Gospel Conversations in the Car: Rethinking Everyday Evangelism

If I were to ask you where your most personal, deep, and meaningful conversations have happened, what would you say? Maybe you would name personal events, like weddings and funerals. You might think of conversations in classrooms or the break room at work. Inevitably, you might respond with your living room or around the kitchen table. There are many places that could be listed, but one place that would show up on nearly everyone’s list is a car.

There is something special about conversations during car rides. Perhaps it’s because we live in a world where face-to-face time is so limited. When families live long distances from each other, work is often done from home, and friendships are built through a screen, there are few opportunities for uninterrupted time together. When you ride in the car with someone, there is no quick and easy escape. You can’t “fake an illness,” create an errand to run, or move to a different conversation happening across the room. If the silence gets awkward, the only way out is to fill it. We are forced to engage intimately with the person sitting across the console from us.

So many of my own personal, life-changing conversations have happened in cars. I’ve had heated arguments, where you swear you are one second away from getting out of this car! I’ve had long-awaited catch-ups with good friends I so rarely get to see. I’ve had much-needed confrontations, tear-filled heart-to-hearts, belly-shaking laughs, and connected with people in ways I never anticipated. Most importantly, I’ve experienced the presence of God during car rides with others.

Some of my most Spirit-filled and Gospel-led moments with others have happened in a car. I once worked a job where I traveled quite a bit with my co-workers. The job called for us to commute to different locations, often together on long car rides. I quickly discovered that, for some reason, the conversations that happened on these car rides were quite different from the conversations that happened around the ‘water cooler’ or even over meals together. There was an intimacy and an openness not found in other areas of our time together. No topic seemed to be off-limits, and I found confidence to ask personal and spiritual questions.

But car rides are not just places for breakthroughs with co-workers and friends. They are also locations of family evangelism and discipleship opportunities. The average American spends over 293 hours per year in a car. This is 12 whole days of our lives! We should use this time. Instead of showing our families anger and frustration during traffic, what if we used this time to learn and grow together? Some of my fondest childhood memories are the car rides home from church. My parents often used that time to prolong our spiritual learning by asking us engaging questions about what we learned at church.

Cars can provide an equal amount of intimacy and distance for thoughtful conversations. They offer a place to think deeply and uninterrupted. As a child, car rides were the places where I really began to think about what I was learning about God.

It’s not just conversations that feel special in cars. They are often ‘safe spaces’ for individuals. How many of us have taken lunch breaks, broken down crying, or had moments of peaceful silence in our cars? In a world that encourages us to constantly be moving, looking for a distraction, our vehicles offer a quiet and undisturbed place. Cars provide an area for our walls to come down, for our vulnerabilities to be exposed. When we find spaces that block out the world, we can finally listen to what God is trying to say to us. We can spend the deep, personal time with the Lord that He desperately desires with us. This special, intimate place doesn’t just have to stay with us; it can easily be shared with others! Cars can become places for evangelism.

Our churches work so hard to give us tools to assist with evangelism. These tools are valuable ways to shape our conversations and often provide solid pathways to address difficult topics. However, much less time is devoted to teaching where to have these conversations. It does no good to have the tools for Gospel conversations if we never create the opportunities to have them. Often, we encourage each other to have these conversations in coffee shops, in parks, or at public events. These are great places to meet with our communities, especially with people we don’t know well. However, these places are also unpredictable environments. Distractions fly at us one after another, and outside circumstances interrupt at the worst time.

You control the environment inside your car. The tone, openness, and intention can be completely shaped by your example. One of our biggest evangelism tools is something we take for granted every day.

In a culture where deep conversation often feels difficult to broach, cars provide the perfect environment to spark these interactions—especially with peripheral people in our lives. Someone may tense up if you approach them on the street, but when you step into a car, a conversation is anticipated. Travel has always been a place of connection with others, a space where openness comes more naturally. While many of our modern forms of transportation—such as airplanes, trains, and ferries—are filled with phone screens instead of conversation, cars remain a little more intimate.

Many churches and organizations already take advantage of Gospel conversations in cars and have started thriving rideshare ministries. These ministries are innovative and vital for doing evangelism in our communities. You don’t need to get a full-time job as an Uber driver to use this strategy. I encourage all of us to see the potential of Gospel car rides in our everyday lives.

Where are the opportunities for you to share meaningful, Christ-centered conversations in your car?

Offer to road trip with co-workers to conferences and retreats—or even just to lunch! When dropping your kids off at school, use that time to ask how they’re feeling and what God is teaching them. Take your friends to the airport! Instead of viewing these trips as mundane and necessary parts of our day, look to them as opportunities to connect and engage.

Sharing the Gospel while traveling is by no means a new idea in our culture or in our time. In the story of Philip and the Ethiopian, we see an example of travel being a setting for evangelism. Instead of getting caught up in the destination, Philip saw the opportunity that God had placed before him on the journey. A stranger was able to receive the Good News he had been waiting for! After rising from the grave, Jesus himself connected with two travelers on the road to Emmaus, using that time to share the message of the Gospel. The journey from one destination to another is often where our lives truly begin to change.