Go Fish!: Engaging Evangelism

Over the last few years the PCUSA folks in Louisville have been making an effort to get Presbyterians interested in evangelism. As you might imagine, this is not an easy task.

I attended the evangelism track of Big Tent in 2009, and found that some attendees seemed wary of how to proceed when it came to evangelism in their congregations. There were the usual (cringe-worthy, for me) comments about the “dreaded E-word”, followed by nervous laughter. And yet, I think we all understood that sharing the Good News with our communities is an imperative if our churches are to continue in the years to come.

Eric Hoey, Director of Evangelism and Church Growth, and Ray Jones, Coordinator for Evangelism, patiently made the case for evangelism, and introduced speakers from around the country to encourage and train us.

Since Jones and his colleagues have been hard at work on a new church resource they will unveil at this June’s Big Tent in Indianapolis, called, Engage. After talking to Jones, I find the upcoming initiative promising, because it links discipleship, social justice and evangelism. Jones himself said they are very excited about Engage.

Jones pointed out that discipleship is the necessary foundation to Christians engaging in evangelism. He told me that practicing evangelism “outside of disciple making is going to be a weird and wacky exercise.”

He also made the case that evangelism and social justice always linked in the New Testament, but that somehow in church history the two were separated.

“The main thing we’re hoping is that people will see that evangelism is essential to the church’s ministry, and that it’s closely tied to social justice,” he told me.

Engage is something he hopes will help churches produce people who will not only serve their communities, but will also share their faith with others.

The initiative has four main emphases, Jones said. Each aspect will:

• - Engage participants with the Gospel, starting with the story of Jesus, showing how God is on a mission to heal a broken world;
• - -Engage participants in their own faith stories, showing how each of us has a story of transformation to share with others;
• - -Engage the congregation in what it means to be a disciple making church; what shifts have to be made to encourage disciple making?
• - Engage the community by first finding out how congregations can serve the communities around them.

“The first thing that we really looked at was where do we begin? We have to begin with this notion that we’ve all got a story, and we’re part of a larger story,” Jones said of the first two emphases.

On the last emphasis, Jones said Engage would ask congregants to think about their spheres of influence in the community at large. Who do they regularly come into contact with? And if they aren’t coming into contact with non-Christians, how can they stop hanging out at church, and start hanging out with people who aren’t a part of church? Where is God already at work out in the community, and how can we get in on that work?

Jones said Engage is designed to start with a Session before it is introduced to the congregation. The idea would be for the elders to interact on the material for the first 45 minutes of a Session meeting, taking the place of a devotional time. Elders would engage with the Gospel, as well as with their own faith stories.

Once the Session had gone through the materials, other church leaders would participate. Jones said the recommendation would be that the leaders begin with a retreat that takes them through the same material as the Session went through.

The retreat would then be followed by gatherings one night a month. At the gatherings the leaders would break into small groups, with elders leading the groups. The main focus at these gatherings would help elders and leaders determine their spheres of influence outside of the church, and what it would look like to engage others in the community.

There would also be a chance for the leadership of the church to actually walk the community surrounding the church, and notice what’s happening. The exercise is designed to help leaders see where God is already at work, and to figure out how to partner with the community to get in on what God is doing.

The final piece of Engage is a six-week small group experience for the entire congregation, linked to the Sunday worship experience.

While it would be tempting to see Engage as a program to help congregations bring more people into church, Jones said that’s not the point.

“When you talk about evangelism, most churches think it means getting more people into church,” he said. “It’s more than that; it’s making Jesus real for people.”

Are you ready to Engage? How are you or your congregation already engaging the community around you?

Seminary Reflections: Justly Social

I have spent this semester in an exegesis course on the Letter to the Ephesians. While there are significant parts of the letter with which I continue to struggle, and some places I still don’t particularly understand, I have deeply enjoyed exploring what I think of as being an elaborated theology of community.

In Ephesians, “life together” is not simply a characteristic of everyday life meant to be regulated by codes of Christian ethics. To the contrary: community is the very characteristic of our salvation. God has by grace “raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places” (2:6, NRSV). Later, the Gentiles to whom the letter is addressed are welcomed into “the household of God,” which by Christ “the whole structure is joined together” (2:19-20). The Greek verbs here use the same syn- prefix we see elsewhere in synagogue; this is a community gathering, not just a personal transaction.

I see this as a key distinction. Often in the Epistles, and likewise at certain places in the Gospels, we find proscriptions for community life, as in Paul’s exhortations in 1 Corinthians on food offered to idols or on appropriate behavior at the Lord’s Supper. It is tempting to understand these exhortations as directions meant to help individuals, brought together by shared belief, to put up with one another. Something like, “You’re in this thing together: here’s a few thoughts to help you deal with it.”

But Ephesians flips this on its axis. Christian community isn’t something we have to deal with: it’s something we have to strive for; it is at the very root of our Christian vocation. Yes, Ephesians later moves into some very controversial language as it proscribes rules for households, and I find myself deeply at odds with some of what it says. But I nonetheless take as its central theology the idea that we are called to live out, on this Earth, the community God has already created for us.

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It’s been a few weeks now since Fox News pundit Glenn Beck created another political firestorm by suggesting that churches promoting “social justice” might just as well be promoting communism: “If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. ... Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!” Beck has received no shortage of tirade from his usual opponents, and from some new ones. And yes, I’m here today adding my objection to the record.

But I want to do more than simply object. I’m neither a linguist nor a political philosopher. I can’t explain the background of the phrase “social justice” to the degree I might like. But it strikes me that there’s an ambiguity in the phrase not unlike the ambiguity over what it means to be a Christian community.

Christians should work in homeless shelters, fight poverty, fight for the marginalized, advocate for human rights, and a thousand other “social” issues. The question I pose is: why? Are we doing “justice” in the realm of the “social” – doing good deeds in the world around us, helping “others,” making it easier for all of us to live together in this world?

There’s nothing wrong or bad about that rationale. But I just want to push it for one moment. In Ephesians, we don’t get “justice” until first we heed our vocation to be “social,” to be in community. The first flows from the second: we are called to be community, and so we act upon each other accordingly.

Christ has broken down the dividing-wall of the temple, bringing Gentiles and Jews together (2:14). What other dividing-walls has He broken down? Where are the dividing walls that help us to define our community? What about the ones that separate our neighborhoods from the ones across the tracks? The ones that separate our churches from our neighborhoods, or from the churches down the street? These, certainly, are the first ones that Christ has destroyed.

Christians should pursue social justice. You’ll get no argument from me. But Christians should also pause just a moment to consider what it is that we mean when we articulate the term. I suspect that what we’ll find is that, if we can ever figure out how to be “social,” the justice will roll down like water.