Monday, October 27, 2008
"Doing" Evangelism
Blue Fish recently posted on why he does not "do" evangelism:
I grow increasingly concerned that as all Christians, it seems, come to identify themselves as "evangelicals" that we are so limiting what the church is and is to do that it will be lost forever. It seems like we are trying to turn the church into a giant mouth, to borrow the Pauline metaphor.
Understandably, this matches the American commercial ethos of continual institutional growth as the only legitimate sign of health - but it defies the vision of the church that is established in scripture. It turns the church from a group of believers to some sort shark that eats for the sake of survival and survives purely to eat.
When the vision of the church we present is that we are all called to evangelize, is it any wonder that the church does not make mature Christians? When the church "lives to eat and eats to live" is it any wonder that the kind of truly life changing, transformative power that the gospel represents gets lost in the mix somewhere.
Salvation is easy, transformation is hard. Church growth is easy, church depth is hard. Absolving mankind of its sins would have been easy, dying on a cross was hard.
Somehow I think we are called to take the hard road.
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- Delusion
- Inability
- Sin
- Courage
- Opportunity
and after discussing each, he adds this postscript:
I'd also say, that sometimes I don't do evangelism because I'm actually doing something that is genuinely more important for me to be doing at that moment to bring glory to God, which might be.... eating, sleeping, working or any number of other things.Although he offers this latter comment as a confession concerning the lack of evangelism in his life, I think he has a heck of a point there. NOT EVERY CHRISTIAN is called to be an evangelist. That does not mean we fail to take the opportunities to introduce others to the gospel that present themselves to us, but it does mean that God has given us each unique gifts and ministries and that some are called to serve the body of believers while others are called to serve those outside that body. (I Cor. 12)
I grow increasingly concerned that as all Christians, it seems, come to identify themselves as "evangelicals" that we are so limiting what the church is and is to do that it will be lost forever. It seems like we are trying to turn the church into a giant mouth, to borrow the Pauline metaphor.
Understandably, this matches the American commercial ethos of continual institutional growth as the only legitimate sign of health - but it defies the vision of the church that is established in scripture. It turns the church from a group of believers to some sort shark that eats for the sake of survival and survives purely to eat.
When the vision of the church we present is that we are all called to evangelize, is it any wonder that the church does not make mature Christians? When the church "lives to eat and eats to live" is it any wonder that the kind of truly life changing, transformative power that the gospel represents gets lost in the mix somewhere.
Salvation is easy, transformation is hard. Church growth is easy, church depth is hard. Absolving mankind of its sins would have been easy, dying on a cross was hard.
Somehow I think we are called to take the hard road.
Technorati Tags:evangelism, transformation, church, culture, surface, depth
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