Evangelism through the local church1
‘If any man be a dumb Christian, not professing his faith openly, but cloaking and colouring himself for fear of danger in time to come, he giveth men occasion, justly and with good conscience, to doubt lest he have not the grace of the Holy Ghost within him, because he is tongue tied and doth not speak.’ In other words, Christians who never share their faith are unlikely to be true Christians. So said the Second Book of Homilies, a 1571 collection of sermons to be read out in churches to introduce the people of England to the newly Reformed faith of the church.
Various forms of evangelism
Evangelism can take different forms. Ever since Jesus offered living water to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, and Philip told the good news of Jesus to the Ethiopian in his chariot, personal evangelism has had impeccable biblical precedents. It is still our duty, when the opportunity is given, to share Christ with our relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues who do not yet know him.
Mass evangelism too (the preaching of an evangelist to crowds) has over the centuries been blessed by God. Jesus himself proclaimed the good news of the kingdom to the crowds in Galilee. So did the apostle Paul to the pagans of Lystra and the philosophers of Athens. So did John Wesley and George Whitefield in eighteenth-century Britain and America. Gifted evangelists of many nationalities are still preaching effectively to large crowds today, although they know that their ministry depends on the cooperation of churches and Christians. And all over the world there are clergy and lay people who take preaching seriously, and who remember that their congregation will often include both non-Christians and nominal Christians who need to hear the gospel.
Nevertheless, local church evangelism is the most normal, natural and productive method of spreading the gospel today, for two main reasons.
First, there is the argument from Scripture. According to the apostle Peter, the church is both ‘a royal priesthood’ to offer spiritual sacrifices to God (which is worship) and ‘a holy nation’ to proclaim God’s praises (which is witness). And these responsibilities of the universal church devolve to each local church. Every Christian congregation is called by God to be a worshipping, witnessing community. Indeed, each of these two duties necessarily involves the other. If we truly worship God, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, so that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in turn leads to worship, in a perpetual circle.
The Thessalonians set a fine example of local church evangelism. In his first letter to them Paul points out this remarkable sequence: ‘Our gospel came to you . . . You welcomed the message . . . The Lord’s message rang out from you.’ In this way the local church becomes like a sounding board which reflects and amplifies the vibrations it receives. Or it is like a communications satellite which first accepts and then transmits a message. Every church which has heard the gospel must pass it on. This is still God’s principal method of evangelism. If all churches had been faithful to this commission, then the world would long ago have been evangelized.
Second, there is the argument from strategy. Each local church is situated in a particular neighbourhood. Its first missional responsibility must therefore be to the people who live there. The congregation is strategically placed to reach the locality. Any political party would be wildly jealous of the plant and personnel which are at our disposal. In many countries the churches have ample resources to disseminate the gospel throughout their land.
Thus biblical theology and practical strategy combine to make the local church the primary agent of evangelism.
But if the local church is to act out its God-appointed role, it must first fulfil four conditions. It must understand itself (the theology of the church), organize itself (the structures of the church), express itself (the message of the church) and be itself (the life of the church).
The church must understand itself
The theology of the church
Many churches are sick because they have a false self-image. They have grasped neither who they are (their identity) nor what they are called to be (their vocation). We all know the importance of an accurate self-image for good mental health. What is true of persons is equally true of churches.
At least two false images of the church are prevalent today. The first false image is the religious club (or introverted Christianity). According to this view, the local church resembles the local golf club, except that the common interest of its members happens to be God rather than golf. They see themselves as religious people who enjoy doing religious things together. They pay their subscription and reckon they are entitled to certain privileges. In fact, they concentrate on the status and advantages of being club members. They have forgotten – or never known – that, as Archbishop William Temple put it, ‘The church is the only co-operative society in the world which exists for the benefit of its non-members.’ Instead, they are completely introverted, like an ingrown toenail. To be sure, Temple was guilty of a slight exaggeration, for church members do have a responsibility to each other, as the many ‘one another’ verses of the New Testament indicate (‘love one another’, ‘encourage one another’, ‘bear one another’s burdens’, etc.). Nevertheless, our primary responsibilities are our worship of God and our mission in the world.
At the opposite extreme to the religious club is the secular mission (or religionless Christianity). In the twentieth century, some Christian thinkers became exasperated by the self-centredness of the church. It seemed to them so absorbed in its own petty domestic affairs that they resolved to abandon it. For the arena of divine service they exchanged the church for the secular city. They were no longer interested in ‘worship services’, they said, but only in ‘worship service’. So they tried to develop a ‘religionless Christianity’ in which they reinterpreted worship as mission, love for God as love for neighbour, and prayer to God as encounter with people. A similar movement of ‘post-evangelicals’ or the ‘emerging church’ abandoned traditional congregations in favour of unstructured Christian communities with a focus on neighbourhood transformation.
How should we evaluate such movements? Their distaste for selfish religion is surely right. Since it is nauseating to God, it ought to sicken us as well. But the concept of ‘religionless Christianity’ is an unbalanced overreaction. The message of the gospel cannot be adjusted to suit modern sensibilities. And we have no liberty to confuse worship and mission, even though (as we have seen) each involves the other. There is always an element of mission in worship and of worship in mission, but they are not synonymous.
There is a third way to understand the church, which combines what is true in both false images, and which recognizes that we have a responsibility both to worship God and to serve the world. This is the double identity of the church (or incarnational Christianity). By its ‘double identity’ I mean that the church is a people who have been both called out of the world to worship God and sent back into the world to witness and serve. These are, in fact, two of the classical ‘marks’ of the church. According to the first, the church is ‘holy’, called out to belong to God and to worship him. According to the second, the church is ‘apostolic’, sent out into the world on its mission. The church is to be simultaneously ‘holy’ (distinct from the world) and ‘worldly’ (not in the sense of assimilating the world’s values, but in the sense of renouncing other-worldliness and instead becoming immersed in the life of the world). Dr Alec Vidler captured this double identity by referring to its ‘holy worldliness’.
Nobody has ever exhibited ‘holy worldliness’ better than our Lord Jesus Christ himself. His incarnation is the perfect embodiment of it. On the one hand, he came to us in our world, and assumed the full reality of our humanness. He made himself one with us in our frailty, and exposed himself to our temptations. He fraternized with the common people, and they flocked round him eagerly. He welcomed everybody and shunned nobody. He identified with our sorrows, our sins and our death. On the other hand, in mixing freely with people like us, he never sacrificed or compromised his own unique identity. His was the perfection of ‘holy worldliness’.
And now he sends us into the world as he was sent into the world. We have to penetrate other people’s worlds, as he penetrated ours – the world of their thinking (as we struggle to understand their misunderstandings of the gospel), the world of their feeling (as we try to empathize with their pain), and the world of their living (as we sense the humiliation of their social situation, whether that is poverty, homelessness, unemployment or discrimination). Archbishop Michael Ramsey put it well: ‘We state and commend the faith only insofar as we go out and put ourselves with loving sympathy inside the doubts of the doubter, the questions of the questioner, and the loneliness of those who have lost the way.’ Yet this costly entry into other people’s worlds is not to be undertaken at the expense of our own Christian integrity. We are called to maintain the standards of Jesus Christ untarnished.
Seldom in its long history has the church managed to preserve its God-given double identity of holy worldliness. Instead, it has tended to oscillate between the two extremes. Sometimes (in an overemphasis on its holiness) the church has withdrawn from the world and so has neglected its mission. At other times (in an overemphasis on its worldliness) it has conformed to the world, assimilating its views and values, and so has neglected its holiness. But to fulfil its mission, the church must faithfully respond to both its callings, and preserve both parts of its identity.
‘Mission’ arises, then, from the biblical doctrine of the church in the world. If we are not ‘the church’, the holy and distinct people of God, we have nothing to say because we are compromised. If, on the other hand, we are not ‘in the world’, deeply involved in its life and suffering, we have no-one to serve because we are insulated. Our calling is to be ‘holy’ and ‘worldly’ at the same time. Without this balanced biblical ecclesiology, we will never recover or fulfil our mission.
The church must organize itself
The structures of the church
The church must organize itself in a way that expresses its understanding of itself. Its structures must reflect its theology, especially its double identity.
Often the church is structured for ‘holiness’ rather than ‘worldliness’, for worship and fellowship rather than mission. In contrast, the report The Church for Others: A Quest for Structures for Missionary Congregations says,
The missionary church is not concerned with itself – it is a church for others . . . Its centre lies outside itself; it must live ‘excentredly’ . . . The church has to turn itself outwards to the world . . . We have to recognize that the churches have developed into ‘waiting churches’ into which people are expected to come. Its inherited structures stress and embody this static outlook. One may say that we are in danger of perpetuating ‘come-structures’ instead of replacing them by ‘go-structures’. One may say that inertia has replaced the dynamism of the gospel and of participation in the mission of God.
Our static, inflexible, self-centred structures are ‘heretical structures’ because they embody a heretical doctrine of the church.
Some zealous churches organize an overfull programme of church-based activities with something arranged for every night of the week. On Monday night the committees meet, and on Tuesday night it’s the fellowship groups. On Wednesday night there’s a Bible study, while Thursday night is the prayer meeting. On Friday and Saturday evenings other good causes occupy people’s time and energy. Such churches give the impression that their main goal is to keep their members out of mischief!
But such a crowded, church-centred programme, admirable as it may look at first sight, has many drawbacks and dangers. To begin with, it is detrimental to family life. Marriages break up and families disintegrate because parents are seldom at home. It also inhibits church members from getting involved in the local community because they are so preoccupied with the local church. In this way it contradicts an essential part of the church’s identity, its ‘worldliness’. As Bishop Richard Wilke has put it, ‘Our structure has become an end in itself, not a means of saving the world.’ In that case, it is a heretical structure.
I sometimes wonder (although I exaggerate to make my point) if it would not be more healthy for church members to meet only on Sundays (for worship, fellowship and teaching) and not at all midweek. Then we would gather on Sundays and scatter for the rest of the week. We would come to Christ for worship and go for Christ in mission. And in that rhythm of Sunday–weekday, gathering–scattering, coming–going and worship–mission, the church would express its holy worldliness, and its structure would conform to its double identity.
How, then, should the local church organize itself? Ideally, it seems to me, every five or ten years each church should evaluate itself and review how far its structures reflect its identity. It should conduct a ‘local church audit’ to review how far the church is penetrating the community for Christ. This could involve two surveys, to create a ‘parish profile’ (‘to build up an accurate picture of the parish’) and a ‘church profile’ (‘to build up an accurate picture of the local church’).
A local community survey
Each church is set in a particular situation, and needs to become familiar with its context. This involves asking questions like these:
A local church survey
This second survey needs to ask whether the church is organized to serve itself, or to serve God and the community. Is it really organized only for itself, for its own survival and convenience, and for the preservation of its privileges? What are its cherished traditions and conventions which unnecessarily separate it from the community?
The two surveys (of community and church) will need to be studied by the church leadership (clergy and lay). Out of this reflection will grow a renewed strategy for mission. The church can then set both long-term and short-term goals, with a list of priorities. The church may decide that it is suffering from a false self-image and needs biblical teaching on its holy worldliness and the implications of this for mission; or that a training programme is needed to equip members for evangelism; or that church-based activities should be reduced to increase involvement in the community. It might decide to restructure the church building, decor, seating or services; or to organize a visitation of the area in cooperation with other local churches; or to form specialist groups to penetrate particular segments of the locality. For example, a group could adopt a local pub, not to make occasional evangelistic raids into it, but between them (in pairs) to visit it regularly over a long period, to make friends with the people who congregate there. Again, the church may decide to arrange home meetings for neighbours, or a series of apologetics lectures in a neutral building, or regular guest services with an evangelistic thrust, to which members can bring their friends. Or the church may decide to take up some special social need, which has surfaced during the surveys, and encourage a group to study it and then recommend action. All such decisions will be designed to help the church to identify with the community, and to develop structures that facilitate an authentically incarnational mission.
The church must express itself
The message of the church
It is not enough for the local church to understand itself and organize itself accordingly; it must also articulate its message. For evangelism, at its simplest and most basic, is sharing the gospel (the ‘evangel’). So in order to define evangelism, we must also define the good news.
There can be no doubt that the essence of the gospel is Jesus Christ himself. It would be impossible to preach the Christian good news without talking about Jesus. So we read that Philip, speaking to the Ethiopian, ‘told him the good news about Jesus’. The apostle Paul described himself as ‘set apart for the gospel of God . . . regarding his Son’. Moreover, in bearing witness to Jesus, we must speak above all of his death and resurrection. To quote Paul’s famous summary of the apostolic gospel, ‘What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared.’ We simply do not share the gospel if we do not declare God’s love in the gift of his Son to live our life, to die for our sins and to rise again, together with his offer through Jesus Christ, to all who repent and believe, of a new life of forgiveness and freedom, and of membership in his new society.
But how shall we formulate this good news in our world’s increasingly pluralistic societies in such a way that it resonates with them and makes sense? There are two opposite extremes to avoid.
The first extreme I will call total fixity. Some Christians seem to be in bondage to words and formula, and so become prisoners of a gospel stereotype. They wrap up their message in a nice, neat package. They tape, label and price-tag it as if it were destined for the supermarket. Then, unless their favourite phraseology is used (whether the kingdom of God, or the blood of Jesus, or human liberation, or being born again, or justification by faith, or the cosmic lordship of Christ), they declare that the gospel has not been preached. What these people seem not to have noticed is the rich diversity of gospel formulations which are found in the New Testament itself. The options I have listed are all biblical, but because all of them contain an element of imagery, and each image is different, it is impossible to fuse them into a single, simple concept. So it is perfectly legitimate to develop one or other of them, according to what seems most appropriate to the occasion.
The opposite extreme is total fluidity. Some years ago I heard a British bishop say, ‘There’s no such thing as the gospel in a vacuum. You don’t even know what the gospel is until you enter each particular situation. You have to enter the situation first, and then you discover the gospel when you’re there.’ Now if he meant that he wanted a gospel in context, not in a vacuum, and that we need to relate the gospel sensitively to each person and situation, I fully agree. But to say that ‘there is no such thing as the gospel in a vacuum’ and that ‘you discover it’ in each situation is surely a serious overstatement. For what the advocates of total fluidity seem not to have noticed is that, alongside the New Testament’s rich diversity of gospel formulation, there is also an underlying unity (especially regarding the saving death and resurrection of Jesus) which binds the different formulations together. As Professor A. M. Hunter wrote, ‘There is . . . a deep unity in the New Testament, which dominates and transcends all the diversities.’
Is there a middle way? Yes, there is. Both the extremes which I have described express important concerns which need to be preserved. The first (‘total fixity’) rightly emphasizes that the gospel has been revealed by God and received by us. It is both a tradition to be preserved and a deposit to be guarded. We did not invent it, and we have no liberty to edit it or tamper with it. The second (‘total fluidity’) rightly emphasizes that the gospel must be adapted appropriately to each particular person or situation. Otherwise it will be perceived as irrelevant.
Somehow, then, we have to learn to combine these two proper concerns. We have to wrestle with the tension between the ancient Word and the modern world, between what has been given and what has been left open, between content and context, Scripture and culture, revelation and contextualization. We need more fidelity to Scripture and more sensitivity to people. Not one without the other, but both.
The church must be itself
The life of the church
The church is supposed to be God’s new society, the living embodiment of the gospel, a sign of the kingdom of God, a demonstration of what human community looks like when it comes under his gracious rule.
In other words, God’s purpose is that the good news of Jesus Christ is communicated visually as well as verbally, ‘by word and deed’. Every educator knows how much easier it is for human beings to learn through what they see and experience than through what they hear. Or rather, word and deed, hearing and seeing, belong essentially together. This is certainly so in evangelism. People have to see with their own eyes that the gospel we preach has transformed us. As John Poulton put it, ‘Christians . . . need to look like what they are talking about. It is people who communicate primarily, not words or ideas . . . What communicates now is basically personal authenticity.’ If our life contradicts our message, our evangelism will lack all credibility. Indeed, the greatest hindrance to evangelism is lack of integrity in the evangelist.
In 1 John 4:12 it says, ‘No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.’ God is invisible. Nobody has ever seen him. All that human beings have ever seen of him is glimpses of his glory.
The invisibility of God is a great problem for faith. It was so for the Jews in the Old Testament. Their heathen neighbours laughed at them for worshipping an invisible God. ‘You say you believe in God?’ they taunted them. ‘Where is he? Come to our temples, and we will show you our gods. They have ears and eyes, hands and feet, and mouths and noses too. But where is your God? We can’t see him. Ha, ha, ha!’ The Jews found this ridicule hard to bear. Hence the complaint of psalmist and prophet: ‘Why do the nations say, “Where is their God?”’ Of course Israel had its own apologetic. The idols of the heathen were nothing, only the work of human hands. True, they had mouths, but they could not speak, ears, but could not hear, noses, but could not smell, hands, but could not feel, and feet, but could not walk. Yahweh, on the other hand, although (being spirit) had no mouth, had spoken; although he had no ears, he listened to Israel’s prayers; and although he had no hands, he had both created the universe and redeemed his people by his mighty power. At the same time, the people of God longed for him to make himself known to the nations, so that they might see him and believe in him.
The same problem of an unseen God challenges us today, especially those brought up on the scientific method. They are taught to examine everything with their five senses. They are told to suspect anything which cannot be subjected to empirical investigation. So how could it ever be reasonable to believe in an invisible God? ‘Let us only see him,’ they say, ‘and we will believe.’
How, then, has God solved the problem of his own invisibility? First and foremost he has done so by sending his Son into the world. ‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.’ As a result, Jesus could say, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’, and Paul could describe him as ‘the [visible] image of the invisible God’.
To this people tend to reply, ‘That is wonderful, but it happened nearly 2,000 years ago. Is there no way in which the invisible God makes himself visible today?’ Yes, there is. ‘No one has ever seen God.’ We read in 1 John 4:12 the same words as in John 1:18. But now John concludes the sentence differently. In the Gospel he wrote that ‘the only Son . . . has made him known’. In the Epistle he writes that ‘if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us’. Because of John’s deliberate repetition of the same statement, this can only mean one thing. The invisible God, who once made himself visible in Christ, now makes himself visible in Christians, if we love one another.
God is love in his essential being, and has revealed his love in the gift of his Son to live and die for us. Now he calls us to be a community of love. We are called to love each other in the intimacy of his family – especially across the barriers of age and sex, race and rank. And we are called to the world God loves in its alienation, hunger, poverty and pain. It is through the quality of our love that God makes himself visible today.
We cannot proclaim the gospel of God’s love with any degree of integrity if we do not exhibit it in our love for others. Perhaps nothing is so damaging to the cause of Christ as a church which is either torn apart by jealousy, rivalry, slander and malice, or preoccupied with its own selfish concerns. Such churches urgently need to be radically renewed in love. It is only if we love one another that the world will believe that Jesus is the Christ and that we are his disciples.
Here, then, are the four main prerequisites for evangelism through the local church: