by
George W. Stroup*
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,
evangelism is first and foremost a theological issue having to do with
fundamental claims the church makes about the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Evangelism is not primarily a matter of strategies and programs, although
the responsible practice of evangelism demands carefully formulated
strategies and programs. First and foremost, what is at stake in evangelism
is nothing less than the very meaning of the gospel. Quite literally,
evangelism means “gospelism.” But what is the gospel, the “evangel” in
evangelism, the euangelion? That is a theological question that goes to the
heart of Christian faith, and it is a question that must be asked and
answered prior to any discussion of strategies and programs.
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.1
For 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. 2
2. 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. 3
On 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
FOOTNOTES
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).
2. Julian N. Hartt, _Toward a Theology of Evangelism_ (New York: Abingdon, 1
955), p. 117.
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