Today less than two percent of the world Jewry believe Jesus to be Israel’s Messiah. Jewish evangelism is an essential part of world evangelism. If Jesus is not the Messiah for all, he is not the Messiah at all.
For different reasons, many Christians today do not see the need for Jewish evangelism. Some believe that the church has lost its right to proclaim the gospel to Jewish people because of church history, especially the Holocaust.
Others read the Bible to say that Jews have their own way to God and therefore do not need to hear or believe in Jesus as their Messiah and Saviour.
Still others see God’s mission as starting only with Jesus and the New Testament, failing to see the New Testament story as the continuation and fulfilment of what God has done with and through the history of Israel and the Jewish people.
The Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism (LCJE), an issue network of the Lausanne Movement, seeks to bring together both Jewish and non-Jewish believers involved in the field of Jewish evangelism to share information and resources and to strategize on a global level, so that more Jewish people will hear and consider the good news of Jesus.
We affirm that whereas the Jewish people were not strangers to the covenants and promises of God, in the way that Paul describes the Gentiles, they still stand in need of reconciliation to God through the Messiah Jesus. There is no difference, said Paul, between Jew and Gentile in sin; neither is there any difference in salvation. Only in and through the cross can both have access to God the Father through the one Spirit. The Cape Town Commitment II-B-1
