Evangelism
Evangelism seems to take one of three forms in the church
today. A quick list would be: impersonal, blitz (blitzkrieg), and street
witnessing. All three are very popular within the church today. Yet the first
two have the highest support due to the easy and comfortableness of the
activities. They are all undertaken with good motives yet the out come is
questionable.
Impersonal witnessing is almost more for the Christians than
for the non-believers. Billboards and bumper stickers are put up along freeways
and slapped on cars with the hope that someone might see it and change their
beliefs. As the church has moved to business models of operation this type of
witnessing has become more popular. We place billboards, that have a cross on
it and states “He died for you” and have a bible verse reference such as John
3:16 on it, along highways hoping that with the number of people that pass it
daily a few will cry out to God. We assume that people know what the bible is,
know the significance of the cross and know that they needed someone to die for
them. We assume they care, understand and are open to new thoughts/beliefs. We
assume that over exposing non-believers will leave them neutral or open to the scriptures
and not harden them off. Often times this logic is supported with verses such
as Isaiah 55:11 “so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return
to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for
which I sent it.” However the outcome is as impersonal as the message itself.
Bumper stickers are equally as effective. The ultimate goal of impersonal
witnessing is the best product placement seen to date. Sometimes impersonal is
taken under the guise of not allowing anyone an excuse to claim they never knew
about Christ’s work. Yet the outcome of this type of witnessing are short
cryptic messages or images that are bombarded upon viewers. The logic seems to
be that putting stickers on our cars will create a more amiable mindset toward
Christians and church. That coupled with the fact that Christians are rarely
among the people that need the message of Christ long enough to let their life
do the talking for them. Christ ate with the tax collectors and sinners, yet
it’s easier, nicer and less messy for us if we put a sticker on our car and
expect them to come to us.
Blitz (blitzkrieg) witnessing takes its name from the London
blitz of World War II. The German planes would bombed London en masse then
retreat back across the channel behind their lines for safety. In the same sense
it is a common policy of church evangelism to inundate an area with people then,
when the day or event is done, they’ll pull back to their normal areas of
socializing to be untouched by where they just were evangelizing. A popular
strategy in our local area is to send youth groups 10-12 hours south into
Mexico for one week then pull back into town and share the stories of “God’s
work” in Mexico. A more recent strategy, locally, is for three days a year
(four months in between each day) to mobilize the entire church, multiple
denominations, to do work in our town. This strategy is much improved over the
other blitz strategy. However the result is similar, hundreds to thousands of
Christians come out to inundate our local area then dissolve back into the
scenery. Four months later another wave emerges very similar to cicadas. Very similar to impersonal witnessing this
form is concerned with trying to only affect the Christian participants in a
positive manner, or if there are negative reactions then they can be written
off as persecution and told as war stories. We do not consider what assumptions
we are making toward the receptors of our evangelism. We assume that random
people interacting with an individual on a scheduled three days a year will
change that individual’s life. We invade people’s worlds with no awareness of
the cultural difference between them and us, with no awareness of our own
cultural biases, and expect them to understand what we are doing and saying,
expect to have street cred with them—because we got our hands dirty three times
a year. There is a benefit to this method, it has helped show other
suburbanites that the church is active and cares about their city, however
these are not those whom the event is apparently aimed.
Street witnessing has the widest spectrum range of
activities, from people holding signs, to yelling into bull horns, to handing
out tracks on a street corner, to having a conversation, to knocking on doors.
It can be a very personal style of evangelism. The more obnoxious forms have
similar assumptions as the styles mentioned above so I will not address them in
detail here. There is a wide range of how to become involved in a conversation
with people some quite invasive, some quite “organic.” Door knocking can be
quite invasive, even I’ve been known to tell door knockers to go away. This
style is a delicate issue because it can be quite a natural and non-invasive to
introduce people to Jesus. The people street witnessing that I have talked to
are a common site near the bars in town. They have capitalized on the nights
that these streets are the fullest. However
while the streets are the fullest, they are typically full of people who are
not concerned with anything but tonight and getting plastered. A common
assumption in this is that Christians do not frequent, let alone go to bars. As
one who used to frequent clubs, several awkward conversations ensued because
the fact that Christian’s may attend parties or clubs was not considered. The
bull-horn waivers often caused quite a scene when other Christian’s approach to
encourage them or let them know that there were more then pure heathens out
that night.
These three methods are blind stabs in the dark and are not
incarnational methods. What does it say that Christians must leave their
personal lives to be around those that need Christ? We “need” programs and
groups to reach out to others. Our lives do not speak for themselves or if they
do then we are so isolated that no one notices or asks questions. We prefer
anonymity either by isolation (street witnessing) or by mass effect or by
stickers and billboards.
In our little corner of the world, the “gospel” (good news) message
is the same. You’re bad, you need a “savior,” there’s this cool guy named Jesus
and you should say this “prayer”……rinse and repeat. Our one focus is “saving
souls from hell” in the largest group size as possible. In some reformed
circles there is almost a “drug dog” mentality, we don’t know where or who the
“elect” are but dammit we’re going to find them. Then once their found, they’re
on their own because we need to find the next soul in need of realizing they’re
“elect.” It is quite an obsessive compulsion. We’ve stopped treating people as
humans, maybe we’ve forgotten what it is to be human, and have started treating
them as collector trinkets. We are not
interested in their lives, stories, or spiritual welfare, instead all we’re
interested in is if they can check of the “said the sinner’s prayer” box or
not. We’ve disconnected the gospel from the rest of life. Salvation has become
a prayer at a single point of life with no repercussions on the rest of the way
we live. At one local church the gospel has been boiled down to feeling better
about yourself, “you’re accepted just the way you are, now go live like an
accepted person.” Needless to say, this is quite popular with Christians, who
are interested in sustaining their way of life. The injustices at work in and
around people’s lives is barely a footnote that is glossed over in our pursuit
of their soul and systematic injustices that affect their daily lives are not
even recognized because that would require more time and every minute more
people die. Our ultimate message to those around us is “become like us” and you
too can live a comfortable life knowing that you have eternal fire insurance.
We have no answer for evil and injustice; rarely do we even try to combat such
forces. But rather we have resigned ourselves to hunkering down waiting for the
“rapture” content to fiddle while the world around us burns. The world around
us needs hope; needs to be shown that Christianity is more than a mind trick,
more than an intellectual pursuit and that we actually are aware of the world
around us and working for the kingdom. We have forgotten the physical needs of humans
in our spiritual philanthropistic endeavors.
