Non-Evangelical Evangelisms

So, after some hard work this weekend, I finally finished a draft of my book proposal about evangelical outreach techniques. Much rejoicing!

Apparently the effort left my brain somewhat drained, as I've been remiss about posting. More brainwork lies on the horizon. Next week I travel to an academic conference where I'm delivering a paper on--what else?--evangelical outreach techniques.

This paper has yet to be written.

But I've started work on it this evening. Now, ostensibly the paper concerns the confrontational evangelism of Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master" system, which I've written about on this blog extensively, as contrasted with more relational, less formulaic approaches like Greg Koukl's tactical evangelism (which I've also written about).

For all their differences, these two forms both fit into the category of "Christian outreach" that I tend to distance myself from since (at least) leaving the Southern Baptist faith of my childhood for more Methodist waters. Both emerge from theological stances much more conservative than my own, which makes them fascinating for me as a (progressive-liberal) scholar but alien to me as a (progressive-liberal) Christian. While I strive in my work to represent their rationales fairly, I do not feel especially compelled to grapple with how their particular form of proselytizing should inform my own faith.

As often happens in research, however, some of the work that I read this evening challenged my sense of (perhaps protective) isolation from my topic. Specifically, I read a book I had pilfered--uh, borrowed--from my minister father's collection of theology texts: How to Reach Secular People by George G. Hunter III (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).

Now, I had grabbed this book as part of a stack of how-to guides to Christian outreach from the past 50 years or so that I've amassed. I chose it in order to explore how it compared to, say, Paul E. Little's How to Give Away Your Faith from 1960, or to Greg Stier's present-day "Dare 2 Share" program. Having read many of these self-help-style books, I expected to learn about Hunter's own take on why current evangelism is in trouble and how to fix it, perhaps with a sort-of-original set of metaphors and analogies to help the reader (who is assumed not to be a scholar or theologian).

Hunter is less interested, however, in promoting his own homemade system and more in presenting a brief overview of some of the more successful (in his eyes) evangelical endeavors. His chapters tend to consist of annotated lists, e.g., attributes of secular people, different models of conversion, characteristics of ministers who successfully reach secular people, etc.

Hunter writes in 1992, so the ministries that seem new, successful, and exciting are mainly those of the "seeker-sensitive" model (also called the "new paradigm"), like Bill Hybels's Willow Creek or Rick Warren's Saddleback congregations. These ministries distinguished themselves by doing market research (i.e., creating an average unchurched person or prospective member--"Unchurched Harry" or "Saddleback Sam") to determine what about "traditional" church was keeping people away from attending church. So informed, Hybels and Warren designed churches specifically to cater to people who felt regular Christianity was too boring, too irrelevant, and too moralizing to ever include them. Seeker-sensitive services typically strip away conventions of "regular church"--no hymnals, no pews, no offertories, no "churchy" language (what Hunter calls "Protestant Latin"), and a service that plays more like a rally or rock concert with an inspiring speech than a church service.

Especially in 1992, these were successful models. (The 1990s later saw a backlash of sorts against them, and recent problems with Saddleback's fincances and membership have cast doubts on the model's efficacy.)

But Hunter writes as well about Donald Soper, a street preacher who has made open-air preaching into a kind of art form. Now, I have lots of experience studying open-air preachers of the Ray Comfort or Free Speech Alley Fundamentalist variety. But Soper (in Hunter's representation) seems different.

Indeed, all of the evangelistic outreach methods and rationales Hunter relates differ from Comfort and even Koukl. The primary difference? The absence of hell-speak and the Absolute Truth You Must Submit To. For Comfort, evangelism consists of confronting a stranger with the reality of her sins and their hellish consequences (i.e., the Law) before sharing the possibility of Christ (i.e., grace). Koukl doesn't recommend hitting strangers with "for all have sinned," but his tactical apologetics certainly aim toward winning a rhetorical struggle, mainly by demonstrating the incoherence of the unbeliever's worldview.

While I get the sense that Hunter himself (and certainly those whom he discusses) holds a theology not at odds with the reality of hell or the exclusivity of Christian Truth, the model of outreach he presents and praises from Soper and others simply doesn't deal with Hell as a motivator for people to commit their lives to Christ.

Actually--that's another big difference between Hunter and Comfort/Koukl: commitment. In his presentation of evangelicalism, the aim that works is not "get the person saved" but "get the person committed to a life of Christ." To achieve that latter aim, existential threats or rhetorical victories don't count nearly as much as does presenting a compelling, authentic example of a Christianity that is attractive, consistent, and successful. He touches on this distinction a bit, noting that while some evangelistic techniques preach a single necessary conversion, the Christian life often requires multiple conversions, ongoing commitments not to a single belief but to a life lived for and within Christ. The most successful ministries, in his view, inspire unbelievers to see Christianity as alive, relevant, enriching, attractive, and finally irresistible.

And then it struck me--I was finding this read from 1992 so engaging because he was in a sense articulating what I'd like Christian evangelism to be. It's so different from the model of outreach driven by fear and smugly assured of its victory--the model I had absorbed as a Baptist and the model I see preached by so many evangelicals.

Needless to say (and here I engage in a bit of smugness myself), Hunter is a Methodist, not an evangelical. I appreciated, however, seeing how a non-evangelical (in the sense of Protestant subculture) theology can still passionately motivate an evangelical (in the outreach-sense) philosophy.

Of course, that's just a challenge to me as well: no longer can I simply study evangelism as a scholar. I need to begin to develop for myself a theology of evangelism.

More later,

JF