Afterlife-focused Evangelisms

I suggested yesterday that many conservative evangelicals underplay the full import of "giving your life to Christ" (or "being born agian," "getting saved," what have you). The hell-first, you-need-Christ-to-avoid-the-fire-below proselytizing pitch so popular in evangelical culture front-loads all of the critical attention onto the "hell" aspect of faith. You become a Christian, at least initially, in the faith that Christ will spare you from the wrath of God.

Now, from eternity's perspective, certainly this is a grand deal. Make one decision and enjoy a hell-free afterlife. (Alternately, as I've argued, the eternity perspective could also be framed as an offer-you-can't-refuse: make a decision now or face unending, mind-shattering torture). And, as most evangelical fans of the hell-first approach will readily admit, they operate from just such an eternal-over-temporal perspective. This is what leads to a minor (sometimes major) tension within certain evangelical arenas: to what extent should material ministries to the poor and needy compete with proselytic ministries to lead people to the Lord?

From the hell-first perspective, giving someone on an airplane a nice in-flight meal--even if that person is starving for something to eat--matters little if the plane itself is about to crash. In such a case, offering a parachute (i.e., the gospel)--saving their eternal soul--takes precedence over attending to their temporal needs. Now, most evangelicals will aver that ministries to the poor/homeless/needy/prisoners/widows are noble and important. But these are ultimately less important than fulfilling the Great Commission's mandate to "go ye therefore. . . and make disciples."

Variations of this afterlife-matters-more-than-social-service attitude, by the way, crop up throughout Christian history. In the 19th century US and Britain, the rise of premillennialism served as a still-influential example. Premillennialism, in general, understands the Bible as teaching that Christ will at some point (usually "very soon" or "any time now") return to earth to establish a thousand-year-long earthly kingdom, followed by the Final Judgment. A number of sub-species exist, notably premillennial dispensationalism (I'll get to that later) and pre-tribulation rapture version. (An excellent if dated go-to source for premillennialism in the 19th century is Ernest Sandeen).

Whatever their exact configurations of the End Times, premillennialists' belief in a perfect order-to-come lead them to disengage from the irredeemably imperfect world-that-is. So the world has problems of poverty, starvation, disease, violence, etc? Of course it does. These, to the premillennialist (I generalize), are endemic to the fallen human world. Any human effort to alleviate these problems can only be palliative, a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. "The poor will always be with you," said Jesus. Thus, while Christians should be charitable toward those less fortunate, they need to direct their attention forward to the World To Come.

The 19th century premillennialists in the US and Britain faced competition from other evangelicals who valued as integral to the Christian life struggle against human structures of oppression and injustice. Abolitionists, social gospelers, Christian socialists--all of these and more rejected the idea that Christians got a God-given pass from addressing the here-and-now needs of "the least of these." They drew on other parts of scripture--the calls for justice and mercy, the directives toward hospitality and charity, the example of Christ--to imagine a Christian ministry larger than a finger pointing to hell.

Again, I simplify; most evangelicals now as then would not classify themselves in either camp exclusively. But one can today see struggles between afterlife-focused and world-focused viewpoints similar to those of the social gospelers and the premillennialists of over a century ago. Take the divisions within evangelicalism over environmentalism, for instance. Several key evangelicals (Rick Warren, for example) have begun to argue that evangelicals ought to be concerned about humanity's negative impact on the natural world. Other evangelicals, often aligning with global warming skeptics, counter that 1) God is in control of the fate of the world, not humans; and 2) the world is destined for re-making in any respect, so our present attention needs to be focused not on saving a doomed world but on saving the damned souls living upon it.

Or, closer to my own interests, consider the different valences of "missionary work" when spoken of by different sorts of evangelicals. For some, "missionary work" means spreading the gospel--full stop. You go to a different country (or to a different part of your own country) and do nothing but share the gospel, translate and distribute Bibles, preach on the streets, etc. The "foreign missionary"--a US-based evangelist who travels to and lives for a time in a foreign country--is a common hero in evangelical circles. I remember a Sunday night service from my Baptist childhood hearing a visiting foreign missionary who had spent years in some dark jungle trying to find a way to translate "ask Jesus to come into your heart" for people whose culture put the center of self into the throat rather than the heart (thus: "let Jesus come into your throat").

Better still, I remember, were the stories of foreign missionaries who had to work covertly in countries with regimes hostile to Christianity. Many a story of secret bible meetings, surreptitious prayer circles, jail time, and even martyrdom cast an aura of 007-style romance around the lives of such missionaries.

"Mission work" means something different in other denominations. In the United Methodist Church, for instance, missions work (represented by the UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief) more often means material assistance to people in need: food for the hungry, micro-loans and education for the poor, medical intervention for the sick and injured, infrastructural support for those whose homes have been destroyed, etc.

Again, the two poles are less exclusive than I've laid out here. But in terms of basic orientation, in terms of the answer to the question, what should a Christian's ministerial focus be?--evangelicals and Methodists (along with other mainline denominations) part ways most dramatically.

Just to be clear: I am at this point in my life convinced that the way of Christ demands that my attention and efforts be directed at addressing and alleviating instances of human suffering. I do not see this as a distraction from a "real" Christian mission but the Christian mission par excellence.

This is not to say that I do not see certain pitfalls or disadvantages to such an orientation (these I will deal with another time). But, having lived an afterlife-focused faith for much of my childhood into my teenaged years, I prefer the material-needs/solidarity-with-those-who-suffer approach.

And, though I think that the Methodist/UMCOR definiton of missions is more in line with the will of God, my main concern with afterlife-focused evangelism is not (or not only) that it ignores the temporal lives of those around the evangelist (the sick, the poor, the suffering) but (more) that it ignores the temporal life of the afterlife-focused Christian.

More tomorrow,

JF