Rethinking
Evangelism
During my first full time ministry
experience, I helped sponsor an evangelistic outreach among black people. This was the fifties, and it was in the
South. The 1954 Supreme Court decision
on integration was still fresh in the minds of the people, but the schools
still weren’t integrated in the community where I lived. It would take a federal court order to change
that.
On a practical level life was still
pretty much segregated, and still is in many places. At that point, we were not willing to admit
black people into the fellowship of the white churches (which is shameful), but
at least some of us thought we needed to share the gospel with them. But there was a challenge that went beyond
the racial tensions themselves. The
black churches were culturally different from us.
There was one thing we had in
common with that culture however, and there was our exclusivism. If white churches seem to be parochial, the
black churches were even more so, and they didn’t worry much about tact. We invited a black evangelist to conduct an
evangelistic meeting, which was well attended.
As a courtesy to other ministers who attended, he invited visiting
preachers (including me) to say a few words to the audience. I recall one of these visiting preachers
making this statement, “If you want to go to heaven, you’ve got to get in the
Church of Christ. That’s all there is to
it.”
As Caucasians, we would never have
said that, but if we would allow ourselves to be totally transparent, many of
us believed it. To a large degree that
explains the enormous evangelistic zeal of the fifties. We thought everybody was lost except us, and
if you believe that, you do everything you can to rescue them for what you
think is a lost condition.
In today’s world, many of us have
backed away from that perspective. Many
of us no longer believe that we have an exclusive, franchised dealership for
God. I think I’ve always believed that
you have to leave the decision about salvation in the hands of God. We’re a little quick on the trigger when we
apply the “lost” label to others.
Nevertheless, I began to realize that our evangelistic methods were
based on the premise that other Bible believing people are wrong. I
mastered some of those techniques and got pretty good at it.
I’ve turned my attention to those
who don’t profess to have any relationship with God at all. It’s a
much harder thing to do. We’d like to
populate the church with people who are pretty much like us already. My secular neighbor drinks beer, walks
about without a shirt on, and uses language that offends me. Admittedly, we
don’t know how to relate to people like that very well, and our evangelistic
zeal begins to subside when we think about the task for trying to get that
person to take a closer look at Jesus.
I think that is one reason the
church has turned inward, and really has little evangelistic interest. Once we broadened our vision of the church’s
mission, we stopped fighting the denominations, turned on each other, and our
desire to save the world pretty much played out. I’m overdrawing the picture by a good bit,
but it seems to me that any objective person would have to agree that we still
don’t have a good handle on our mission.
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