The Church Must Be Itself: Its Life

3

EVANGELISM

Mission Through the Local Church

We should be very grateful to the African bishops for proposing, and to the other bishops for agreeing, that the last ten years of the twentieth century, indeed of the second millennium A.D., should be declared “A Decade of Evangelism.”

This decision of the 1988 Lambeth Conference brought evangelism to the top of the Anglican church’s agenda and challenged us to ask ourselves what we know and believe about evangelism. For the whole Anglican Communion found itself obliged to face a responsibility which it has often shirked, namely the call to bear witness to Jesus Christ.

According to the definition which the Anglican primates commended to us, to evangelize is “to make known by word and deed the love of the crucified and risen Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that people will repent, believe and receive Christ as their Savior and obediently serve him as their Lord in the fellowship of his church.”

Not that evangelism is foreign to the ethos of Anglicanism. Far from it. The Second Book of Homilies, for example, written mostly by Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, and published in 1571, contains the following admonition: “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.”

FORMS OF EVANGELISM

Evangelism can of course take different forms. Ever since Jesus offered living water to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:4-15), and Philip sat beside the Ethiopian in his chariot and told him the good news of Jesus (Acts 8:26-35), personal evangelism has had impeccable biblical precedents. It is still our duty, when the opportunity is given and in a spirit of humility, to share Christ with those of our relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues who do not yet know him.

Mass evangelism too (the preaching of an evangelist to crowds) has over the centuries been signally blessed by God. The recent disgracing of a few American televangelists does not contradict this fact. Besides, Jesus himself proclaimed the good news of the kingdom to the crowds in Galilee. So did the apostle Paul to the pagans of Lystra (Acts 14:14-18) and the philosophers of Athens (Acts 17:22-23), and Wesley and 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 active cooperation of churches and Christians. And all over the world there are clergy and lay people who take their preaching seriously, and who remember that in their congregation there will often be both non-Christians and nominal Christians who need to hear the gospel.

Worship leads to witness, and witness to worship.

Nevertheless, local church evangelism can claim to be the most normal, natural and productive method of spreading the gospel today.1 There are two main reasons for commending it.

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 spread abroad God’s praises (which is witness) (1 Peter 2:9-10). Moreover, these responsibilities of the universal church devolve on each local church. Every Christian congregation is called by God to be a worshiping, witnessing community. Indeed, each of these two duties necessarily involves the other. If we truly worship God, acknowledging and adoring his infinite worth, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, in order that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in its turn to worship, in a perpetual circle.

The Thessalonians set a fine example of local church evangelism. Near the beginning of 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” (1 Thessalonians 1:5-6, 8). In this way the local church becomes like a sounding board which reflects and amplifies the vibrations it receives, or like a radio station which first accepts and then transmits a message. Every church that has heard the gospel must pass it on. This is still God’s principal method of evangelism. If all churches had been faithful, the world would long ago have been evangelized.

Second, there is the argument from strategy. Each local church is situated in a particular neighborhood. Its first mission responsibility must therefore be to the people who live there. The congregation is strategically placed to reach the area around it. Any political party would be wildly jealous of the buildings and personnel which are at our disposal. The churches in many countries 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 fulfill 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: ITS THEOLOGY

I make no apology for beginning with theology. 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 for mental health of having an accurate self-image. What is true of persons is equally true of churches.

At least two false images of the church are prevalent today.

Many churches have a false self-image.

The first false image is the religious club (or introverted Christianity). According to this view, the local church somewhat 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 that they are entitled to certain privileges. In fact, they concentrate on the status and advantages of being club members. They have evidently forgotten (or never known) the perceptive dictum attributed to Archbishop William Temple that “the church is the only cooperative 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” of the New Testament indicates (“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). It was in the 1960s that some Christian thinkers became understandably exasperated by what they saw as the ecclesiastical self-centeredness of the church. The church seemed to them so incorrigibly absorbed in its own petty domestic affairs that they resolved to abandon it and drop out. 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 neighbor, and prayer to God as encounter with people.

How, some forty years later, should we evaluate this movement? We must surely agree that their distaste for selfish religion was right. Since it is nauseating to God, it ought to sicken us also. But the concept of a “religionless Christianity” was an unbalanced over-reaction. 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 Alternatively, we may say that the church is summoned by God to be simultaneously “holy” (distinct from the world) and “worldly” (not in the sense of assimilating the world’s values and standards, but in the sense of renouncing other-worldliness and becoming instead immersed in the life of the world). It was Dr. Alec Vidler who admirably captured the church’s double identity by referring to its “holy worldliness.”2

Nobody has ever exhibited the meaning of “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 himself with our sorrows, our sins and our death. On the other hand, in mixing freely with people like us, he never sacrificed, or even for one moment 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 (John 17:18; 20:21). 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 poverty, homelessness, unemployment or discrimination). Archbishop Michael Ramsey put it well when he wrote in his critique of secular theology: “we state and commend the faith only in so far 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.”3 Yet this costly entry into other people’s worlds is not to be undertaken at the cost of our own Christian integrity. We are called to maintain the standards of Jesus Christ untarnished.

The church [has a] God-given double identity.

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 over-emphasis on its holiness) the church has withdrawn from the world and so has neglected its mission. At other times (in an over-emphasis on its worldliness) it has conformed to the world, assimilating its views and values, and so has neglected its holiness. But in order to fulfill 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 fulfill our mission.

THE CHURCH MUST ORGANIZE ITSELF: ITS STRUCTURES

The church must organize itself in such a way as to express its understanding of itself. Its structures must reflect its theology, especially its double identity, whether the people meet in a traditional church building or chapel, a school, theatre, pub, hall or home.

The most common fault is for the church to be structured for “holiness’ rather than “worldliness,” for worship and fellowship rather than mission. This was the emphasis of the report The Church for Others (1968), subtitled A Quest for Structures for Missionary Congregations. One does not have to agree with everything in the book in order to appreciate its thrust that

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 “gostructures”. One may say that inertia has replaced the dynamism of the gospel and of participation in the mission of God.4

Further, our static, inflexible, self-centered structures are “heretical structures” because they embody a heretical doctrine of the church.

It has been very refreshing, while reading the Church of England report, Mission-Shaped Church, to note its regular use of the expression “missionary churches,” alluding not to a particular kind of church but rather to an essential feature of every church.

Our static, inflexible, self-centered structures are “heretical.”

Some zealous churches organize an overfull program of church-based activities. Something is arranged for every night of the week. On Monday night the committees meet, and on Tuesday night the fellowship groups. On Wednesday night the Bible study takes place, and on Thursday night the prayer meeting. Even 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! Certainly they have neither time nor opportunity to get into mischief since they are busily engaged in the church every single night of the week!

But such a crowded, church-centered program, admirable as it may look at first sight, has many drawbacks and dangers. To begin with, it is detrimental to Christian family life. Marriages break up and families disintegrate because father and/or mother are seldom at home. It also inhibits church members from getting involved in the local community because they are preoccupied with the local church. It thus contradicts an essential part of the church’s identity, namely its “worldliness.” As Bishop Richard Wilke of the United Methodist Church in the United States has put it, “our structure has become an end in itself, not a means of saving the world.”5 In that case it is a heretical structure.

Come to Christ for worship and go for Christ in mission.

I sometimes wonder (although I exaggerate in order to make my point) if it would not be very 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-week-day, 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 conduct a survey in order to evaluate itself and especially to discover how far its structures reflect its identity. In fact, it should conduct two surveys, one of the local community and the other of the local church, in order to learn how far the church is penetrating the community for Christ. This idea was taken up in Britain by ACUPA (the Archbishops’ Commission on Urban Priority Areas), whose influential report was entitled Faith in the City. It recommended what it called a “local church audit,” consisting of both “the church profile” (“to build up an accurate picture of the local church”) and “the parish profile” (“to build up an accurate picture of the parish”).6 Perhaps I could take these in the opposite order.

First, a local community survey, as each church is set in a particular situation, and needs to become familiar with it in all its particularity. A questionnaire will need to be drawn up. Here are some of the questions which it will probably include:

In the second survey on the local church, probing questions will need to be asked. Is the church in reality organized only for itself, for its own survival and convenience, and for the preservation of its privileges? Is it organized to serve itself, or to serve God and the community? What are its cherished traditions and conventions which unnecessarily separate it from the community? The questionnaire might include the following areas:

The church building, whether traditional or contemporary, whether owned or rented. Church members tend to be most interested in its interior (its beauty, comfort and amenities). But we also need to walk round it and look at it through the eyes of an outsider. What image does it present? Is it a fortress (dark, forbidding and austere), or is it bright, inviting and welcoming? As an illustration, let me mention visiting the huge central square of the capital city of a Latin American republic. In the middle was the statue of the national hero, who had rescued the country at the beginning of the last century from the Spanish conquistadors. One side of the square was entirely occupied by the Roman Catholic cathedral. I tried to get in, but it was closed. On the steps leading up to its main door, however, were three human beings—a drunk who had vomited copiously, a blind beggar selling matches, and a prostitute who was offering herself to passers by in broad daylight. A drunk, a beggar and a prostitute, three symbols of human tragedy, and behind them a locked cathedral, which seemed to be saying “Keep out! We don’t want you.” I realize that there may have been good reasons why the cathedral was closed. My concern is with the “vibes” that were given off by that scene.

Is the church in reality organized only for itself?

A critical look at the inside of the church building will be necessary too, especially through the eyes of non-Christian visitors—its decoration and furniture, lighting and heating, its notice boards, posters, bookstand and pamphlets.

The church services. As with the first-century Jewish synagogue, so with the twenty-first century Christian church, there are “god-fearers” on the edge of every congregation, who are attracted but not yet committed to Christ. Are our worship services exclusively for the committed, designed only for the initiated, and therefore mumbo jumbo to outsiders? Or do we remember the fringe members and nonmembers who may be present? What about the forms of service, the liturgy and language, the music (words, tunes and instruments), the seating, and the dress of both leaders and congregation? We need to ask ourselves what messages these things proclaim.

The church membership. Is our membership mobilized for mission? Or is our church so clericalized (i.e., clergy-dominated) as to make this impossible? Has it grasped the New Testament teaching about the every-member ministry of the body of Christ? Or is it less a body than a pyramid, with the clergy at the pinnacle and the lay people in their serried ranks of inferiority at the base? Are the members of the church also members of the community? Or are they either confined to church activities or practicing a commuter-Christianity (traveling long distances to church), which makes local involvement difficult, even artificial?

Do we imprison our members in the church?

The church program. Do we imprison our members in the church? Or do we deliberately release at least some of them (including leaders) from church commitments in order to encourage them to be active for Christ in the community, and then support them with our interest and prayers as they do so? Do we ensure that the biblical truth of the double identity of the church is taught and embodied, and that training is available for those who want to commit themselves to Christian service and witness?

The two surveys (of community and church) will need to be studied by the church leadership (council, diaconate, or whatever it is called) both separately and in relation to each other. Out of this reflection will grow a strategy for mission. The leadership (preferably with others who may wish to be involved) will set both long-term and short-term goals, and establish a list of priorities. They may decide that the church is suffering from a false self-image and needs above all else some biblical teaching on its holy worldliness and on the implications of this for mission; or that a training program must be arranged to equip members for evangelism; or that church-based activities should be reduced in order to increase members’ involvement in the community. It might be decided to radically restructure the church building, decor, seating or services; or to organize a general visitation of the local area, if possible in cooperation with other local churches; or to form specialist groups to penetrate particular, secular segments of the parish.

For example, a group of committed young people could adopt a local nightclub, not in order to make occasional evangelistic raids into it, but between them (in pairs) to visit it regularly over a long period, in order to make friends with the other young people who congregate there. Again, the church may decide to arrange home meetings for neighbors, or a series of apologetic lectures in a local and neutral building, or regular guest services with an evangelistic thrust, to which members would be encouraged to bring their friends. Or the church may determine to take up some special social need in the local area that 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 which facilitate an authentically incarnational mission.

THE CHURCH MUST EXPRESS ITSELF: ITS MESSAGE

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 evangel, the good news. So in order to define evangelism we must also define the good news.

The local church must also articulate its message.

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” (Acts 8:35), and that the apostle Paul described himself as “set apart for the gospel of God… regarding his Son” (Romans 1:1, 3). Moreover, in bearing witness to Jesus we must speak above all of his death and resurrection. To quote Paul again in his 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” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). 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. The Anglican primates’ recommended definition of the gospel includes these essentials: “to make known by word and deed the love of the crucified and risen Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that people will repent, believe and receive Christ as their Savior and obediently serve him as their Lord in the fellowship of his church.”

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 Christian people seem to be in bondage to words and formulas, 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 favorite 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 roundly declare that the gospel has not been preached. What these people seem not to have noticed is the rich diversity of gospel formulation that is 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 am in full agreement with him; but to say “there is no such thing as the gospel in a vacuum” and “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.”7

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 paradosis (a tradition to be preserved) and a paratheke (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 contextualized, that is to say, related 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 dialectic 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: ITS LIFE

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 set forth visually as well as verbally, or in the language of the primates’ definition, that it be made known “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.”8 Conversely, 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.

No text has helped me to understand the implications of this for the life of the local church more than 1 John 4:12: “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, of the outshining of his being.

The church is supposed to be God’s new society.

Now the invisibility of God is a great problem for faith. It was for the Jews in the Old Testament. Their heathen neighbors laughed at them for actually worshiping 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?’ ” (See, for example, Psalm 115:2.) 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 (for example, Psalm 115:4-7). Yahweh, on the other hand, although (being spirit) he 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 that he would 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 people who have been brought up on the scientific method. They are taught to examine everything by their five senses. Anything which is not amenable to empirical investigation they are told to suspect and even reject. So could it ever be reasonable to believe in an invisible God? “Let us only see him,” they say, “and we will believe.”

God calls us to be a community of love.

How, then, has God solved the problem of his own invisibility? First, he has revealed himself visibly in the world he has made (Romans 1:19-20), for both the heavens and the earth declare his glory (Psalm 19:1-6; Isaiah 6:3). Second and supremely, he has revealed himself 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” (John 1:18 RSV). Consequently Jesus could say, “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and Paul could describe him as “the [visible] image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).

To this people tend to reply: “That is truly wonderful, but it happened nearly 2,000 years ago. Is there not a third way in which the invisible God makes himself visible today?” Yes, there is. “No one has ever seen God” (1 John 4:12). John begins this verse in his first letter with the identical sentence which he has used in the prologue to his Gospel (John 1:18). But now he concludes the sentence differently. In the Gospel he wrote that “the only Son… has made him known.” In the letter 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, loving each other in the intimacy of his family—especially across the barriers of age and sex, race and rank—and loving the world in its alienation, hunger, poverty and pain. It is through the quality of our loving 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. As one of the group reports of the 1978 Lambeth Conference put it, “mission without renewal is hypocrisy.” It is only if we love one another that the world will believe that Jesus is the Christ and that we are his disciples (John 13:35; 17:21).

Here, then, are the four main prerequisites for evangelism through the local church. First, the church must understand itself (theologically), grasping its double identity. Second, it must organize itself (structurally), developing a mission strategy that reflects its double identity. Third, it must express itself (verbally), articulating its gospel in a way which is both faithful to Scripture and relevant to the contemporary world. And fourth, it must be itself (morally and spiritually), becoming so completely transformed into a community of love that through it the invisible God again makes himself visible to the world.

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