Reassessing the role of personal testimony for evangelism and personal growth.
In contemporary evangelical culture, the use of personal testimony in evangelism has become so commonplace that few pause to consider its theological implications. It is almost assumed that in order to effectively communicate the gospel, one must tell their story—what they used to be like, how they encountered Christ, and how everything changed. This happens more often during one-to-one outreach or church events where unbelievers usually come by invitation of churchgoing friends; les so in street envagelism.
Nevertheless, this narrative-driven approach often appeals to emotion and subjective transformation, and while it may seem persuasive on the surface, it carries with it a significant risk: it can obscure the gospel itself and mislead both the hearer and the speaker into thinking that salvation is primarily about personal experience rather than the objective truth of Christ crucified and risen.
The gospel is not a story about me, nor is it authenticated by what has happened to me. It is the proclamation of what God has done in Christ for sinners: that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day. The biblical call is to believe that Jesus is exactly this Christ—not to feel a certain way, not to see a certain change, not to recount a particular moment. When personal experience is given centre stage, when testimony becomes the substance rather than the servant of the gospel, the door is opened to confusion, pride, and misplaced assurance.
In my own encounters, I’ve met numerous believers who, even after many decades in the faith, still define their Christian life by what they no longer do or by that single moment of conversion many years ago. They recount, sometimes with an unwitting air of spiritual superiority, how they used to drink or swear or cheat or else, but God changed them. That is, of course, something to be thankful for. But one cannot help noticing that while they pride themselves in what they have left behind, they are often blind to ongoing patterns of unkindness, arrogance, bitterness, impatience, or lack of love—things which Scripture equally condemns. Their testimony has become a kind of spiritual shield, a story that defines their identity and insulates them from further self-examination. The message becomes: “Look at how much I’ve changed,” rather than “Look at what Christ has done.”
This is not a harmless shift. It creates a subtle but powerful new standard, where people judge the reality of their salvation based on whether or not their experience mirrors that of others. Did I feel what he felt? Did I change like she changed? If not, was I really saved? In this way, assurance is no longer anchored in the unchanging promises of God in Christ, but in the ever-shifting sands of memory and emotion. Faith becomes introspection. Evangelism becomes autobiography. And the glorious gospel of grace becomes a personalised self-improvement story.
Biblically, we find a very different pattern. The apostles did not centre their preaching on their experiences, but on the facts of Christ’s death and resurrection. Peter at Pentecost did not say, “Let me tell you my story.” He proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Christ, and called on the crowd to believe. Paul, when addressing the philosophers at Athens, did not appeal to how his life had changed, but to the resurrection of the dead and the coming judgment. Even in the accounts where Paul does share his testimony, such as before Agrippa, it is never presented as proof of the gospel’s truth, but rather as background to his calling, with the central message remaining unchanged: that people must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
When we elevate personal testimony, we not only obscure the gospel; we also risk feeding the flesh. Human nature loves a story where we are the overcomers, the transformed, the ones who have journeyed from darkness to light. There is a subtle pride in recounting the dramatic nature of our conversion or the depth of our sinfulness—pride that finds comfort not in Christ, but in how much Christ had to save us from. But salvation is not about the degree of external transformation, nor about the spectacle of our redemption. It is about the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning work and the reliability of God’s promise to save all who believe in His Son.
An additional consequence of this overemphasis on testimony is the implicit expectation that a “valid” or “powerful” testimony must be dramatic. The more sordid the past, the more compelling the narrative seems to be. As a result, those who have been raised in Christian homes, who have never wandered far into visible or scandalous sin, are sometimes left feeling as though their faith is somehow second-rate or incomplete. They have no jaw-dropping story to tell—no prison cell conversion, no miraculous healing, no rock-bottom moment. Yet this is a tragic distortion of biblical truth. The grace of God is no less glorious when it preserves than when it rescues. The young man or woman who trusts in Christ at an early age, without the baggage of a prodigal past, testifies just as clearly—if not more so—to the faithfulness of God and the sufficiency of the gospel. Their faith is not less authentic because it lacks drama; it is grounded in the same Christ, rests on the same promise, and inherits the same eternal life. To measure the power of the gospel by the extremity of the pre-conversion story is to misunderstand the very nature of grace.
We would do well to relegate personal testimony to its proper place—at the margins. A testimony can illustrate the gospel, but it must never replace or define it. It may adorn the truth, but it must never be the basis upon which anyone is invited to believe. Salvation comes through faith in the person of Christ, not in someone else’s experience of Him. The gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes,” not everyone who feels or remembers or changed dramatically. Our message must be: believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved—not “believe, and see if/that something dramatic happens to you.”
If we are to be faithful stewards of the gospel, we must resist the temptation to preach ourselves, even under the guise of testimony. Our calling is to preach Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves as servants for His sake. Let the story be His. Let the assurance rest not in our transformation, but in the One who said,
“Whoever believes in Me has everlasting life.”
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