There is general fear being widely
expressed among evangelicals today that we are not reaching people the way we
used to. Certainly the numbers of people in the modern West who are becoming
Christians seems to be slumping, and a lot of us are a bit nervous about the
trend.
Is the Age of Evangelism Ending?
According to Bible.org, one problem is that the professional clergy people and leaders are not stepping up, and that church ministries and programs are not going out to reach people. Meanwhile,
The Evangelism Institute has found that while 85% of evangelical churches have
a pro-evangelism statement in their constitution, less than 5% of the people
are actually involved in doing something with it.
All these worriers are agreed that Christians do still have a message worth
getting out to the world, but for some reason we’re just not getting it out. So
while this may not yet be the end of the church, it’s starting to look like
it’s the end times for outreach, for evangelism, for the gospel.
Well, contrary to all this, I want to suggest that it’s actually not that evangelism is ending. It’s that increasingly the message of salvation is being
shared (or more correctly not being shared) in such a way that it simply is not attaining its true ends.
The message is not failing us. We are failing the message.
Let me explain.
Churching for Seekers
Back at the end of the last century, a huge
wave of alleged enthusiasm for outreach swept through the evangelical congregations
in the West, particularly in North America. Taking its cue from large, affluent
congregations like the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago, the megachurch
movement strove to remodel the church so as to make it more “seeker sensitive”.
Proponents of this idea drew on the knowledge tradition of business and
mass-marketing, and thus sought to reorient congregational life and activities
to make church more open to the needs and demands of the secular community. Their
theory was simple: that providing an abundance of well-organized programs
and services and creating a more entertaining atmosphere would draw unbelievers — characterized as “seekers” — into a less
alien and threatening sort of spiritual experience. More people would hear the
gospel, souls would be saved, and the numerical draining off of congregants
from the churches would be reversed.
Now, some of the changes they proposed were ultimately beneficial, I think, and some were probably long overdue. But others
were sorely misguided in ways that are far easier to see in retrospect. One
problem was this idea of the “seeker”: it did not turn out to be true that the
vast majority of unsaved persons were actually looking for a church experience.
Rather, they tended to be basking in the glow of their television sets and
computer screens, or scouring the shopping malls for the latest soul-soothing
purchases. It turned out rather to be as Christopher Lasch characterized
Western people in his celebrated 1979 book, The
Culture of Narcissism:
“The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health and psychic security.”
Or, to take the same idea from a Christian
source, consider Roger Lundin’s 1993 comments about how people of his day were
thinking:
“A therapeutic culture is one in which questions of ultimate concern — about the nature of the good, the meaning of truth and the existence of God — are taken to be unanswerable and hence in some fundamental sense insignificant. A therapeutic culture focuses upon the management of experience and environment in the interest of [a] ‘manipulatable sense of well-being’ …”
Or again, consider Christian pundit Ken
Myers, in his essay, The Wonders of Salvation, published in the same year:
“There is much in modern American culture to encourage us to believe that whatever’s wrong in the universe, it can’t possibly be our fault. We are much less bothered about being guilty than about feeling guilty, in part because we are perpetually reminded that who we are is determined by how we feel about ourselves. In such an atmosphere, salvation means being freed from bad feelings about who we are. The gospel contextualized in such a setting redefines Christ as the ultimate source of self-esteem.”
Myers continued with the quip that while
the most famous sermon of the previous century had been Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God”, today’s culture would probably produce an
equivalent sermon entitled, “Clients in the Hands of a Smiling Therapist”.
The bottom line was that people just weren’t “seeking” a church experience the way the megachurch advisors seemed to
think they were. Consequently, the rapid growth experienced by many
megachurches in the surrounding years turned out to come more from the
dissolution of smaller congregations or the transfer of believers from one sort
of church to another than from any revival of evangelism — a realization
that was eventually to be reluctantly conceded by both celebrated pollster
George Barna and chief megachurch advocate Peter C. Wagner (Dunlap, 1997).
Evangelism by Numbers
An equally troubling problem was the tendency of contemporary liberal and conservative evangelical congregations to
view evangelism as a problem of mass-management. Those who can think back may
recall Nelson Annan’s popular renewalist booklet More People (1987), in which he unapologetically excoriated the
conservative churches for their undervaluing of numerical expansion, and pled for a more statistical, numerical approach to evaluating church success. But in
fairness, the same folly was evident among conservative thinkers lamenting the failure of the “gud auld gospel meeting” to bring in the expected numbers to pound down the chapel doors to hear the
get-saved-now messages that so many of them were cranking out weekly to no
particular audience. The renewalists blamed the church for being insufficiently
driven by numbers, and the conservatives blamed the believers for not inviting
their friends into their antiquated, polemical services. But both sides thought
the problem was the same: they were just not getting the right people inside
the church doors to hear the lovely programs being put on for their benefit.
Numbers-thinking is a serious problem. It’s not at all a Christian way of thinking about things. The Lord himself told us
that the ninety-nine that need no salvation are no compensation for the one
that does. And in a way, the numbers-based approach reminds me of the salutary
caution of Christian historian Paul Johnson. Writing of the humanist poet and
social theorist P.B. Shelley, Johnson observed:
“[H]e loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular. He burned with a fierce love but it was an abstract flame and the poor mortals who came near it were often scorched. He put ideas before people, and his life is a testament to how heartless ideas can be.”
If ideas can be heartless, numbers surely can. And there was not much heart for the gospel either in the megachurches or among conservatives. To be sure, there were loud and insistent protestations to the contrary; but looking back, I think we ought not to take them very seriously. The truth was that neither side was willing to do the hard work of evangelism; and so long as that was the case, we have every reason to doubt the depth of their conviction.
Serving the Seeker-Seekers
Now, try this idea on for size: neither the megachurch advocates nor, of course, the
conservatives, were actually being sensitive to “seekers”, if any such were to
be found. Rather, both were “seeker-seeker
sensitive”. That is, both were sensitive to the fear of individual
believers associated with any thought of reaching out to the unbelieving world personally. They knew that individual
believers were increasingly nervous and unpracticed in having any deep
interpersonal dealings with the world at large; and both the conservative and
the liberal churches were sensitive to
this concern, and were attempting to provide for these nervous believers. On
both sides, the local church itself was thought to be the engine that would
solve this problem by providing either an upbeat program or a regular round of
stodgy polemics that would do the job of evangelizing that local believers were
increasingly unwilling to do.
The first step in being more sensitive to these nervous believers would be to make sure that
they had as little to do as possible prior to a professional evangelist or
professionally-run program being able to take over. Believers had to know that
if they brought a neighbor to church there would be some well-oiled presentation
of the way to be saved, so that the pressure on them would be lessened as soon
as their neighbors were inside the chapel doors.
A second way this approach was sensitive to seeker-seekers was that within the precincts of
the church building the numerical advantage held out-of-doors by unbelievers
would be spectacularly reversed: no longer would there be only one Christian
for a thousand skeptics, but a whole congregation of Christians for only a few
unsaved people. Peer pressure might well achieve what intelligent persuasion or
even consistent living within the local neighborhood could not; and if it did
not, at least it would make the situation far more comfortable for the
evangelizing believer than for the potential convert.
Side Effects
But this strategy also had some very serious side-effects that were little noted at the
time, but which now are manifest everywhere, in conservative and liberal
congregations alike. One was that it removed any sense of ultimate
responsibility for evangelism from the individual believer to the church. The
church became an institutional replacement for the missing knowledge, courage
and obedience of local believers, and thus also institutionalized their
passivity about the problem. After all, if the church is the engine of
evangelism then why should I feel personally concerned if evangelism is not
being done? Do I not give to the church? Do I not attend regularly? Are there
not evangelistic meetings or wonderful, upbeat programs of music, drama and
spiritual therapy on offer every week? Then surely the fault is with the
unbelieving world, that is now, in these last days, simply becoming so
hard-hearted that all our best efforts can produce no more than the thin trickle of results we are accustomed to seeing …
So went the reasoning. And so went the gospel. Distracted from their personal obligation to share their faith with
their neighbors, and increasingly cloistered in the church or cocooned in
their suburban homes, modern, western believers simply stopped feeling that
they had a problem. Evangelism was the work of the professionals, and the
individual believer’s obligations began and ended with supporting the
professionals.
This was the end of the gospel. It ended when we believers began to think we didn’t have to know our own faith well,
live it out personally and strive to share it with those who were perishing. It
ended when we forgot that neither the Great Commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself …”) nor the Great Commission (“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation …”) could ever be fulfilled within the safe confines of the local church. It ended when we stopped obeying the One who gave that responsibility directly to his
disciples, and did so at a time in which there was no church. For the church began at Pentecost; and had the Lord
ever intended the church to take over the individual responsibility of every
disciple to go and preach the gospel, he could have easily repeated those
instructions when the Holy Spirit was first given. But he did not.
Churches and Evangelism
Today many of our own people — our own fellow believers and our theologians — are fond of drawing analogies between
us and the church of Laodicea spoken of in Revelation 3. Of the church of Laodicea, you will recall, the Lord says:
“… you are neither cold nor hot” and “because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.”
To this he adds a great many other things:
but to none of them does he add, “This I have against you; that you
failed to preach the gospel.”
Now, this would seem to be a terribly surprising oversight. If, after all, the church at Laodicea was characterized
as “lukewarm” and worthy of such visceral rejection, and if it had become rich
and arrogant, you would surely expect it to have fallen down on its responsibility
to the gospel. And yet, if this was the one area in which this corrupt church
was not falling down, then it is not apparent that they were doing so well in maintaining it that the Lord thought they
merited a commendation — or even just a momentary nod of approval. So
either they were doing it so passably that it was not a problem but so weakly
that it was not a stroke in their favor.
There is one other possibility: that they were never expected to do it at all.
Is that likely? Well, it would seem so. For of the seven churches of Revelation, not a single one is commended for their
faithfulness to messaging salvation to the unsaved, nor are any of them
criticized for failure to do it! Their faithfulness in suffering is commended,
and their doctrinal and moral failures are indicted, and above all their love
or lack of love for the Lord is emphasized — but not one word about their
gospel meetings. How strange, if any of them were ever expected to be having
them.
But they weren’t, you see. Evangelism is
not a church function. It’s the responsibility of each and every individual
Christian in his or her neighborhood, workplace and world. While the church
can edify the believer in his faith, as a corporate entity it bears absolutely
no stitch of responsibility in reaching the lost. The gospel begins and ends
with you and me.
Ashamed of the Gospel
So now we come to our key question: why has
the gospel ended? And the answer is simple. It has ended because you and I are
not sharing it. We have stopped taking the risks involved in reaching out to
our neighbors. We have stopped living lives that are consistently different,
so our neighbors have stopped asking about any difference. We have stopped
reading our own Bibles and thinking things through for ourselves, acquiring our
own grasp of doctrine, so we feel too ignorant to speak up, and too scared that
perhaps some difficult question will set us back on our heels. In part, we are
fearful that we will fail in the most important kind of communication a person
can undertake, and that somehow we will contribute to making the Christian
message even less plausible to our neighbors.
But we are also fearful that witnessing will place on us a significant burden to be open, communicative and
hospitable with people who live rather differently than we do. We don’t want to
be faced with the decision of whether or not to drink socially, or how to
respond to an invitation from those two people living in that broken home or
that homosexual partnership. We don’t know how to handle ourselves around the
Sikh, Muslim or Taoist who lives across the hall and invites us for tea. We
don’t want to run into that skeptical local Socrates who will frighten us with
his questions, or that extremely needy person down the block whose kids are
running loose all the time. We especially do not want our Christianity to get
into our workplaces and bring us into embarrassment or conflicts there; after
all, we have to make a living, right? And anyway, those people know us: and given the way we struggle
in our own lives every day, what are the chances we can even speak to them?
And so we pull back, avoid relationships and
hunker down among Christian friends, in life groups or in local churches. We
don’t go out much, and we certainly do not seek friendships out there in the
world, where every kind of cold wind is blowing. And yet we wonder that we
never find a time or opportunity for the gospel …
The End
But what, really, is the end of evangelism?
As the late, great Neil Postman once so perceptively pointed out, there are two types of “end”. One means simply
“termination” or “cessation”. But we use the word in quite a different way. If
someone asks us to borrow our hammer, we might ask, “To what end?” And in that
case, we don’t mean “are you going to stop” but rather, “for what purpose”,
“with what goal” or “what is the legitimate end point of the labors you aim to
undertake, once they are completed?”
This sort of end is what the Greeks used to call telos, meaning, “outcome” or
“end-point”, not at all a “cessation”. The end
of the gospel is, and has always been, the bringing of lost people into
relationship with their Creator through the message of the life, work and
person of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ. Its end has always been salvation. It has never been a bauble to be admired, or
even a comforting mantra to be recited to Christians, but a rough-and-tumble
message of blunt truth to a dying world. The end of the gospel is to get out there and save souls, for their
eternal joy and for the ultimate glory of God.
So get it out there, and end the gospel — that is, give it the end for which it was given to us in the
first place. Suck up all your fears, and just do it. Stop making excuses. It’s
the most powerful message on earth, backed by the real power of the Spirit of
God; so our inadequacies will not be a block to it.
You don’t know how to do it? You don’t know what you’d say? Guess what: you can learn. You can’t learn by sitting at home,
but you can learn by getting out there and trying. The Lord knows you’re not
perfect. And yes, sometimes you will make mistakes. No doubt you will
sometimes — quite often, maybe — fail to do justice to the message of
salvation that you so cherish.
But the Lord knows who you are: do you know who he is?
All we need to do is to be faithful. The Lord of Glory himself gave us his Spirit. He also gave us a direct personal command, and backed that command with
all the authority in the universe.
As for the church, be grateful for it. Enjoy the fellowship, practice worship, sing, pray, serve and give.
But as for the gospel, take it to the streets yourself. If you don’t, no one else will.
You mean... I actually have to get to know people and... talk to them?
ReplyDeleteYes.
DeleteSurprisingly, "go ye into all the world" does not mean, as I was taught it meant, "sit ye in all the church pews." ;)
This is an absolutely fantastic article, by which I mean that it made me want to shout hallelujah and show it to everybody I know, but it also made me squirm and want to hide in a hole because I, too, am part of the problem.
ReplyDeleteI admit to great timidity when it comes to "evangelism". This actually worked in my favour in a previous role as youth pastor. While I knew that expectations were to go and reach youth, and recognizing that a great deal of what would pass as evangelism would be invitational, we began to ask "invite them to what?" We decided that if we invited kids to a meeting that did not include young people who were honestly seeking to know God, then our invitation was useless. So we focused on building up in Christ the kids we had, lots of teaching, lots of discussion about everyday issues, lots of fun. And then other kids started showing up. So before we got around to the serious work of evangelism, we figured we'd better use our limited resources to build those kids up. And then their friends started coming and I realized I was off the "evangelism" hook. It seems to me that there is no substitute for people who honestly and humbly seek to worship God with their whole being, who genuinely love and enjoy one another and who model what it means to be authentic, open-hearted persons in communion. Christ is lifted up in the midst of that kind of community. And people are drawn to him. We have both an individual AND a communal opportunity/responsibility.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good insight, TAGged. I think that those of us who struggle with knowing how to evangelize can certainly exercise our gifts by building up the body of Christ through discipleship, teaching, and exhortation. We may not be the last link in the chain when it comes to leading someone to Christ, but we can still be an important part of forging that chain and making it strong enough to reach the lost.
ReplyDeleteWell, I hesitate to be contrary, but I think you've got it wrong and are perhaps slipping in the direction of the common error.
DeleteBeing a "link" is fine...but I fear you could be missing the important point: evangelism is simply NOT a thing you can do in a church context.
Yes, you can aid other things...edification, spiritual growth, discipleship, worship...but none of these are evangelism. Evangelism is a personal responsibility you and I have to the Lord...we can't blow it off with more busyness with other things, no matter how "spiritual" they may be.
The "chain" of which you speak -- teaching, exhortation, service, whatever -- is not the thing that the Lord has appointed to reach the lost. By the grace of God, you do it.
Therefore, when we stand before the Lord, "Well, I was really busy in the church..." will not be an answer the question, "Were you a faithful steward of the gospel?"
Didn't say anything about a church context in my comment, though I can see how you might have assumed that from what TAGged wrote.
DeleteWell, apologies if I'm misunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteIt's all too common for people to think they can avoid their duty to the Great Commission by doing other things they find easier and less scary to do, especially things earmarked as "spiritual service" of some kind. But I don't see anywhere in Scripture where we're told we can trade off our duty to the Great Commission in that way.
I don't regard myself as an especially talented evangelist, but honestly, I think we've just got to stop whining and do what we've been told to do.
And if that's the page you're on too, well, we've got no disagreement.
This is a late addition to the conversation, but I was trying to make a case for a flexible both/and. I think a lot of damage has been done by reducing evangelism to four laws. A helpful tool for explaining salvation, but "good news telling' seems to me to be bigger than just that. What I experienced was a group of Christ followers getting together and chatting about the God of scripture, and then continuing that conversation as fellow wonderers about how the world works with their friends at school. It just seemed a seamless conversation, people wandered in and out of stuff we were doing and often stayed around for a while, and many made commitments to follow Jesus. We DID have a concern to tell people about Jesus, we prayed for many by name. We also taught kids that they knew their friends better than we did. In fact God probably put those people in their life for a reason. So it was their responsibility to chatter about Jesus as was appropriate to the questions their friends were dealing with. As they lived out their faith and spoke up, "in season and out", salvation came to many. Both/and, individual conversations AND inviting to churchy meeting stuff. Granted, high schoolers are a special group, they are in learning mode and need a base to go to for answers and guidance, but we saw similar things happen when their parents began to catch some of the same vision and desire.
ReplyDeleteThat is an excellent point. Thank you for sharing your experience. I actually think that's much more what the Lord had in mind than some sort of a four-or-five-point canned approach.
DeleteNow, when I say that, please understand that I'm not saying it's not important to know a list of the basic facts about the gospel, and I'm not even saying it's bad for a Christian -- for his or her own information -- to know some sort of summary of the salvation message. But (except under extraordinarily hurried circumstances) if our actual sharing with others comes in prefabricated sections, like a hen-house, then I think that's very poor communication, considerably short of the spirit of the gospel, and also unlikely to be well-received.
I think the exciting thing is that the Lord has called upon all of us, as Christians, to discover the ways and circumstances in which we can best communicate the truth about Jesus Christ. That is a very individual challenge, but also a very inspiring one. And I think that for all of us, the message surely has to start with God's own attitude -- sincere love for the people who are in our orbit, and a valuing them personally, in all the forms they may come, and with all the complexities that sincerely caring for them brings into our lives.
In this, we are called to mirror God the Father. For when He communicated the message to us it was not in some cold, detached, uncaring and impersonal formula, but in living relationship with His Own Son. And that, if nothing else, should help us clear up any illusion that a repeated, formulaic kind of message is what is required of us.
Well said. Thanks again for providing such a good example.
YES! Love this stuff! Plus you used Neil Postman - an added bonus.
ReplyDelete