Evangelism for the Rest of Us

In July of this year, just a couple weeks after the General Assembly of my denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA our “Stated Clerk” J. Herbert Nelson wrote the following on twitter:
[hashtags were read aloud, for instance “Hashtag Jesus”]“Our … statistical report released in May revealed that we … are not telling people about #Jesus. Making disciples, #baptizing and teaching are basic to the calling to serve #Jesus. Who have you told about the difference that Jesus is making in your life? #testimony” Before being elected to the office of Stated Clerk J. Herbert Nelson was our director of the office of public witness in Washington D.C. this helps to keep our denomination aware of peace and justice issues as well as mobilize us to take action in areas of immigration, healthcare, women’s rights, LGBT rights, race and Rev. Nelson is himself is an African American man in a predominantly white denomination.   I give you that information to underscore his question “Who have you told about the difference that Jesus is making in your life?” not as a distraction from social justice but to suggest that perhaps they need to be more connected.

To unpack this question and delve into the text first I want to dig into this term and the practice of evangelism, consider the harm it has caused and try to reframe it. Then we’re going to discuss the impact of our stories, the good and the bad, that is to say following Jesus has thrown me into a lot of adventures, it has also led me into a whole lot of student loan debt. All of that is what #testimony is. We’ll also consider the stories of those within the biblical narrative and wonder how they answer this question. Finally, we’re going to talk about what it really means to “make disciples” especially with our reframing of what evangelism really means.

Those of us in Progressive churches can sometimes be caught like a deer in the headlights on this question. We operate within a pluralistic society and unlike some of our brothers and sisters within the faith we don’t consider that a bad thing, in fact it’s beautiful and healthy. Further, to speak of baptism and making disciples means conversion and conversion is a very loaded term. As a text for the powerful the Bible has meant abuse, but when read by the oppressed it has meant liberation. So maybe the problem of asking “Who have you told about the difference Jesus is making in your life?” of a predominantly white, privileged and only recently progressive denomination is shame. We hold a growing awareness of how we have impacted the world, how we have harmed the world, and we have done it in Jesus’ name. The Christian church has done this all wielding the words of this passage we read this morning as our personal right to do so.

The Christian writer and freelance progressive evangelical theologian Shane Claiborne a white man from East Tennessee says that he is still recovering from his conversion. There are certainly plenty of people who will tell you lovely stories about how their lives were messed up, they struggled with addictions and had broken relationships and then they found Jesus and their lives turned around. For Shane however, he was homecoming king, he had plans to go to a good school and become an anesthesiologist, buy a big house, have a pretty wife, and he was just going to live the American dream but then he met Jesus, and Jesus wrecked his life. He has lived on the streets and squatted in buildings with his houseless neighbors, protecting them from being evicted from the only places they had to lay their heads, and he was in Iraq while our own country, his country, was bombing them so he could stand in solidarity with their people.

Yet it is important to also pay attention to what Claiborne is NOT doing here. This isn’t paternalism as a form evangelism. Which is both an overreaction to realizing the harm we have caused, while still maintaining a sinful supremacy. Claiborne is not reacting out of his shame in choosing to “help” the poor. As he says, you don’t get crucified for helping the poor, you get crucified for joining them. Crucifixion certainly makes this lifestyle sound more appealing, doesn’t it? But the point then, if we ARE to all take up our crosses and follow, is not oppression nor is it going out and “helping” -the point- is solidarity. This evangelism is not pushing our own way, forcing conformity, nor is there a paternalism that preserves the same hierarchy. A paternalism in which one may help others as “less fortunate” but never treats them as equal nor asks the hard questions about why we are “more fortunate.”

I was taught about two forms of evangelism growing up, Roman and Celtic. The Roman form was the basic (count on fingers) feel convicted, pray the sinner’s prayer, and accept Jesus sort of method, but it was very cold and clinical, formulaic. These are the folks who might come up to you with a gospel tract in the mall containing 4 spiritual truths, pray the prayer with you, ask you to visit a nearby church and then never see you again. Even my fairly conservative church in which I was raised balked at that idea, my pastor would preach passionately about the Celtic way of evangelism that was all about relationship, getting involved in your community, living by example, and so much as it does not conflict with one’s faith assimilating to the culture and articulating the faith in language and ways that are relevant to that culture, not our own. In its purest sense there is nothing inherently wrong with the Celtic way of evangelism. It is not pushy and it leaves those not interested alone. It however ignores the divisions that pre-exist in the cultures in which one enters. A person of privilege employing Celtic evangelism may not have the awareness to catch themselves perpetuating paternalistic behaviors.

So I am proposing three new forms. Oppressive evangelism, Paternalistic Evangelism, and Solidarity Evangelism. First it is important to remember that word evangelism comes from the Greek word euangellion meaning gospel or good news. To evangelize is to bring good news. Certainly it is hard to know, when we hear this word and it’s forms: evangelism, evangelical, etc where the good news actually is. Oppressive evangelism berates a person for being in a hole, paternalistic evangelism digs the hole pushes a person in and then pulls them out again only to push them into another hole, so they can pull them out again. Solidarity evangelism jumps into the hole and says “Now, I’m highly motivated to find a way out together. And if it happens again or to someone else we’ll both be equipped.” When we properly define our words the term oppressive evangelism begins to sound like an oxymoron and paternalistic evangelism sounds at best misguided. I would hope then, that solidarity evangelism could sound redundant. That people will hear that we are with them side by side and call that good news.

It is then in those moments in the hole working side by side on equal footing that we can share our stories, and be impacted by the stories of the people we encounter. No longer do we tell stories of judgement that say “Jesus fixes people and I think you need to be fixed.” But rather, offer our own stories and while remaining curious and open to the stories of others. “Jesus and my church community were there when I was afraid to be at home alone with my mother. Where have you found safe space in the midst of difficult relationships?” Our telling about the impact of Jesus in our lives does not need to be a big production, it doesn’t need to be a statement of absolutes that says ‘this worked for me so you have to do it too,’ but it absolutely will have to be vulnerable. Telling of your personal faith is vulnerable to begin with, but telling why and how Jesus is important to your life, especially when we try not to think too hard about it most the time, can be really tough. I know that there is a spectrum of faith present in this room. Some here aren’t that sure about God but you like the community. Nonetheless this community gathers as one part of a worldwide body that has organized itself around the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So all our lives have been and are continuing to be impacted by Jesus anyway.

The poet Padraig O Tuama tells stories of the people he has encountered through leading retreats, and weaves them with Biblical narrative. He tells the story of one religious retreat group in which they were practicing touch through offering each other hand massages. After the exercise a woman vulnerably tells the group that this is the first time her hand has been touched since her gender transition. This story is wound with O Tuama’s retelling of the story of the woman who touches the hem of Jesus’ garment and is healed. The woman has been living with shame, unable to connect with others, but she pushes her way through the crowd unseen and believes that all she needs to do is touch the hem of Jesus garment. He won’t notice, she won’t have to bother anyone, and she’ll just slide back into obscurity. But Jesus asked who touched him and knew it was important to acknowledge her presence and existence. He lets her know he felt her touch and makes certain that she has the opportunity to be seen. Having read this passage many times I’ve begun to wonder if O Tuama meant to cast the woman from the retreat in both the role of Jesus and the role of the hemorrhaging woman as she both touched and wanted to make it known that she felt the touch and it was significant.

O Tuama also tells the story of Philipp and the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch. He argues that Philipp may have experienced more of a conversion. All manner of scripture might have convinced Philipp that this man, as a eunuch, should be excluded. But the man happened to be reading out of Isaiah and Philipp began to tell him about Jesus. But as O Tuama also points out, in Isaiah 56 there is a very direct inclusion of eunuchs even going so far as saying that their name, despite their inability to have children, will continue and will be blessed. So here on the road this man asks Philipp to include him and to baptize him, so Philipp does. As O Tuama says “Hello to privilege. Hello to examining your privilege. Hello to conversion.” He argues that Philipp underwent a conversion also because as he spoke of who the person of Jesus Christ is he realized that the good news includes. The good news was bigger than Phillip was previously taught. I have tried not to just read word for word to you from these stories but he is a poet and so much more eloquent “I wonder what the good news was. I hope it was, ‘I just met a man from Ethiopia who, even though he was excluded, included himself.’ I read this story understanding that the main beneficiary of the exchange was Philip who, in the presence of someone whose body had been mutilated at another’s behest, found himself moved towards the generous and inclusive rather than the turgid and tense.” Sometimes the purpose of our “evangelism” of telling our stories is for our own conversion, not someone else’s.

So then if joining others in solidarity, and vulnerably telling our stories is evangelism, what is discipleship? In our passage this morning Jesus commands us to baptize and to make disciples. First of all I have always loved the thought of baptism as its own ordination. That when we ask to be baptized or bring our children for baptism it is not just including them into the family and body of Christ but it is saying, now that you’re one of us, you have work to do too… but – you are not alone. The work of discipleship can also be misunderstood. When Jesus called us to make disciples he was not telling us to make disciples for ourselves so that we can create a huge worldwide pyramid scheme. When we are making disciples they join us as siblings not as our own children but as fellow children of God. Those that we join in solidarity with can then choose to join in solidarity with others.

As a final story to bring this all together. Tattooed on my right shoulder is a portrait of Josephine Butler, I like to call her Josey. Josey was social reformer beginning in the mid 1800s and she passed away in 1906. After the death of her daughter she says she sought to join with women and to find a deeper sorrow than her own. She eventually learned of the plight of vulnerable women in her area and a set of laws called the contagious diseases acts which forced women to undergo inspection for venereal disease.  Police could merely say that they suspected a woman of being a prostitute and she would be forced through the procedure. After it was completed she would be added to a list of known prostitutes whether she was previously or not. This then limited her prospects only to that life. Josey decried the clear double standard, and fought for the rights of these women. In the early days of her campaigns she took many of these women into her own home, especially those who were ill. Eventually she opened a home especially for them. A woman named Mary had been living with them for a few weeks. They made it a practice never to talk negatively about their past lives and chose not to focus on “sin”. Her husband George was an Anglican minister and based on their love letters would be considered a feminist even by today’s standards. He decided that Mary had been there for a while and maybe it was a good time, now that she was comfortable if he went to read to her from the Bible. He returned very bewildered. Having asked her permission to speak to her of Jesus Christ she told Rev. Butler that she’d seen Jesus.  He was confused. He hadn’t preached, they hadn’t said anything. She began to explain, that from the very beginning she was treated as worthy of love and acceptance. She was treated as family, being brought into their own home. She told him they didn’t need to name Jesus for her to meet Jesus.

So go and share your stories, and your lives, bring the gospel in ways that others can receive and say “this is good news,” encourage those around you to share their good news. And as St. Francis says, if necessary (and it may be necessary more often than we’d like) but if necessary. Use words.