|
VOW
|
EVANGELISM AND REFORMED THEOLOGY
Reprinted with permission from the Austin Seminary Bulletin (April 1985), Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 #. 27th Street, Austin, Texas, 78705 What is evangelism? How should the Presbyterian Church pursue Christ's command to "make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19)? Such questions are asked with increasing frequency in the Presbyterian Church. In most of the discussions of evangelism in which I have participated two observations seem to be true. Most of us recognize there is an important tradition of evangelism in the Presbyterian Church, especially in this country, but we are uncertain what evangelism is in our time. We observe examples of evangelism on television, radio, and in the print media, and many of us are uncomfortable with what we see and hear. In its most visible forms, we suspect that these examples of evangelism are not compatible with the faith and life of the Presbyterian Church. More often than not, television evangelism seems manipulative, legalistic and judgmental, more a reflection of middle class values and morality than a presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Secondly, many Presbyterians are confused about how they and their church should engage in evangelism. Not only is it unclear what evangelism is; it is equally unclear to many Presbyterians how the church should practice it. To some extent that confusion may be due to the negative memories, experiences, and images that many of us have of evangelism. To many of us, evangelism suggests pushy strangers who invade our homes and ask deeply personal questions designed to manipulate us into actions we would not freely choose. If that is what evangelism is, we want nothing to do with it. But many of us also have come to suspect that our negative experiences and images may not be all there is to be said about the matter. Hence, we are left with our two questions: What is evangelism? And how should Presbyterians practice evangelism? As our questions suggest, in any discussion of evangelism two principles are important: 1) what is at stake in evangelism is the meaning of the gospel; 2) what the church understands the gospel to be will bear decisively on how the church practices evangelism. The Meaning of Evangelism 1) What is at stake in evangelism is the meaning
of the gospel. In other words,
What is the gospel as Presbyterians understand it? John Calvin provides a clear and succinct answer. We make the freely given promise of God the foundation of faith because upon it faith properly rests ... faith properly begins with the promise, rests in it, and ends in it. For in God faith seeks life; a life that is not found in commandments or declarations of penalties, but in the promise of mercy, and only in a freely given promise.1For Calvin, the foundation of faith is God's freely given promise of mercy, what Calvin elsewhere refers to as God's grace. And by grace, Calvin means God's benevolence (literally, God's good will). The gospel is what the angels announce at the birth of Jesus — God's good will to the world. For Presbyterians, therefore, evangelism is the proclamation of the good news that in Jesus of Nazareth God has unequivocally declared his grace, mercy, and good will to all people, indeed to all creation. Because of what God has done in Jesus Christ, Presbyterians believe that the only appropriate response is repentance, obedience, discipleship, and worship. Consequently, evangelism, as Presbyterians understand it, is not something the church does in order to save lost souls. It is God and God alone who saves people. Evangelism is the activity of the church in response to and in obedience to the prior (prevenient) reality of God's grace in Jesus Christ. There are a variety of ways of describing the meaning of the gospel and therein the meaning of evangelism. Presbyterians do not believe the best description of the gospel is the one most prominent in North American culture, a description that runs something like this: "If you repent of your sins and accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, then God will be gracious to you." That interpretation of the gospel denies the prior reality of God's grace, qualifies the Reformed conviction concerning the utter sinfulness of human beings, and turns the good news of the gospel into a legalistic burden. Presbyterians believe there is a better interpretation of the gospel than the one just described, an interpretation that more adequately reflects the centrality of God's grace in the gospel. It runs something like this: "Because God has been gracious to us in Jesus Christ, we should repent, rejoice, and believe " What Christians do in evangelism or in anything else is always a response to the prior reality of God's grace. And it is God's grace which enables Christians to do what they could not do for themselves. Unfortunately, many churches in this country interpret the gospel by means of values and categories derived more from white, middle class culture than from the Bible. In the context of North American culture, the extravagant claims made by the Bible about God's grace are unintelligible, if not "bad news." The parable of the laborers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16 is a hard saying for individuals nurtured in a culture which teaches that people are what they make of themselves, both economically and religiously. It should not come as a great surprise, therefore, if a Presbyterian proclamation of the gospel failed to evoke a universal "amen" in North American society. The Practice of Evangelism It is important to address first the theological question of the meaning of evangelism because the second principle is dependent on it: 2) what the church understands the gospel to be will bear decisively on how the church practices evangelism. If Presbyterians understand the gospel to be the good news about God's grace, what does that suggest about how the church should practice evangelism? The conviction about the centrality of grace suggests that the church should practice evangelism gracefully, urgently, boldly, faithfully, corporately, and justly. 1. The church should practice evangelism gracefully. In other words, the church should reflect its understanding of God's grace in its practice of evangelism. Above all else, that means that the church must not present the gospel in a coercive and manipulative fashion. To practice evangelism ungraciously would be to deny the content of the gospel. The church must not turn God's good news for all people into bad news for some. The church denies the gospel it proclaims when it presents Christian faith as a religious commandment and burden, when it is more interested in the decisions people make than in the people themselves. As Julian Hartt wrote some thirty years ago: The Christian evangelist is not a salesman for a secular culture presumptively religious at the points at which it is least sure of itself. The Christian preacher is not the salesman of a cult. The gospel messenger is concerned with people as persons; and he does not go among them to pry them out of hell into heaven. He is involved with them because he loves them. 22. The church should practice evangelism urgently. But the urgency of evangelism is not the church's legitimate desire for more people and larger budgets. The urgency in evangelism is nothing more and nothing less than the urgency of the gospel itself, the urgency of the good news about God's grace. It is this gospel which urgently demands to be proclaimed and shared with the world. What hangs in the balance for any individual or community is not heaven or hell. That issue has already been decided once and for all in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What becomes of those who do not confess that Jesus is Lord? As Hartt points out: The church does not have the power to determine for others what that relationship is. Its entire energy is to be exhausted in proclaiming the love by which it has been created and which is given for the redemption of the whole creation. 3On the other hand, serious questions must be asked of any church which no longer lives with a sense of the urgency of the gospel. A church which is indifferent to those who live outside of Jesus Christ must be asked whether it still understands the gospel to be good news or whether that church has become so familiar and so comfortable with the bizarre announcement that the last shall be first and the first last that the gospel is no longer a scandal. 3. The church should practice evangelism boldly. Because of the urgency of the gospel, the church must not be timid in its practice of evangelism. Presbyterians should engage in evangelism in a manner that reflects their deepest convictions about the meaning of the gospel. And they should do so unapologetically and unashamedly. Presbyterians have something important to say in the area of evangelism, and they will make that contribution when they present a forceful, aggressive interpretation of the gospel of grace. Presbyterians must not relinquish the presentation of the gospel in the public media to those voices which qualify, deny, and even contradict the good news about God's grace. What the rest of the Christian community and the larger non-Christian culture may need in evangelism is a clear Presbyterian statement about God's grace. One indicator of the church's boldness is the degree of imagination and creativity it commits to the ministry of evangelism. It is certainly appropriate for Presbyterians to televise worship services, but it may be even more appropriate for Presbyterians to televise their adult Sunday School classes engaged in the study of Scripture and Christian faith. The rest of the world probably knows that Presbyterians worship God. What others may not know and may need to know is that because of their understanding of God's grace Presbyterians do not consider it inappropriate to wrestle with doubts about faith, to ask hard questions, and to engage in the serious study of Scripture. 4. The church should practice evangelism faithfully. As noted. above, there is certainly nothing wrong with the Christian hope that all the world might come to confess faith in Jesus Christ. Nor is there anything wrong with the attempt by individual congregations to add new members and increase the size of their budgets. These legitimate goals, however, are not finally what evangelism means, and they must not become the criteria by which the church evaluates its performance in evangelism. If more members and larger budgets are the criteria for assessing the church's ministry of evangelism, then Presbyterians could and should adopt any number of clever marketing and advertising techniques which have proven to be richly successful for television evangelists. But more members and larger budgets are not as important to Presbyterians as faithfulness to God's grace as they know it in Jesus Christ. If God's freely given promise of grace is the foundation of faith, as Calvin suggests, then it is that grace which must be the final criterion by which Presbyterians assess their efforts in evangelism. It is not unthinkable that if the Presbyterian church were faithful to the grace of its sovereign God that a "successful" program of evangelism might result in fewer members and smaller budgets. 5. The church should practice evangelism corporately. Presbyterians believe it is God's grace which they celebrate in worship and which calls them into new life in Jesus Christ. Consequently, Presbyterians reject any form of evangelism that encourages the private practice of Christian faith. Christian faith is personal, but not private. Christian faith is personal, but it is also intrinsically communal. It is a faith that demands to be lived and celebrated in the context of the body and community of Jesus Christ. The life of the congregation, therefore, is the appropriate context for the life of faith. Furthermore, it is the life of the congregation which the 0hurch should hold up to the world as an imperfect witness to the kingdom of God, and it is the corporate life of the people of God which the church invites the world to join. As John Leith has written, "Evangelism on the horizontal level is the work of people who are the church, inviting other people to share in the common life of the body of Christ" 4 While worship may indeed be the most important thing Presbyterians do as a community, it is by no means the only thing, and it is the whole life of the people of God which should be presented to the world as an imperfect but tangible expression of God's grace. 6. The church should practice evangelism justly. The grace of God which Presbyterians celebrate is not cheap grace. It is a grace that asks for obedience and faithfulness. It is a grace which evokes discipleship. Evangelism is an act of faith on the part of the church, but it must not be separated from the rest of the church's faith and life. While it is appropriate for a session to create a committee on evangelism for the life of the congregation, it is inappropriate for the session to assume that evangelism is restricted to the work of that committee. (The same is true, of course, for all the other ministries of the congregation.) In particular, evangelism must not be separated from the church's commitment to mission and social ministry. To suggest that the church must choose between evangelism and mission is to create a false dichotomy. If the church were to practice mission at the expense of evangelism, it would not honor the mandate of its Lord to make disciples of all nations. And if the church were to practice evangelism at the expense of mission, it would not honor its Lord's mandate to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and visit those in prison. Faithfulness to the gospel of God's grace does not mean choosing between evangelism and mission, but engaging in both and understanding the one as an expression of the other. As the World Council of Churches has observed, A proclamation that does not hold forth the promises of the justice of the kingdom to the poor of the earth is a caricature of the Gospel; but Christian participation in the struggles for justice which does not point towards the promises of the kingdom also makes a caricature of a Christian understanding of justice. 6
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, "The Library of Christian Classics,
Vols. XX and XXI" (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), p. 575 (111,
2,
29).
3. Ibid. 4. John H. Leith, Reformed Theology and the Style of Evangelism (Atlanta: The Presbyterian Church in the United States, no date), p. 7. 5 "Mission and Evangelism — an Ecumenical
Affirmation" in International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol.
7, No. 2 (April, 1983), p. 69.
* In 1985, George Stroup was Associate Professor
of Systematic Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
|