “Pastor, that was the best thing I’ve ever heard. I found my new church home. Where do I sign up, and how can I jump in and begin to serve?” Within the next few months, that new visitor is welcomed as member of the church, and everyone is encouraged.
Then, however, seemingly out of nowhere, the new member is gone. The pastor is never consulted, but he is told by another member that the visitor was unhappy with something in the church, usually the friendliness of the people, and they are now seeking another church. Then begins the difficult and time-consuming process of sorting out what went wrong. Blame is placed on the church for her failures and discouragement filters to other members who hear the complaints.
I confess that after almost twenty years of pastoral ministry, I still do not learn lessons very well. After these many years, I should know by now that affirmations like this, significant pastoral time, and immediate responses that demand becoming a member of the church, typically have around a six-month commitment level, and then the silent departure follows.
The real issue, however, is rarely thought through: Did we really love the visitor with patient discipling, or was this a joint effort in personal and ecclesiastical narcissism?
Evangelicalism’s Seeker Problem
A basic internet search on church visitors will produce dozens of articles that address the different categories of approach. I particularly appreciated one website that categorized church goers as: testers, seekers, pleasers, jumpers, and investors. My purpose is not to outline the different types of church seekers, but to think through the larger problem in evangelicalism with regard to those church visitors who are actually seeking a more substantive church.
We see this constantly in Southern California with a frequent stream of visitors to our worship services. Evangelicalism is in a drastic state of decline, and I suspect in the years to come that we will see record numbers of people who are currently involved in a broader evangelical church identify as exvangelical. There are those, however, who are genuinely seeking something more substantive. Reformed churches offer a radical alternative to the theological shallowness of many evangelical churches. Visitors attend, often after hearing someone like RC Sproul on the radio, and they are mind blown.
The problem is that detoxification from evangelicalism is a very long process and transition to a Reformed church is not an easy one for former evangelicals. You can take an evangelical out of evangelicalism, but it’s far more difficult to take evangelicalism out of an evangelical. In other words, we have to appreciate that coming to a Reformed church really is a new kind of “experience” for evangelicals—and living with “experience” is all they’ve known. The Word of God is expositionally expounded, the sacraments are valued, and the community is serious about the Christian faith all in ways often not previously experienced.
The visitor turned new church member initially celebrated receiving the means of grace. This was expressed as the single great reason for their decision to join. Like anything in life, when the glamour wears off, then comes the hard work of commitment. The honeymoon is wonderful, but then comes the necessary work of sacrificial love. Anyone who is married knows this. And the connection is important, there is a direct parallel to commitment in the church as the bride of Christ and that of a husband and wife in marriage itself.

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In its 40 years, Campus Outreach has seen 55,000 students at evangelistic events. Staff and volunteers have discipled 15,000 students over weekly Bible studies and worship times—1,447 of them have gone on to serve in ministry or missions. Over the last 12 months alone, 712 students have professed their faith in Christ.
More than 20 years ago, Olan Stubbs was trying to share his faith with two guys in his freshman class at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. It wasn’t working.
One sat on the dorm steps outside and smoked weed. When Stubbs attempted to explain verses to him, he said he didn’t believe the Bible. The other was a football player “who could articulate the gospel better than I could. But he was often coming in late at night, drunk. Obviously there was some kind of disconnect.”
Stubbs didn’t know what to say or do. Then he heard about two RAs on the second floor who were leading a Bible study. They’d led someone he knew to Christ.
“I’d love to learn how to share my faith like you guys are doing,” he told them. They handed him a booklet by Navigators founder Dawson Trotman and told him to “get involved in Campus Outreach.”
Campus Outreach was famous for its evangelism, founded by a church famous for its evangelism, planted by a man famous for his evangelism.
Stubbs was hooked. Today, he’s one of nearly 750 Campus Outreach staff serving on 122 campuses in 11 countries. In its 40 years, Campus Outreach has seen 55,000 students at evangelistic events. Staff and volunteers have discipled 15,000 students over weekly Bible studies and worship times—1,447 of them have gone on to serve in ministry or missions. Over the last 12 months alone, 712 students have professed their faith in Christ.
Stubbs works at Briarwood Presbyterian Church, where Campus Outreach began. The church was planted in 1960 and grew to 4,000 members largely on the strength of personal evangelism. “The Great Commission has been our heartbeat,” the website says, and it’s not kidding: Briarwood partners with more than 100 mission boards and organizations and more than 300 ministry staff.
Briarwood got that heartbeat from its founder.
“If you meet a Christian in Birmingham who is 60 or older, and you ask them how they came to Christ, I’d bet my money that at some point they’ll mention Frank Barker,” Stubbs said.
The 86-year-old Barker has led many thousands to Christ—his daughter Peggy Townes estimated 10,000 personally and hundreds of thousands through his ministries. But it wasn’t because he loved talking to people. He’s not a gregarious personality or even a compelling speaker.
“I’d like to just settle in and read a book,” he said. “But the Bible tells us to reach out to others, so I had to discipline myself to do that.”
Turns out, that was catching.
Later to Faith than to Ministry
Barker came to ministry late, and to faith even later.
Beginning in high school, “I was living a pretty wild life morally,” Barker told TGC. From lying to his parents to throwing eggs at people to drinking too much (and then driving), Barker knew he wasn’t living a good life, but couldn’t pull himself out of it.
Playing tennis restricted his rowdiness, but not a lot and not for long. He went to college on an ROTC scholarship, then became a jet pilot in the United States Navy.
One weekend, while in flight training school, “I came back up to Birmingham and had a wild weekend,” Barker said.

On his way back to Pensacola, he fell asleep at the wheel, and when the road curved, his car sped onto a rutted-out dirt road. When he finally got the car stopped, the headlights picked up a sign nailed to a tree: “The wages of sin is death.”
“I thought, You know what? I think God is trying to tell me something,” he said. “I started trying to straighten up. I felt I’d been so bad that if I was going to get to heaven, I was going to need to be a preacher.”
Barker kept swinging between resolving to do better and partying until one night, when he felt God was actually listening to the rote prayer he tossed up. He told God he wanted to follow him.
Barker began to stay home from the wild nights with his friends; after his tour of duty, he enrolled at Columbia Theological Seminary. A month in, he inherited from his roommate a preaching gig at an Alabama church.
“The first year, nothing particularly good happened,” he said. “At the end of that year, I thought, Something’s wrong. I wonder if I’m really a Christian.”
It was an awkward question to ask his professors or congregants, but he knew an Air Force chaplain, and asked him. (“Joe, how can I make sure I’m a Christian?”)
The chaplain gave Barker a tract and told him to put his trust in Jesus and receive salvation as a gift.
“That’s wrong,” Barker told him. “God’s not going to just give this thing away! You’ve got to work for it.”
The chaplain insisted, and Barker began to realize “I had totally missed that salvation was about grace. I surrendered my will and transferred my trust from me to Christ. When I did that, life began to change dramatically.”
Storefront Church
Among the first people Barker tried to evangelize were his parents, who were already saved. Then he told his sister, who accepted Christ. He told the handyman. He told his friends. He told his congregation, which began to grow.
After seminary, the Birmingham presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in the United States asked Barker if he’d organize a new church in the rapidly developing area of Cahaba Heights.
Intent on a PhD, he told them no.
They asked for the summer.
Just the summer, he agreed.
Barker knocked on doors and found so much interest in a new congregation that he skipped the Bible study stage of church planting and went right to the rented building, setting up in an old barber shop in a strip mall. That first Sunday, 70 people showed up. Three months in, Briarwood Presbyterian Church was chartered with 90 members.
Barker packed out the storefront church. Three years in, with 290 members, Briarwood moved into its own facility that could fit 400. (It was there the Presbyterian Church in America held its first meeting in December 1973.) A few years later, a 1,000-seat sanctuary was added.
In 1988, Briarwood moved into a facility that could fit 4,000. By the time Barker retired in 1998, membership had grown that large.
But they weren’t necessarily drawn in by the preaching.
“Kind of Boring”
“My father was not a dynamic orator by any means,” Townes said. “He’d shuffle up to the pulpit and say, ‘Uh, turn in your Bibles to 1 John 3,’ and then quietly read it and start preaching. There was nothing dynamic or big about it.”
“When I first visited Briarwood as a freshman in college, I was like, ‘This guy’s kind of boring,’” Stubbs said.
But Barker had the zeal of a new convert and the discipline of a Navy pilot.
“I had to train myself” to evangelize, Barker said. “You know, you get on an airplane thinking about the person you’re going to be sitting next to.”
At first, he didn’t know how to share his faith—“I didn’t learn it in seminary”—so he just kept telling the story of his own conversion.
“A lot of people in the 1960s could really identify with that, because they had a religious worldview: ‘There is a God, and I’m supposed to be a good person,’” Stubbs said.
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This article, with all its bearded banter, has nothing negative to say to you. We agree with Shakespeare that “he that hath a beard is more than a youth,” but not when he continues, “and he that hath no beard is less than a man” (Much Ado about Nothing, 2.1). For if you walk according to your God-given and God-matured masculinity, you are a bearded man, whether you have hair on your face or not. To understand that statement, consider the wonder of why God made beards.

Joab’s charge to play the man still endures, immortalized in Scripture. “Be of good courage, and let us be courageous for our people, and for the cities of our God, and may the Lord do what seems good to him” (2 Samuel 10:13).
Joab, facing enemies from the front and from the rear, took some of his best men and faced the Syrians ahead. The rest of his army would turn with his brother, Abishai, to meet the Ammonites to their back. Here we find the iconic words of Joab to his brother:
If the Syrians are too strong for me, then you shall help me, but if the Ammonites are too strong for you, then I will come and help you. Be of good courage, and let us be courageous for our people, and for the cities of our God, and may the Lord do what seems good to him. (2 Samuel 10:11–13)
This battle scene, equal to the best of Braveheart, Gladiator, or 300, began, if I may comb things out just slightly, with a man’s beard. Or, to be precise, the beards of several bushy men.
Sheared Like Sheep
David had sent several bearded messengers to meet the newly crowned King Hanun of the Ammonites, who succeeded his father, Nahash. David expressed his condolences for the deceased Nahash by dispatching these warm-chinned chums to “console [Hanun] concerning his father” (2 Samuel 10:2). Nahash had remained loyal to David — the neighboring kings kept the peace between each other. David’s delegates extended, as it were, the right hand of good will to Hanun.
A hand Hanun would not shake.
Led by the folly of suspicious counsel, the princes of the Ammonites convinced Hanun that these servants did not come to comfort but to conquer. “Has not David sent his servants to search the city and spy it out and to overthrow it?” (2 Samuel 10:3). And this is where things get rather hairy for the king. How should he respond?
He decides to shame David’s men and make them a spectacle. “Hanun took David’s servants and shaved off half the beard of each and cut off their garments in the middle, at their hips, and sent them away” (2 Samuel 10:4). He left multiple cheeks exposed.
Like sheep, Hanun sheared these men. These trees lost half their leaves; these lions, half their manes. When David heard of the barber-ous deed, he sent to meet them because they were “greatly ashamed.” The king acknowledged their humiliation and told them, “Remain at Jericho until your beards have grown and then return” (2 Samuel 10:5).
And what would David do next? Touch a man’s goat, and it’s time for court; touch a man’s beard, and it’s time for war.
Still Waiting in Jericho
In the twenty-first century, we might miss how hostile this act really was, how deeply shaming for an Israelite man in that day. If King Hanun cut off half of our beards today, it would be considered less shameful than strange. Also, not very effective — for each could just shave the other half off and still fit in with society. So why did this razor cut them to the heart? Why wait outside Jerusalem until it grew back? One historical commentary states, “What may seem like a ‘prank’ was in fact a direct challenge to David’s power and authority, and precipitated a war between the two nations” (336).
And beyond its spitting upon David’s outstretched hand of peace, consider the prominence of the beard in Israel.
First, in Israelite culture, the beard served as a sign of mature masculinity. All Israelite men grew beards; God commanded it: “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” (Leviticus 19:27).
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