Evangelism 1

Tonight at our New Hope small group we started a church-wide study about evangelism. These kinds of studies aren’t really my kind of thing, but I think there is a lot to be said for doing something as a part of the larger body of Christ, even if it is just the larger body of our (other) church. It’s a series from Willow Creek called Just Walk Across the Room, a four week series of DVD’s about relational evangelism. As long as I can be at each week’s lesson, I plan to blog about it here.

Tonight was called The Single Greatest Gift. In the video we were introduced to a man named Brian, to whom Bill Hybels just walked across a soccer field. Brian eventually converted to Christianity and is now an active “creeker” (Bill’s word, not mine).

yadda yadda yadda skip to the conversation... Me and Billy are worlds apart in the way we see the Church, so I mostly just want to share about the conversations we have around the subject.

We started out just discussing the idea of “walking across the room” by which they mean starting casual friendships with people, presumably with the intent to convert them to our religion. It seems to be a sort of post-modern idea, but the B.H. version looks a little one sided; meeting someone so you can change their life. We talked about seeing it as a little more two sided –meeting people to talk, listen, and learn.

This illustrates what I see as a central difference between the conservative evangelical perspective and the postmodern “emergent” perspective. The former see relational ministry as a means to an end –the old “meet a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ” paradigm. The latter see it more as a part of the end- the atonement as restoration of relationships between people, not just between God and us.

The key scripture for this section of the study was Luke 19:10, which I think puts the two perspectives into a good scriptural context. It’s introduced as a statement of Jesus’ mission, but different translations encourage significantly different understandings.

in the NIV it says “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost”

Tim pointed out something about this and I liked the way he put it: he said this could be a reference to the idea of God recovering the broken image of God in humanity. “That which was lost” is “the image of God” and the mission of Christ is therefore framed more as a restoration of humanity than a conversion of individuals. That seems to me to fit really well with the rest of scripture as well as my experience with “evangelism.”

But the other way to look at this verse is what the ESV says: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” which doesn’t specifically refer to “lost people” but seems to have that implication. (I talked to my resident-Greek-expert-wife, and she said that it’s kind of ambiguous about which is more true to the Greek, though the ESV seems to be closer to the original sentence) This perspective seems to promote a kind of penal-substitution type idea that Jesus’ mission was to pay the price for each sinner who believes. While I don’t dispute the truth of that statement, it doesn’t seem to be the focus of Jesus’ ministry.

It seems to me Jesus’ ministry was much more relational and less entrepreneurial. The language of restoration makes a lot more sense to me than the language of commerce when we’re talking about the work of God.

That led us in to a little bit of discussion about our language and the way it frames our belief about an issue. When God is leading a person to reach out to someone, I think their response is shaped by the language with which they frame evangelism. For example, if I felt the Lord leading me to “walk across the room,” I may go and start a conversation, talk about life, ask some questions, learn about the person, and go from there. However, someone from a more solidly conservative-evangelical background might approach the situation differently. Feeling that same call to “walk across the room”, the conversation may quickly lead to something like “if you were to die tomorrow, do you know where you would be?” or maybe four spiritual laws, or the sinner’s prayer.

Granted this is not what B-Hizzle is advocating. He seems to fall somewhere in the middle, admitting he felt an urge to keep bringing up Church but at the same time feeling a need to let the relationship run it’s course and let the Lord work.

So after week one I have to say, I got more out of it than I thought I would. Although I feel like we pretty much got our collective head around the idea of “Just walking across the room” so it will be interesting to see what the next 3 weeks are about.