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After watching people come forward at Billy Graham's invitation in 1963, Helmut Thielicke wrote:

"It all happened without pressure and emotionalism. It was far more the shepherd's voice, calling out in love and sorrow for the wandering ones. I saw their assembled, moved and honestly decided faces. Above all there were two young men - a white and a negro - who stood at the front and about whom one felt that they were standing at that moment on Mount Horeb and looking from afar into a land they had longed for. It became lightning clear that men want to make a decision. I shall have to draw from all this certain consequences in my own preaching, even though the outward form will of course look somewhat different."

Gospel preaching makes the story compelling and accessible. Or, as Steve Hayner has put it, "helping people to take steps toward Jesus."

Paul's breathtaking analogy: "We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5:20).

Imagine! "God is making his appeal through us." Preaching, true gospel preaching, is not us talking about God. It is God speaking through us. Could anything be more awesome, more humbling, and, yes, more exhilarating?

We are part of a "double search," a kind of homing instinct of the soul that God has placed within each of us, that makes us turn Godward in response to the God who turns toward us and says: "Come home to me."

And how does God say that? In many ways beyond our imagination, including the life of Jesus. But God also uses us and the "foolishness" of our preaching.

Increasingly I think of preaching as helping people to see the clues that God is already reaching out to them, through the beauty, the joys, and pain of their lives. We help them to acknowledge the resistances and attachments that keep them away from God. And then we help them to take steps toward Jesus.

At the churches he has served, in the Philippines, in California, and in Canada, Darrell Johnson, who now teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, sought to cultivate a culture of open responsiveness. He wanted open response not to be some unusual idea, one reserved for special occasions, but a regular opportunity for the first-timer or the hundredth-timer to take steps toward Christ.

Crisis times especially nurtured this expectation. "Your heart may be breaking," he might say. "We have a whole team to pray with you after the service."

There are also regular ways to offer "safe places" for response. During prayers he might say, "You may have been attracted to faith but don't know what to do with it. Try this. Tell that to Jesus. Say, 'This may sound silly but I'd really like to know if you are real.'"

Sometimes he invites people: "Put your hands on your knees, palm down, and then if you are wanting to know Jesus more raise them slightly."

In the bulletin would be an invitation: "If you need prayer, or if a loved one does, or if you want to know Jesus, talk with us after the service." Again: open response becomes normal, nothing unusual.

The forms will differ, as Thielicke wrote to Graham, but the invitation to respond should be there, God making his appeal through us. So, in whatever way we may be led, we can say something like this:

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Give as much of yourself as you know, to as much of Christ as you know. It will cost you nothing, and it will cost you everything. But there will be wonder after wonder, and every wonder true."

Will these new disciples continue on? It's the staying power of Christ that counts. But a final observation from Helmut Thielicke to Billy Graham is worth noting:

"The consideration that many do not remain true to their hour of decision can contain no truly serious objection: the salt of this hour will be something they will taste in every loaf of bread and cake which they are to bake in their later life. Once in their life they have perceived what it is like to enter the realm of discipleship. And if only this memory accompanies them, then that is already a great deal."