A Model for Evangelistic Equipping Using Newbigin’s Embassy Framework
8
Evangelism in a Pluralistic Society
The Newbigin Vision
Carrie Boren Headington
The crisp, English spring morning began with a brief time of prayer just outside the room where the esteemed Christian theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman had prayed daily over a century ago. As the missioner designated for Oriel College for the Oxford University Christian Union missions week, I was filled with anticipation. The breakfast dining hall was crowded with students ready to start their day, and I sat smack in the middle of a packed table. As we introduced ourselves, it became clear that my table was laden with first-year students, many of them studying science, brimming with ideas and academic acumen.
“I haven’t seen you before. Are you visiting?” one student asked.
“Yes, in fact, I am. I am a graduate student at Wycliffe Hall down the road,” I replied.
“What brings you here?”
“Well I am part of a group on campus this week which is engaging students in discussions about the meaning of life.”
“Let me know when you figure it out,” said Dan, the evident leader.
“We are available so people can ask any question about life and spiritual issues.”
“Spiritual? Are you here to talk about God?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Good luck with that!” Dan quipped.
Laughter erupted from the entire table except for three female students adorned in hijabs. I exchanged a quick glance with them but they kept their heads down and did not engage the conversation.
“Surely you have some questions about God,” I said with a smile.
At that prompting, the questions flew.
They began asking how anyone can know there is a God at all. They were science majors who sought proof and evidence.
We began discussing how there are very few things one can actually prove in an airtight manner. I argued that I couldn’t prove, for example, that my mom loves me but I know it to be true more than anything on this earth. So how do we come to know anything?
As science majors, they countered by discussing the value of inductive reasoning.
For the next hour we discussed reasons for God’s existence: the fact of the universe, the design of the world, the creativity of humanity and the sense of global values.
We were having fun bantering with each other. Then I asked, “And what about the fact of religion around the world?”
“Religion is what has caused all of the wars and messes in the world,” one student replied.
“Yes, part of that is true but much good has come out of religion too—hospitals, schools, care for the poor, to name a few. But think about this for a moment: Doesn’t it seem that all people have an instinctual desire to worship something beyond themselves? There is an innate spiritual impulse to connect with the divine. This impulse cannot be squelched by communism or persecution. It is a universal instinct.”
“Maybe. I am not sure,” one of the students said quietly.
I had one more point to share.
“I believe that the greatest pointer to the existence of God is the reality that God has actually revealed himself to humankind in the person of Jesus Christ. God came to earth and walked among us.”
Dan looked at me with disdain and said, “Ohhh, I see, you are a Christian. So you are not really here to have an open discussion about God. You want to convert us. Not going to happen.”
At this point the students peeled off. They “suddenly” had to go to class.
A couple of students stayed behind asking questions about Jesus, the cross and the Bible. I was astonished that citizens of a country that has an established state church could have no sense of Christianity, even to the point of total ignorance about the symbol of the cross.
To my surprise, when I exited the dining hall, the three Muslim women were waiting for me. They invited me to their dorm room for tea and more discussion. They said they were praying for me as I discussed God with such a hostile (albeit jovial) group of students. They were proud of me for my perseverance. We sat for a number of hours getting to know one another. I invited them to the evening talk where there would be a presentation of the gospel. They agreed.
This was the first morning of the mission.
When Lesslie Newbigin wrote his groundbreaking work The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,1 he prophetically defined the situation I faced that morning around the breakfast table: a pluralistic world where the gospel of Jesus Christ would be one of many competing voices in the public square and where Christianity would be diminished to private belief and rejected as public truth. Newbigin wrote on the cusp of a post-Christian era in the West, when Christians were grappling with how (if at all) to proclaim the Christian message. Today marks an even more diverse landscape of competing and often clashing worldviews. Newbigin’s diagnosis of Western culture and the church’s mission to share the gospel in the public arena is a call to reexamine how evangelism is done in and through our churches today.
In this chapter, I engage Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, examining its implications for evangelism in our world today. It is my contention that twenty-five years after its publication, Newbigin’s insights serve as a compass for how the church should undertake evangelism in the West. While Newbigin serves as a foundational resource for challenging the church to embrace its missional identity,2 the specific practice of evangelism has not played a major role in the discussion. That being said, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society has much to say about evangelism. Newbigin, in fact, provides an evangelism commitment, one that maps a plan regarding the message, the messenger and the method the church is to take in the work of evangelism.
I write as an evangelism practitioner serving in a mainline Protestant denomination that is in rapid decline in the West. In a sincere, impassioned attempt to reach people with the gospel in our contemporary culture, some within my denomination and other mainline churches have been on the forefront of defining evangelism in terms of how the gospel can best absorb much of the Western pluralistic mindset in both theology and ethics.
For the past decade, I have served as missioner for evangelism for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. My task has been to do the work of an evangelist and apologist, proclaiming the gospel in word and deed, and to equip congregations to share our faith as individuals in their everyday lives and as local church communities. We have seventy-five churches in our diocese that include churches in rural areas, the inner city, Spanish-speaking-only areas, rich, poor and mixed-income areas, universities, suburbs, and new immigrant communities such as Bhutanese, Nigerian, Kenyan, Sudanese and Korean, to name a few. Additionally, I have had the opportunity to work with ecumenical partners through various citywide and global evangelistic movements and missions in the UK, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the US. Alongside evangelistic teams, we have struggled together in seeking to grasp our respective cultural contexts and how to express the good news we have in Jesus Christ.
In my context, not unlike other parts of the West, the topic of evangelism elicits strong reactions, both positive and negative. Theologians, practitioners and the lay faithful alike have views of how evangelism should be done (if at all). The term itself stems from the Greek word euangelion, meaning good news. Evangelism is the act of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ in word (proclamation) and deed (actions) and inviting people to become a follower of him. Missiologists have various emphases when defining evangelism, but the three elements of evangelism involving words, actions and invitation are central. Christopher Wright emphasizes the proclamation aspect of evangelism. Wright notes, “The work of the ‘gospel’ (Phil 2:22), then, seems to refer primarily to this task of making the good news known by all means of communication possible and at whatever cost. There is an intrinsically verbal dimension to the gospel. It is a story that needs to be told in order that its truth and significance may be understood.”3 The words must be accompanied by actions in evangelism. Missiologist David Bosch defines evangelism “as that dimension of activity of the church’s mission which seeks to offer every person, everywhere, a valid opportunity to be directly challenged by the gospel of explicit faith in Jesus Christ, with a view to embracing him as Savior, becoming a living member of his community, and being enlisted in his service of reconciliation, peace and justice on earth.”4 Evangelism today, as in centuries past, echoes the disciple Andrew sharing with his brother, “We have found the Messiah” (John 1:41) and inviting him to meet and to follow Jesus. As Scott Sunquist highlights, “Evangelism is, at heart, introducing Jesus Christ to others and inviting them to become partakers in his Kingdom.”5
Newbigin’s Diagnosis of Evangelism in the West
What does evangelism look like in the pluralistic context of Dallas? To answer this question well and to properly equip people for the work of evangelism, we must follow Newbigin’s emphasis on understanding the cultural landscape and diagnose the role that evangelism has played in our culture. He observed, “In the past two hundred years European missionaries have given much attention to studying the cultures of non-European people with a view to communicating the gospel to them. They have unfortunately not given so much time to understanding this (Western) culture within which the gospel has been so long domesticated. And this is a very, very difficult undertaking, a very painful undertaking.”6
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society commences with a direct confrontation of the way evangelism is being done and has been done in the Western church. Newbigin rattles the slumbering church, saying that evangelism in the Western context can no longer follow the strategy of “revival” and “calling one back to their Christian roots.”7 The context has changed.
Serving in the Bible Belt region of America, where it seems there is a mega-church on every corner,8 Newbigin’s challenge is especially poignant to us. For the past fifty years, the national Episcopal Church’s evangelistic campaign was to place a sign in the middle of every town, which read, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” with an arrow pointing to the church location. We truly thought that this was all we had to do in Texas in order to fill our pews. Other denominations would say the same. Our region in the American South was perhaps the last bastion of Christendom in the West. This is no longer true. Even here, roughly sixty percent of the people in our region say they do not attend church regularly.9 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society alerts the church that we are in a post-Christian pluralistic reality, which calls into question the continued use of past evangelism strategies.
Newbigin’s depiction of Western culture as one of doubt and suspicion, where all truth is seen as subjective and relative, is even more pronounced today than it was twenty-five years ago. Any claim to absolute truth, except in the scientific arena, is viewed as untenable, haughty and naive. Knowledge is bifurcated into belief and fact. The world of beliefs and values has been relegated to the private sphere of personal opinion. The world of facts, mainly scientific, are the only ones allowed in the public sphere as objective truth. “One is free to promote [Christianity] as personal belief but to affirm it as fact is simply arrogance.”10 A Western free society is “not controlled by accepted dogma but characterized by the critical spirit which is ready to subject all dogmas to critical (and even skeptical) examination.”11 As a result, very little is accepted as public truth. Most beliefs are relativized to private subjectivity.
I will never forget a conversation about sin I had with a highly intelligent, affable, seemingly reasonable college student. He said he didn’t believe in sin because there is no objective, supreme moral law or moral lawgiver to define right and wrong. For this young man, all truth and morality was subjective, except perhaps scientific law. I said, “Well surely you cannot say the horrific Holocaust of the Jewish people is morally acceptable.” The young man thoughtfully paused and said, “Well, I did not live during that time. I was not in the mind of the SS. Who am I to judge their actions?” The young man was not trying to be provocative. He was expressing the relativism that Newbigin analyzed. Morality, religion and all that comes with them are siloed to personal preferences. They have nothing to do with truth.12
Western culture especially embraces this relativistic worldview in our burgeoning pluralistic and increasingly urban culture, where various secular and religious beliefs interact and sometimes collide.13 This is evident in our own context in Dallas, Texas, which reported the highest influx of refugees in the past year of any city in the United States.14 Newbigin noted that the leading Western approach to managing globalization and diverse communities is to embrace all voices and never affirm one truth over another for the sake of peace and unity. “Pluralism is conceived to be a proper characteristic of the secular society, a society where there is no officially approved pattern of belief or conduct.”15
Newbigin deploys the work of Michael Polanyi and places the Western relativistic and pluralistic society in the context of what Polanyi, sociologist Peter Berger and others term “a plausibility structure.” “Every society depends for its coherence upon a set of . . . ‘plausibility structures,’ patterns of belief and practice accepted within a given society, which determine which beliefs are plausible to its members and which are not.”16 This plausibility structure becomes the public truth, the contours of how one should live. In the current Western plausibility structure, the gospel plays a limited role, relegated to private belief.
Newbigin illustrates how the church in large measure has bowed to this plausibility structure and relegated evangelism in the West to a relativistic, privatized spirituality. While there are plenty of examples where the gospel is winsomely presented and demonstrated in communities throughout the West, Newbigin’s diagnosis of the way the Western church has become infected by the prevailing culture is sobering. Newbigin warns of three conditions in particular:
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society offers more than a creative analysis of Western culture; it also offers solutions for Western Christians to break out of the evangelistic traps where we have placed ourselves. Newbigin invites the Western church to see the gospel afresh as public truth and thereby leads the church to rethink the evangelistic message, the evangelistic messenger and the evangelistic methods.
The Message
The gospel is not some good news or a bit of good news—it is the good news that God has revealed himself and redeemed the world in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Evangelism is the proclamation of this good news in word and deed, affecting the whole of life. Before launching into the way we evangelize, it is crucial to look at the gospel message itself. Newbigin firmly expresses a particular view of the message we are to proclaim.
In an effort to uphold the Christian faith in the face of post-Enlightenment modernity, Christian evangelism and apologetics sought to define the Christian message in the rational terms of the day. Evangelists explained that Christianity, like science, is reasonable. Newbigin contends that the eighteenth-century Christians onward were misguided in their articulation of the faith. Christianity was relegated to a mere system of “timeless metaphysical truths about God, nature, and man. The Bible was a source of information about such eternal truths as could be discovered by direct observation of nature or by reflection on innate human ideas.”19 As a result, the Bible was viewed more as a list of facts rather than a narrative. Newbigin counters, “We do not defend the Christian message by domesticating it within the reigning plausibility structure. This was surely the grand mistake of the eighteenth-century defenses of the reasonableness of Christianity.”20 The defenders of Christianity accepted “the assumptions of their assailants.”21 “The eighteenth century was, above all, the time when the attempt was made to show that Christianity was acceptable within the limits of reason and without recourse to revelation.”22 This has played out into two ways, one modern and one often labeled as postmodern.
The modernist evangelistic message became an affirmation of Christianity’s logicality according to the terms of modernity. Cru’s (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) primary evangelistic tool for many years, The Four Spiritual Laws, is an example depicting Christian propositions according to the patterns of scientific and natural laws. Christianity is diluted when defined only in terms of its “reasonableness.”23 Often as a result, those who assent to mere propositional truths become followers of an intellectual ideology that does not permeate the whole of life.
At the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa, I remember vividly when Antoine Rutayisire, the dean of Anglican Cathedral of Kigali, Rwanda, posed the question regarding his country, “How is it that a country whose population was cited as 90 percent Christian could collapse into genocide?” I thought the answer would entail a lack of discipleship. To my surprise, the dean rooted the problem in how Christianity was initially presented and then subsequently taught in Africa by many Western missionaries. The difficulty originated with the evangelistic message itself. He said that because the gospel was presented as a set of propositional truths, the fullness of the gospel was not grasped. The Rwandans were given Christian information but neither the message nor the tools for transformation. As a result, when it came to facing tribal battles, the Rwandans resorted to their traditional tribal way of thinking and handling conflict. To use Newbigin’s terminology, the Rwandans were given a gospel in narrow, modernistic, propositional terms that did not incorporate the whole of life. The way we evangelize is not only a matter of eternal life; it is a matter of life and death, here and now.
The current evangelistic message has also been shaped by the ruling worldview of postmodernity, centering on subjective personal experience. Sincerity and authenticity have become the test of the gospel’s relevance. In this postmodern scenario, the Christian message becomes one of the many choices from which to choose in the smorgasbord of philosophical and ideological options.
There are on the one hand those who seek to identify God’s revelation as a series of objectively true propositions, propositions which are simply to be accepted by those who wish to be Christians. And on the other hand there are those who see the essence of Christianity as an inward spiritual experience, personal to each believer, and who see Christian doctrine as formulated during church history as symbolic representations of these essentially inward and private experiences.24
This too results in the gospel remaining privatized and open to subjective interpretation. In this scenario, Christianity is not public truth; it is merely one of many paths on an individual’s experiential spiritual journey. This mitigates the purpose and therefore the fervor to evangelize in a pluralistic world. The urgency is lost.25
Furthermore, evangelism under these strictures centers on personal conversion and often omits communal and public life. When this individualistic Western style of evangelism is exported to other, more communally-oriented countries, like Rwanda, the impact can be devastating. When truth is privatized, the communal ethics can easily become lost, and havoc can ensue. Perhaps the destruction that can result from the privatization of the gospel is not as overt in the West as it is in other contexts, but it is no less destructive.
In today’s postmodern context, one could argue that the prevailing “plausibility structure” in the West is free-market capitalism. The goal in life for Westerners is material security, happiness and prosperity. Newbigin explores this in Truth to Tell, a subsequent work to The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. While capitalism was designed as a way to balance supply and demand, it has become a system that operates independently of ethical boundaries. Financial gain and growth are ends in and of themselves, and the laws of the market dictate the way common life works. The gospel itself has no bearing on financial questions from a public point of view, as they operate in separate domains.26 Within this plausibility structure, the evangelistic message is often presented as God sending Jesus Christ to fill the personal inner void that material goods will not fill. It can easily turn the gospel into some kind of panacea for the “God-shaped hole”27 in individuals, to give us a better life, a fulfilled spirituality and, in some circles, even material success. The gospel in this context remains privatized and domesticated.28
In an effort to contend with dominant Western plausibility structures, Newbigin shows how Christian theologians have wrangled over the nature of the Christian gospel, soteriology, and the role and authority of Scripture. A divide between “fundamentalists” and “liberals” has resulted in radically different perspectives on which evangelistic message to proclaim (if one is to proclaim at all). From the gospel message being defined as a series of propositions to transactional penal substitution to a subjective personal spiritual experience that will bring personal fulfillment, the evangelistic message has been a source of contention. Newbigin’s proposal for the evangelistic message cuts through this quandary. He not only provides a way forward for Christians to engage the non-Christian world, he potentially provides a bridge between Christian “fundamentalists” and “liberals.”29
The evangelistic message, according to Newbigin, should center on the cosmic narrative of God’s purposes for the world. Above all else, evangelism should be rooted in the telling of the biblical story of God creating the world, revealing himself to the world, and redeeming the world in and through his Son, Jesus Christ. “The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance of faith, is not a set of timeless propositions: it is a story.”30 The evangelistic message is the particular biblical story rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This christocentric story of God’s purpose and historical actions is singularly distinctive, unlike any other worldview. It ushers in a new reality. “What is unique about the Bible is the story it tells, with its climax in the story of the incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection of the Son of God. If this story is true, then it is unique and also universal in its implications for all human history.”31
The narrative is trinitarian in nature, showing how God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—works in communion to save the world and creates a new heaven and a new earth. In this new creation, God is the God of all people and re-establishes perfect communion between himself and the whole of creation for eternity (Rev 21). This story, which is historical fact, reveals “a truth about the meaning of the whole human story.”32 “It is the beginning of a new creation. . . . Accepted in faith it becomes the starting point for a wholly new way of understanding human experience.”33 By telling the story as public truth for the whole world, we are inviting people into a new way of life, shaped by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Evangelism should be about telling the story and inviting people into a new plausibility structure, in which we “indwell” the gospel story. By indwelling the biblical narrative, we receive a new set of lenses in how to view God, neighbors, the world and ourselves. “The lenses of our spectacles are performing exactly the function that lenses of our own eyes are made to perform. In that sense they are part of us. We indwell them. . . . The Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through.”34
Newbigin shows that this evangelistic message is “a call to conversion. . . . The ministry of Jesus began with such a call ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.’”35 Entering into the Christian story is “radical, a conversion of the mind, which leads to a totally new view of life.”36
The Messenger
Newbigin defines evangelistic mission as “those specific activities which are undertaken by human decision to bring the gospel to places or situations where it is not heard, to create a Christian presence in a place or a situation where there is no such presence or no effective presence.”37 This message is announced by a chosen people who indwell the story of the gospel. But this message is not only something that is announced; it is good news because it is lived. “I suggest the Christian community is invited to indwell the story, tacitly aware of it as shaping the way we understand, but focally attending to the world we live in so that we are able confidently, though not infallibly, to increase our understanding of it and our ability to cope with it.”38
For Newbigin, the medium of the evangelistic mission is the local church, especially commissioned to share the evangelistic message.39 The church is not only as vital as the message; in a real sense it is the evangelistic message. The church embodies and incarnates the gospel. It brings the evangelistic message in words to the world and breathes life into the evangelistic message through public action. Newbigin suggests, “The church is not so much the agent of mission as the locus of mission.”40
The agent of mission and the ultimate messenger is God himself. God is the great evangelist. Newbigin emphasizes that “it is God who acts in the power of his Spirit, doing mighty works, creating signs of a new age, working secretly in the hearts of men and women to draw them to Christ.”41 It is evident throughout the Bible that God is the great missionary who comes to redeem a broken world. It is equally clear that when Jesus ascended into heaven, he left his followers a mandate to go into the world to share the good news of himself (Mt 28:18-20; Mk 16:15; Lk 24:48; Acts 1:8). The commission to the Christ-followers is clear and unmistakable. Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last” (Jn 15:16). The church is the body of Christ on earth, which indwells his life, death and resurrection. The gospel is heralded to the world in and through the church, which is the hermeneutic of the gospel.
The Method
Newbigin challenges the church to reject the competing plausibility structures of the West and calls on the church to evangelize by living and telling the story as God’s elect people. The evangelistic message of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ will not reach the world fully, unless the Christian community indwells it as an elect people.
This election of the church to bear the message of God should in no way engender pride for being specially chosen. Followers of Jesus are not those whom God loves above others. We are sinners saved by grace called to bear the gospel story. It is a cruciform witness and life. As Christians, we bear the gospel to a hurting world. The church should be on the front lines of entering the wounds of the world, taking the gospel to the most broken. We take the good news into the pain of society. As we engage in evangelistic witness, there is a corresponding journey along the path of suffering and self-denial that reflects the love exhibited by Christ crucified (Lk 9:23). “A church which preaches the cross must itself be marked by the cross.”42
Newbigin highlights that the spirit in which the church shares the evangelistic message is crucial. “God’s electing grace, his choosing of some to be the bearers of his salvation for all, is a matter of awe and wonder and thankfulness: it can never become the ground for making claims against God which exclude others. God does not choose to save some and exclude others.”43
The church should also not bring the good news in a coercive manner. With the not-too-distant memory of Western imperialism, Christians have become cautious about appearing as gospel bullies. While we should heed the failings of our past misuse of power, the church must not shrink from sharing the public truth of the Christian story. “When coercion of any kind is used in the interest of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted. . . . We must affirm the gospel as truth, universal truth, truth for all peoples and for all times, the truth which creates the possibility of freedom; but we negate the gospel if we deny the freedom in which alone it can be truly believed.”44 We are “not a new imperialism, not a victorious crusade. Its visible embodiment will be a community that lives by this story, a community whose existence is visibly defined in regular rehearsing and reenactment of the story which has given it birth, the story of the self-emptying God in the ministry, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.”45
Equipping the Messenger for the Method
“To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God’s saving purpose in the world, to be the sign and agent and the first fruits of his blessed kingdom which is for all.”46 This is the call of the followers of Jesus the world over. The Lausanne Covenant describes it well: “the whole church, taking the whole Gospel, to the whole world.”47 It is ecumenical, local, global and public.
Yet today many in the Western church, illustrated in Newbigin’s diagnosis above, have lost this sense of purpose and evangelistic call. In reaction to the contemporary climate, the church does not want to impose the Christian message on others or bring faith into the public arena. The church shrinks from a proactive proclamation of the biblical story.
Perhaps most troubling is that the Western church has lost its sense of mission. Many congregations truly do not know they have been elected to proclaim and indwell the Christian story. When I started my job as an evangelist, many earnest followers of Jesus commented that they did not know our denomination did evangelism. They were not trying to be amusing; they truly thought evangelism was a peculiar strategy some denominations (primarily Baptist and nondenominational evangelicals) deployed in order to woo new members. To share the Christian story with others was not what one does in modern church life. The residue of this mindset calls for a new kind of equipping God’s people, one that focuses on two themes: embassy and ambassador as defined by Newbigin.
The Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple was known to say, “The church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” Evangelism is at the very heart of who we are as followers of Jesus. We have been elected to bear the biblical story. Newbigin’s framework assists the church in recapturing God’s mission vision for his people.
God’s embassy. In The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin provides an evangelistic strategy by defining the church as an embassy. Newbigin says the church is “God’s embassy in specific places.”48 God’s embassy is “a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of the neighborhood.”49 This unique embassy, the local church, placed throughout the world, represents the kingdom of God on earth bearing the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It is “the visible foretaste” of what is to come.50
By viewing the church as the embassy of the kingdom of God, Newbigin provides an evangelistic paradigm for how we strategically and intentionally equip the messengers for evangelistic mission. God has tactically placed churches throughout the world to be his salt and light in the context of specific locals (Mt 5:13-16). “The gospel has to be communicated in the language of those to whom it is addressed and has to be clothed in symbols which are meaningful to them.”51 The gospel must be contextualized, that is, lived, spoken and made manifest in ways that are meaningful to local situations. There is no abstract gospel. The story of God is truly translatable in any context. “True contextualization happens when there is a community which lives faithfully by the gospel and in that same costly identification with people in their real situations as we see in the earthly ministry of Jesus.”52
If the local church is the embassy for God’s kingdom, the minister should function like the commander and chief equipper of the ambassadors. The ambassadors (i.e., members of the congregations) in turn represent God’s kingdom and carry the Christian story beyond the walls of the church into the world. “The business of leadership is precisely to enable, encourage and sustain the activity of all of its members.”53 Since the primary activity for members of the congregation is to be “ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20), the primary task of the minister is to help his or her people grasp this call and to provide tools to carry out this evangelistic mission.
For ministers to perform this teaching charge, they need to first be trained in evangelism. When The Gospel in a Pluralist Society was written, ministerial training was “almost entirely conceived in terms of pastoral care of existing congregations.”54 The focus was on maintenance, not mission.55 Even today very few seminaries have specific teaching in evangelism and mission, and there are even fewer who train pastors from the perspective outlined by Newbigin. Now that we are living in a new post-Christendom era in the West, we need clergy who comprehend this missional reality and are able to engage their local context with the gospel. Pastors cannot train others in what they themselves have not experienced. Seminaries need to commit as much teaching in evangelism as they do on pastoral care and administration of the sacraments. There is much discussion today in seminaries about being missional, but actual training in personal and parish proclamation evangelism is sadly lacking.
Missional education is usually centered on being a presence in the community and engaging in social justice. As Newbigin affirms, “Action for justice and peace in the world is not something which is secondary and marginal to the central task of evangelism. It belongs to the heart of the matter. Jesus’ action in challenging the powers that ruled the world was not marginal to his ministry; it was central to it. Without it there would be no gospel.”56 For Newbigin, evangelism is both proclamation of the story and living out the story in public action. Newbigin rightly cites that “to set word and deed, preaching and action against each other is absurd. [Word and deed] mutually reinforce and interpret one another. The words explain the deeds, and the deeds validate the words.”57 There is “an indissoluble nexus” between deeds and actions in evangelism.58
Newbigin argues that most of the proclamations in the book of Acts were prompted by questions. People saw something different in the way followers of Jesus lived and loved, and they were motivated to ask what caused the transformation. In response, the messengers gave “an accounting for the hope that is in [them]” (1 Pet 3:15). Newbigin says followers of Jesus need to live in such a way that people will ask about our faith, and then we must be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have in Christ.59 If our chief commanders and equippers of the local church do not know how to engage in sharing the biblical narrative in proclamation because they themselves have not been trained, how can they teach their congregations to take the story to others? Adding training in articulating the evangelistic message to seminary education is vital.
God’s ambassadors. Paul says in Romans 10:14-15, “How are they to call on the one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” The church’s members are the kingdom ambassadors out in the world. Members of the congregation who witness in their local communities, the workplace, with families and friends are the ones on the frontline of evangelistic mission. “The major impact of such congregations on the life of society as a whole is through the daily work of the members in their secular vocations and not through pronouncements of ecclesial bodies.”60 Newbigin emphasizes that the local church “has to be a place where members are trained, supported, and nourished in the exercise of their parts of priestly ministry in the world.”61
Many church systems, however, remain confined to a maintenance model. Ministry for the laity centers on how they can best serve within the walls of the church as volunteers—greeters, choir members, coffee-hour servers, Christian formation teachers, nursery workers and stewards. While these are needed and important, equipping for evangelism is frequently missing from Christian formation. At best, it is a tangential program that frequently falls through the cracks, succumbing to the inner demands of caring for the flock. Training the ambassadors for the evangelistic call should be at the heart of the entire life of the church.
A Model for Evangelistic Equipping Using Newbigin’s Embassy Framework
Step 1: Preparing the embassy. We cannot give what we do not have. Newbigin astutely observed that Paul in the New Testament never had to tell the followers of Jesus to evangelize. The gospel bubbled out of them with ebullient joy. After their encounter with the resurrected Jesus, they could not stop talking about what they had seen and heard (Acts 4:20). Michael Green defines evangelism as “overflow.”62 Evangelism results from the exuberant overflow of sharing about our encounter with Christ. This stands in contrast to the predominant way evangelism is defined in churches, “as an obedience to a command”;63 thus evangelism becomes a task, a duty and a program. Evangelism should be the result of an encounter with Jesus Christ that propels ambassadors to share this good news. As Paul said, “for the love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14).
Hence, the first step of preparing the embassy for mission is to nourish a daily Christ-encounter for the ambassadors through worship, Christian formation and education, retreats, prayer gatherings, and other faith-building activities. “To the extent that we nourish ourselves on Christ and are in love with him, we feel within us the incentive to bring others to him: Indeed, we cannot keep the joy of the faith to ourselves; we must pass it on.”64 As the church gathers, the people of God encounter the presence of Christ and are filled with his presence. Ambassadors are priests to the world, but if there is no consistent Christ-encounter, there will be no evangelism. We will revert to evangelism as a duty or obligation.
Step 2: Cultivating the call. As stated above, many Christians do not know that they have been called to be ambassadors, and they do not know how to evangelize. Throughout our diocese, we have encouraged all parishes to do a preaching series on the imperative to evangelize. We have also provided workshops and adult education series, which cover the following:
Because of our intentionality in developing an evangelistic strategy in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, our parishes are reaching their communities for Christ. They see the mission vision with their new set of missional lenses. Their joy and energy is infectious. They too “cannot keep from speaking about what [they] have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). As we have stepped out and shared the gospel in our communities, new life and energy have rushed into our parishes. One of my greatest joys is hearing testimonies of our local ambassadors who have evangelized in their respective community. Often these are people who had never considered sharing their faith but have now caught the mission vision. I think of a twentysomething, Steve, who brought his neighbor to the church outreach at the local Gingerman pub, which we called “Ale and the Almighty.” His neighbor went to meet new people, and upon hearing the personal testimonies and how the pastor answered questions regarding the Christian faith, he started attending church and told Steve he wanted to know this Jesus. Steve was astonished and overjoyed. I think of one of our churches in McKinney, Texas, that asked the ambassadors of the embassy to pray for one person each with whom they would share Jesus, and on Palm Sunday 2013, the church had literally doubled. Not only are the new Christians elated, the ambassadors who shared the good news were amazed how God worked through them. I think of three people in one of our inner-city churches that started a community garden and went door to door to pray for people. To their surprise, many people needed food, and the embassy and its ambassadors were able to provide it. They told story after story of how God had cared for the needs of people through their local embassy. I think of a woman in Richardson, Texas, who started a seeker Bible study at a local coffee shop. She invited the teller at her local gas station, the local librarian, her son’s teenage friend and her neighbor. To her astonishment, they all said yes, and she has watched firsthand as they have come to know the irresistible Jesus. She said, “I see the change in them from week to week as they understand God’s unconditional love, grace, and forgiveness.” I think of an ambassador in Plano, Texas, who held a weekly pizza night with his guy friends. Once he caught the mission vision, he invited Christian speakers to share at his pizza group. He watched as some of his best buddies came to know Jesus. I think of the local embassy near a park that started providing free water to runners on the local running path. As they consistently cared for people, curiosity arose and some runners joined seeker courses and have come to know the source of living water himself.
As embassies and ambassadors reach beyond the church walls, the Christian life becomes a great adventure. The gospel comes alive not only for the new hearers but also for the sharers. We are reminded time and again that the gospel is life transforming, and the source of life itself. As we evangelize, we experience the heart of God to reach all people through his chosen embassy and its ambassadors. As we evangelize, some hearers will doubt, some will want to know more and some will believe. We will not carry out the mission perfectly, but in our weakness he is strong (2 Cor 12:9-11). As we do our work of being his ambassadors, God draws people to himself. And as Newbigin ends The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, “God is faithful, and he will complete what he has begun.”68
Newbigin gave the church a great gift in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. With laser-sharp analysis he diagnoses why we shy away from evangelism in the West today and provides followers of Jesus with a renewed confidence to share the gospel in the public square. The evangelistic message rooted in the story of the life, death and resurrection of Christ is the good news for all humankind. The West is on a spiritual search. As Augustine said, “For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”69 We are the public mouthpiece and the hands and feet of God in earth.
When I sat down for breakfast that morning at the Oxford University Mission, I had no idea how people would respond. The two people who had questions about Jesus after breakfast never followed through with interest. I continued to meet with the Muslim women for the better part of the year. I read the Qur’an and shared the gospel while they read the Bible and shared their beliefs. We found common ground in many areas except the most important tenets of our faith. We remained friends throughout. Dan, the staunch vocal atheist, joined an Alpha course in order to prove the Christians wrong and ended up committing his life to following Jesus. He is now an ambassador in a local Christian embassy seeking to glorify God.