Evangelizing Whys and Hows

Ugh. The creeping crud has descended upon me, so I'm home this evening doing what research my mushy brain will allow. I suppose I could draw a punnish parallel between hacking through various popular evangelical texts and hacking up... well, I'll not go into that.

Something that keeps coming up in my forays into comparative evangelicalisms is the differential impulse for evangelizing--and for choosing how to evangelize--that I sense from different writers.

On the "why evangelize?" question, I find a surprising amount of variation. For some, evangelization is essential for Christians because of the here-and-now problem of perdition. People are lost and going to hell. They could die tonight. I've read two different accounts now of 19th century evangelist Dwight L. Moody's Big Regret. The story goes that Moody preached a sermon to a Chicago audience that outlined most--but not all--of the gospel. He left his audience with a challenge to think on what he had said and return the next week to hear the conclusion (i.e., Jesus's saving grace). Alas, that night was in October 1871, the night of the Great Chicago Fire. Moody berated himself from then on for failing to give the full gospel to people at every opportunity. Similarly, "urgency evangelists" will point to the fact that every single person you meet may have only a day, an hour, a minute left of life here on earth. A failure to evangelize--fully, explicitly, from start to finish with an invitation at the end--could be eternally fatal.

Others seem to answer the "why evangelize" question more with a sense that Christianity, a living relationship to the living Christ, makes life in the here-and-now better, fuller, more ethical and rewarding. I was surprised, for example, to read how-to-evangelize guides from the 1960s by the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship that presented Christianity not as a get-out-of-hell-free card but as an answer to the emptiness of modern life. I found that the seeker-sensitive pastors (e.g., Hybels, Warren) profiled in Hunter's overview of evangelistic theology similarly stressed life fulfillment over turn-or-burn.

The idea here, and it's one I personally find compelling, is that the Christian life represents a better way to live out life here on earth. This isn't to say, of course, that Christians live easier lives free from suffering--quite the contrary. These evangelists typically admit that life here on earth is nasty, brutish, and short--but that Christ's solidarity with us in the midst of suffering gives us strength and hope. More, Christ's grace towards us impels us in turn to adopt a life of solidarity with those who suffer. We share the gospel message, then, not merely as or apart from the ministries of grace but as part of those ministries.

Now, in practice, there's plenty of overlap between the urgency model and the better-way-of-life model. While I myself have theological and ethical troubles with the notion of hell (as I've written about on here extensively), pastors like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels are hardly hell-deniers. Nor would most urgency evangelists deny that Christianity is ideally more than just a one-time profession of faith that saves. Nevertheless, in the context of any one ministerial approach, the emphasis--urgency or better-way-of-life--is marked.

Evangelists diverge more sharply over the issue of how to evangelize. The key issue here concerns efficacy. What's the point of sharing the gospel? Ostensibly, the goal is to bring people to Christ so that they are saved from hell and/or part of the body of Christ on earth. An evangelical technique is effective when it results in authentic conversions to Christianity.

But for a number of evangelicals I'm reading, the results criterion for any evangelistic technique takes a back seat to the orthodoxy of the evangelical technique. A number of evangelicals--Ray Comfort, for instance, or even Greg Stiers--insist that the only proper evangelical techniques must imitate patterns clearly outlined in scripture. The science of evangelism thus comes from studying (and categorizing) instances from the Gospels and book of Acts (mainly) of how Jesus or the disciples preached or witnessed to unbelievers. Indeed, even Old Testament examples of preaching/teaching/proclaiming like Elijah or Nathan or Daniel serve as how-to guides for the modern evangelical. The what's-in-the-Bible approach to evangelism matches the conservative evangelical doctrine of inerrancy whereby the Bible's plain sense words, properly contextualized, serve as the ultimate authority for Christians. Wondering how best to evangelize? Why, look in the Bible, which is God's Instruction Book for All Things Christian.

Typically, the what's-in-the-Bible approaches tend to tack more toward the turn-or-burn tactics. Gospel presentations must be brief and complete. You may have only one chance to witness to an unbeliever, so you'd better make it count. This means that, whatever trick or tactic you use to catch someone's attention, you steer quickly and directly to a presentation of the full gospel--human sin/depravity, God's judgment, Christ's atonement, and the possibility of salvation by grace.

In particular, there's no skimping on hell here. There is the hard sell of the gospel--or it is nothing. Ray Comfort, for example, excoriates any gospel presentation that soft-pedals the harsh truth of eternal damnation. Greg Stier, in a parallel way, suggests that the sure-fire sign of a good gospel presentation is audience incredulity at the depth of God's grace and judgment (i.e., the "You mean to tell me that my kindly agnostic aunt will go to hell but a rapist-murderer who repents will go to heaven?"). Comfort and Stier--who in practice pursue quite different ministries--both argue that muting the more extreme or potentially offensive parts of the gospel result in an evangelism that is both less effective and unbiblical. Or rather--it's less effective because it's unbiblical.

The assumption here--an essential assumption, Stier contends--is that the kerygma of the gospel (the plain, full presentation of sin/judgment/atonement/salvation) is effective regardless of time/place/method of presentation. It is God that saves, not humans. The Holy Spirit transforms the human soul, enabling it to turn to God, through the power of the Holy Word. To decide not to present the Word in its totality hinders the action of the Holy Spirit and, more insidiously, suggests a lack of faith in the power of the Gospel.

Such is the allegation sometimes leveled (not particularly by Comfort or Stier) at evangelists who imagine evangelism differently. A number of other evangelical approaches--worldview evangelism, Greg Koukl's tactical apologetics, Randy Siever's "Doable Evangelism"--consciously avoid the up-front/hard-sell approach. These approaches counsel an awareness of the fact that most non-Christians begin by being fairly closed to the gospel and even distrustful of overt proselytizing attempts. Prior to such full-gospel pitches, in these techniques' views, the Christian needs to stop and take stock of where non-Christians are in terms of their worldview or relationship to Christianity. These techniques teach modes of general interaction with non-Christians that allow evangelists to get a sense of who they're dealing with. Only after establishing a base-level relationship of trust and mutual sharing does it make any sense to present the gospel. And even then, gospel presentations don't stand wholly on their own; they must be accompanied by apologetic work.

This is long-term evangelism, seeing the work of outreach as a process of relationship-building that works over time. It's also an evangelism where efficacy means more than "copying Biblical examples exactly." Relational evangelism, in these evangelists' views, works better, gets more and more substantive results, than does the sudden turn-or-burn technique. Of course, most of these practitioners would dispute the accusation that they aren't being Biblical. They would point to the variety of Christ's interactions with non-believers (everything from a party to a one-on-one conversation at a well) or especially to Paul's sermon to Greek non-Christians at Mars Hill (Acts 17).

Again, I don't mean to draw too strict of a line between the Bible-copiers and the relationship-ers. Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share ministries), for example, grounds himself in Biblical examples and full-gospel presentations but draws a great deal on relational techniques as well. But the more obvious fractures amongst evangelicals--between the emerging church and the old-style evangelicals, for instance--mirror the fault lines around these questions of evangelical technique.

More later,

JF