ben's blog

Bosch's definition of evangelism

David Bosch said that evangelism was one aspect of mission, and defined it thus:

"Evangelism is the proclamation of salvation in Christ to those who do not believe in him, calling them to repentance and conversion, announcing forgiveness of sins, and inviting them to become living members of Christ's earthly community and to begin a life of service to others in the power of the Holy Spirit."

- from Transforming Mission, p. 11.

Brilliant.

A less individualistic gospel

Scot McKnight apparently recently took a stab at a brief gospel presentation that manages to de-stabilize the individualism of most presentations I've heard. He preached a gospel that manages to keep the church front-and-center in God's purposes (as it should be, I think). See what you think:

God loves you and everyone else and has a plan for us: the kingdom community.

But you and everyone else have a sin problem that separates you and everyone else from God, from yourselves, from one another, and from the good world God made for you.

The good news is that Jesus lived for you, died for you, was raised for you, and sent the Spirit for you - so you all can live as the beloved community.

If you enter into Jesus' story, by repentance and faith, you can be reconnected to God, to yourself, to others, and to this world.

Those who are reconnected like this will live now as God's community and will find themselves eternally in union with God and communion with others.

Those who preach this gospel will not deconstruct the church. Instead, they will participate in what God is doing: constructing the kingdom community even now.

Postmodern evangelism

One of the questions that has tickled my brain for years now is how the church can effectively preach the gospel in the postmodern context. Lots of people have written about this, and I usually revert back to Lesslie Newbigin, who said presciently in the 1960s that "the best apologetic for the gospel is a community that believes it."

So in essence the first work of evangelism is actually the cultivation of a community that lives out the gospel. Not totally, of course, but there must be some sense of differentness about the people called church. This way the words of the gospel flow out of a praxis of the implications of the gospel, making the proclamation much more powerful.

Apparently others are fascinated by such questions, too. Halden quotes J.C. Hoekendijk, who claims that in contexts where there is no Christian memory, where there is no initial belief to call people back to, evangelism must look very different from the revival meeting tradition that most of Protestantism comes out of. Specifically we must think about our culture as a mission field and ourselves as missionaries, bringing the gospel to people who really don't know anything about it. Thus if we look to mission contexts to learn lessons, we find interesting results. Hoekendijk writes:

"Many of the new evangelistic experiments which have been made in this No-Man’s-Land shew remarkable similarity of structure. The pattern of work of these new methods may be summarised as follows: to make clear the meaning of the word of proclamation (kerygma) by means of a life lived in fellowship (koinonia) and finding its expression in simple service (diakonia)."

To me, that seems to get down to the fundamentals of preaching the gospel in a postmodern context: we make a clear pronouncement of the gospel, which is intricately bound up with a life lived in fellowship with others (the embodied witness of the church), but this life of fellowship is not a segregated society, but one that lives in and among the people they seek to impact with the gospel, living lives of simple service to people and their culture. Kerygma, koinonia, and diakonia sums it up very nicely.

Evangelism means becoming normal

A lot of what is dubbed "evangelism" in many churches seems to be marketing that is done by Christians for Christians who are looking for a cooler/better/righter church. This post (ht) points out that billboards that say things like

Pastor Bob invites you to:
Awesome Church
Programs for All Ages
Rockin Worship!
Sundays at 11am
"This is not your father's church!"

communicate well to Christians, but the unchurched will hardly even understand what the billboard means, except for the fact that their fathers probably don't attend.

He goes on to advocate evangelism methods that we've been attempting at Christ Community: throwing parties, attending concerts and other things the unchurched go to, being relationally involved in the lives of those who aren't Christians... it certainly is a lot slower work than gathering a bunch of disgruntled church-goers, but I think post-Christendom demands it. The post ends with a great quote:

One of the the first steps in effective evangelism is becoming normal again. Social again. Transparent again. Reaching people may be easier and scarier than we thought. Easier because we don’t need a budget, a building, a core team, or a seminary education. Scarier because there is nothing stopping you.

Downsizing for the sake of mission

Here's an article about "downsizing" the Sunday service for the sake of mission. It's about a conference a guy named Steve Timmis (who wrote a book called Total Church and who oversees a church network called "Crowded House" - what a great name).

He's talking about reducing the time and effort that needs to be put into the Sunday service in order to allow for more time for leaders to "rub shoulders" with non-Christians during the week, reducing the Sunday service to the sustainable essentials, so people stop expecting to be "wowed" by the service and start expecting to be formed as missional people by their participation in it.

A quote from the article:

Steve argues that many ministers need to face one of the ironies of their role: ‘that their eye-ball to eye-ball, shoulder to shoulder contact with non-Christians is limited’.

“Even rarer is those of us in supported ministry actually hanging out with the dregs of society… When was the last time we were accused of being drunks, drug addicts and pimps because of the people we hanging out with… Jesus was.”

This is similar to the advice David Fitch gives in creating services that form us rather than entertain us. He says services should be structured in such a way that even if everyone who was supposed to lead the service fell suddenly ill, the church could still figure out how to have the service in a few minutes, with new people filling in the roles.

What do you think? Is a whiz-bang church service incompatible with the kind of missional engagement Steve and David are talking about?

(ht: Matt Stone)

The service isn't the entry point

Inviting people to "church" is a common way to think about and practice evangelism, at least in its initial stages. And it's okay as far as it goes, but I think in the missional church we need to re-think this emphasis.

Check out this image from Matt Stone's blog (from a post last year):

As Matt elucidates on his blog, the way we normally think of it is that the church service is the "way in," and from there we attempt to "assimilate" people into community life: cell groups, etc. Because of this our services have needed to be very accessible to "seekers" and the like. Again, this is okay as it goes, but there is very little impetus for anyone to go from that place into the deeper realms of community, and often we're left with churches that are a mile wide and an inch deep.

But what if it was the other way around? What if we thought of the church service as the "inner mysteries" of our faith, and the "way in" was through community events? The church service can then resume its traditional role as a formational practice for the Body of Christ: gathering not to attract outsiders, but simply to be formed as an authentic, missional expression of the gospel. Then the "way in" becomes the community that is engaged with the culture: small groups, parties, play-dates at the park, book clubs, brunches, "Alpha"-type classes, etc. From there, people can see a visible expression of what a gospel-shaped community looks like, and if they want to dive deeper, they can come to a worship service, where we are formed as a gospel-shaped people by gathering to adore God, hear his Word to us, respond in faith and prayer and obedience, receive his grace through the Eucharist, and be sent back out into culture with God's mission and love burning in our hearts.

This is what we have been experimenting with at Christ Community. Honestly it's a little frustrating because it is much slower work than simply waving a big flag and saying we have the coolest church service around. But it is good work, and we're starting to see fruit being borne in our community (more maturity), and amongst the culture our community inhabits (openness, inquisitiveness to the gospel). Slow and steady wins the race nowadays, it would seem. Pray for us!

Billy Graham the Civil Rights Activist?

In the same vein as the previous post on the relationship between evangelism and social justice, apparently Billy Graham made a pretty strong symbolic statement at one of his meetings in 1952. We know Billy Graham the evangelist, but Billy Graham the fiery prophet? Apparently:

Holding segregated events had always struck [Billy Graham] as wrong, but he'd never chosen to take decisive action—until now. Walking toward the ropes that separated blacks and whites, Graham tore them down.

Mystified and uncomfortable ushers tried to put the ropes back up. Graham personally stopped them.

This symbolically powerful gesture marked a major ministry watershed. He never again led a segregated campaign.

"There is no scriptural basis for segregation. It may be there are places where such is desirable to both races, but certainly not in the church," Graham told his Mississippi audience. "The ground at the foot of the Cross is level, and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the Cross."

From "Jesus and Justice" in Christianity Today.

(ht: Matt)

Why did evangelism and social action get divorced?

I've wondered about this before, but saw a blog post today that caught my eye that tells the story of a South African university student and apartheid activist in 1979 who wants to become a Christian, but because of the examples he's seen, worries that following Jesus will weaken his opposition to apartheid. Somehow he had it in his mind that you can't have both. This dichotomy seems to dominate Christian consciousness to this day. The blog post then wonders:

"Why is there still so much of a split [between evangelism and social action] evident within the Western church? Why are justice advocates so reticent to proclaim the gospel? Why are evangelicals so reticent to demonstrate justice? How might this change?"

What do you think? Why are these things kept in separate categories in most Western people's minds?