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.
“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.”
Was just wondering if that was a hunch or if you had any support for it? I’m all for holiness and evangelism, and they are certainly linked (holiness breeds the passion for evangelism), but The Salvation Army certainly declined when it stopped evangelising aggressively.
I think Tomlin’s book is much more about discipleship than holiness (they aren’t the same), but I see where you’re coming from. In that sense, we see active community of disciples being evangelistically attractive and active as well as healthy to the ‘re-humanising’ of broken people.
It has been suggested that the reason evangelism wasn’t the focus of the new testament teaching was that it didn’t need to be taught…people did it instinctively and, combined with attractive community, it won thousands by the day on most good days. Our problem is that it isn’t in our veins to evangelise naturally. The result of that is decline.
If we take a look at the church outside of the Western Culture, especially where we have huge growth, you see church with radical discipleship, caring community and active evangelism all working hand in hand.
I think we look for a thousand reasons not to do the difficult work of evangelism. What you think?
I admit that it’s a hunch! I don’t know whether anyone has done the research, but my suspicion is that the evangelism started to drop off at the same point as the passionate holiness did, or rather at the point when holiness began to focus on what we aren’t allowed to do rather than on the practical outworking of it. Again this is a hunch!
Many people do look for the reasons not to do evangelism, something that Tomlin of course picks up on. The problem there is my experience of evangelism as a young man was all about the in your face stuff, the stuff that seems to be answering questions that people simply aren’t actually asking. The problem is that adrift from a real sense of discipleship, evangelism simply isn’t an attractive option because we don’t have that deep urge to share a weak faith with others.
At the end of the day I suspect that there is something of a chicken/egg situation. Which did really come first; a tail of in evangelism or a nominalisation of our discipleship?