Pilgrim Soldier

Churches are meant to be places that can change abnormal people into normal people. People who are shadows change into real people. People who are half-dead in their addiction to destructive habits of selfishness and egotism, change into rich, fully alive human beings, knowing how to love, even when it hurts. At the same time they are also to be places that transform the life of the communities and societies around them by this very same power.

So says Graham Tomlin on page 120 of The Provocative Church.

One question that I have that isn’t answered in this book is, “Why do we major on evangelism now when the early church didn’t?” Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that the early church didn’t evangelise, its simply that they didn’t make it the focal point of their teaching. One answer to the question could be that it is because so few of the people are involved in evangelism and I’m certain there are more than a few who would accept this premise.

However, I’m not so sure that we are focussing on a symptom rather than the cause. Pushing an agenda that highlights evangelism as the most important role of the church seems to distort what the church is really about. It is not about bringing people to a crisis point in their life and getting them ’saved’, it is about being a community in which people are transformed into people in whom the glory of God is seen.

Let me make it clear, I believe that the Salvation Army was called into being to reach souls for the kingdom. I believe that this is our first and greatest mandate. I am not though convinced that in your face evangelism is the ‘be all and end all’ of our effort. In fact I think that the real reason for our success was not our skill at evangelism, but rather our position of being firmly entrenched in the holiness movement.

Graham Tomlin’s book (and I promise this is the last mention of it for a while) actually is not so much a book about evangelism but is a book about holiness. He might not call it that, but the core of his argument is that for us to be truly evangelistic in our efforts for the Kingdom we must live holy lives. Without this basic holiness then ultimately no amount of evangelism will bring the numbers to the Lord that we would like. For me personally, this is why Jesus didn’t turn round and tell us to only get people saved, but instead told us to go and make disciples. Only disciples who seek to live the holy life that Jesus did; disciples who are being increasingly human; are going to influence a real and lasting difference in the lives of those asking the questions.