Category Archives: Evangelism

The New Evangelism, revisited

Last January, I offered a few thoughts on what a “New Evangelism” might look like. In that post, I cribbed the ideas from a documentary I had watched about influencers, asking if the church could reframe its thinking on evangelism in light of what we’ve been able to learn from those who have influenced our idea of culture. “What would a postmodern evangelist look like?” I wondered.

This past weekend, I was reminded of these thoughts. I was wrapping up a speaking gig on the “10 Commandments of Open Source” and some one asked what reason I had for being so hopeful about the church and the Christian Faith given my professed belief that God does not exclusively call people into relationship through Jesus Christ. Or, to ask it another way: “Why should we devote time to making a case for following Christ when there are a ton of other good offers out there?”

This is a good question, I think. Many people I know claim that Christianity is not the only religion that we could give our lives to. However, we have stopped short of spreading the Good News because we don’t want to get painted with the same brush strokes as “Those Christians.” This is totally understandable. The moment that you allow for there to be more than one option, the less likely you are to insist that yours is the best option. And, yet, I can still think that my option is really, really great and worth considering while, at the same time, being honest about its flaws etc.

So that’s what I think I’d like to devote some time and thinking to over the next month or so. What does evangelism look like in an open source world? While I’m not going to say that others have it wrong, I want to figure out how to make the case for why we’ve got it right. How do we make a case for a consistent worldview and life ethic that doesn’t insist that others are not worthy of consideration and devotion?

And so, to get us started, I want to offer some realities that I think would be helpful and necessary to acknowledge when considering our question.

  1. Evangelism is not a dirty word. I have had bad experiences with the “E Word” growing up. As a Charismatic Fundegelical, we treated evangelism like selling a product and we tried everything in our power to get you to buy what we were selling. Even if it meant lying a little. I’m not kidding. But if the Good News really is good news, then we should want to make it known. We’ve got to get over our fear/revulsion/whatever of evangelism.
  2. There is no such thing as on message for the whole world. Anyone with even a passing understanding of contextualization will know that treating everyone the same is just ridiculous. We may want to say that “Jesus is the Answer,” but I think that grossly overstates what we think the question is. Not everyone is asking the same question, and if the Good News is going to actually be good news then is must be relevant news.
  3. No one knows who we are anymore. And no one seems to care. The recent Pew study is only the latest evidence to us that Christianity is seen as irrelevant, and where we’re not irrelevant, we’re often despised. We can’t trust that anything we do will be held up as important. Sure, some of us still get our names in the paper, but those stories are so few and far between that they will have no impact on our standing in the community we’ve been called to serve.
  4. Evangelism is part marketing, and its online marketing at that. We need to stop thinking that “Invite a Friend Sunday” is going to do anything to stem the tide. People are still spiritually seeking and they will give us a look-see, but we need to make it easy for them. And this means that, damnit, we need to get over our aversion to social media and accept that people are increasingly online. It seems so silly to write that statement, but so many churches are not heeding Carol’s advice that the website/FB page/Twitter account are the main door folks use to enter a church.
  5. People don’t want to interact with “First Church” but the people of First Church. Those “clear boundaries” that we have been encouraged to set up are now seen as the latest ways that we fragment our lives. Seeing church people as blank slates that only hold the church’s message is kinda silly. The fact that Jerome is the one tweeting for First Church makes a difference to how First Church is seen. And, in the end, isn’t it the people that make church worthwhile?
  6. We don’t need to spend a lot of money on evangelism programs. We just need to believe that what we are offering (Christ’s Freedom, Grace, and Peace) is worth spending our time sharing. Seriously, if we believe that what we’ve got is worth it, the rest is just tactics and logistics.
  7. We can’t control people’s opinion of us. But we can be around to help mitigate it if it’s bad. The Pew study showed us that most USAmericas love God, Jesus, prayer, etc, but they don’t like us. If we are not out and about – physically or digitally – we will have no chance of changing that impression. Did you know that we are all seen as homophobic, judgmental asses? Of course not. Because we’ve holed ourselves up and are concerned with saving ourselves, rather than help God save the lost, release the captives, and heal the sick.

I’m sure there are many more realities than that. Those are just the one I can think of right now, on a sunday afternoon. What else do we need to contend with as we think about engaging an open source world?

“As long as we reach one person…”

Any church leader who has been in charge of any kind of programming that is consistently showing a lack of success has said it. “As long as we reach one person, everything was worth it.”

Everything? Really?

To be sure, there are times when that is the case. We read the parable of the Good Shepherd going to find the one lost sheep and we feel justified doing what we’ve got to do to make sure that one person knows they are loved by God. But let’s be honest: That’s not usually what we’re talking about.

What we’re usually talking about is someone trying to justify performance in the face of what they consider unreasonable expectations. Jan Edmiston taught me that these can be classified as “how much, how often, and how many.”

Rightfully so, we find these kinds of measurements to be somewhat antithetical to the purposes God has for the Church. If the job of church leaders is to maximize attendance or contributions, certain kinds of choices will be made; choices that, more often than not, make a person feel comfortable and more likely to show up and give.

Yet, rather than try to “change the scorecard” we say that scorecards don’t matter.

But they do matter. They matter quite a bit. The only way that the Good Shepherd knew that the one sheep was lost was because the shepherd counted.

The “Moneyball” phenomenon showed us that there are objective things that coaches can pay attention to that will ensure better and better results for their teams. What are those for the church?

Because – Can we just say? – with the state of the world and it’s need for Christ’s Grace and Peace, reaching just one person isn’t good enough.

Can we imagine a Mainline monasticism?

A couple of questions have bugged me for a while now: If we achieve the goal of everyone living a missional life then what is the purpose of the church as an institution? If the point is to work with God so that everyone is exhibiting the Kingdom of Heaven, then what do we do when that is the case?

My tradition is pretty clear that we understand the Church to be the “provisional demonstration of what God intends for humanity.” In other words: we are God’s demonstration classroom, the place people should be able to look and think, “Ah, that’s the way we should be doing this thing called life.”

And yet, we’re not really demonstrating anything. What we’re basically doing is fighting with each other over who’s got the right idea of how we can save all those darn heathens. It’s not a terribly productive strategy.

It is a strategy, however, is born from a belief that the Church is merely a more holy Social Service Organization. Many (if not most) of us believe that Church is little more than a glorified Rotary Club: We show up once a week, pay our dues, and do some service projects. I think we need to look beyond this. Rotary is great, but it’s not what the Church is called to be, I don’t think.

There is something exciting to me about the Church not being a Social Service Organization, but an intentional community of people sharing a similar space and working to rehearse life the way they beieve God intends it. But this would mean giving up the need to own every damn thing we want and be in control of everything. It would mean giving into collaboration and community in ways we have not yet been comfortable.

Among other things, this would change who we think the pastor is (not CEO, but Community Architect) and what we understand evangelism to be (not coercion…i mean conversion, but inviting them to be functional part of a community in order to possible start another one).

This is a place where I think the New Monastics have something to teach us. Can we learn it? What would a Mainline incarnational monasticism look like?

Dear God, please stop calling pastors

Dear God,

I know we talked earlier, but I have something important that I’d like to ask you so I thought I’d send you a letter. I usually do better thinking through thoughts when I write them out. Don’t think that you need to give me an answer right away, but I’d sure love an answer sooner rather than later.

So, here’s the deal: I’d like to ask you to stop calling “pastors” to the ministry.

As I understand it (from that awesome book of yours) the word “pastor” is drawn from the word “shepherd.” The purpose of the shepherd is to protect and provide for the sheep, to feed them well, and keep them healthy. To be sure, sometimes this means that the shepherd needs to make the sheep do things they’d rather not do, and sometimes it means applying some preventative medicine, etc. But, mostly, being a shepherd means that the sheep are well cared for. You know – that whole “still waters” and “green pastures” thing?

So, the reason I ask is because I think we’ve got enough of these people, and I was wondering if you had noticed. In my own denomination we have somewhere around twice as many “shepherds” as we have “flocks” available. Normally, I wouldn’t worry about that because I know that many of those pastors aren’t “out of work,” they’re just keeping their options open.

But what bothers me is the number of new pastors that seem to be flooding the market every year, and the fact that a lot of congregations don’t want a first time pastor. Seriously?

Again, have you noticed this?

Look, Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth, I am fine with you calling the shots. I’m down with you being the one in charge of calling people to service in the church (you can bet I don’t want the job), but I’m wondering if you’ve fallen asleep lately. I mean, I trust that you have a plan and everything, but this is getting ridiculous. Let me tell you what I think you should do about this.

1) Stop calling pastors. I think we have enough for right now. Let’s let the ones we have get into circulation. I’m sure a lot of that will even itself out. Some of the older pastors are going to retire evenutally. It’ll be a bit tense for a few years, but I think we can manage. However…

2) Please start calling EVANGELISTS instead. Seriously. A lot of these newer folks seeking to be pastors are thinking about your church in crazy new ways and it would be a waste of their energy to ask them to go maintain a system that is gonna wrap up in a few years.

Maybe you’re already aware of all this. Look, I know where I was when you laid the foundations of the world. Okay? I get it. I’m not suggesting you’re not good at what you do, but this is getting out of hand. Maybe you actually did call some of these pastors as evangelists and they got the signals wrong. Maybe the Church in general misinterpreted. Whatev. I’m fine with it all. But could you give an indication of what you’re up to.

Okay. I think that’s enough. Thanks for listening. Thanks for considering.

Wanna do brunch after worship on Sunday? I know this great kosher deli.

Landon

The New Evangelism

Last night I found a pretty cool docu as I was cruising Vimeo. It’s called Influencers: How Trends and Creativity Become Contagious.

Here it is:

As I watched, my mind naturally went to the idea of “pastors as influencers,” mostly because, well, I self-identify as a pastor. But the more and more I thought of it, the more I realized that I had an opportunity here to explore an area I feel compelled to gain a depth of knowledge and wisdom in: EVANGELISM.

Confession: I have a visceral reaction to the word and idea of “evangelism.” I am not joking. It makes my skin crawl, and I start to feel a little sick. I am not joking.

In the Fundegelical culture I grew up in, evangelism was the thing you were taught to do. Youth Group was like sales and marketing school. You learned to defend your faith and you learned to, quite honestly, push it on people. Ostensibly, evangelism is “proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ,” but I experienced it more as selling insurance policies. I know, I know. It’s a tried and tired cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason.

Recently, however, I have been compelled to reconsider what evangelism is and what it looks like. It can’t and shouldn’t be the Salvation Road Show of my youth, but neither can it be just a “commitment to welcoming those who walk through our doors and helping them find a place in the life of this congregation” (honest to God, that was the definition the evangelism committee of one Mainline church I attended had as an official statement). Do I believe that the freedom offered in Jesus Christ is transformative and worth giving my life to? Yes? Then, shouldn’t I freely give what I have freely received? Shouldn’t I offer this marvelous thing far and wide? Yes, and yes. Given how I understand the work of God in Christ, to not do so is to say that no one needs this thing I’ve found. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Ephesians 4 says that God gave the church certain gifts, and that among them were “evangelists.” Can we think of evangelists as “influencers”? Well, here’s what the film says about this kind of person (with a bit of my own commentary thrown in):

Influencers are:

  • Confident. They know they are doing the right thing and they are comfortable doing it. They are not shy when the “slings and arrows” come.
  • Creative. They have a different way of thinking and expressing themselves. They realize that the answers given yesterday do not answer the questions asked today.
  • Early Adopters. They see the possibilities on the horizon long before others do. They are willing to take risks and experiment.
  • Well respected. It’s not necessarily that people “like” them. It is that they have a good track record of naming the truth of the situation. When they speak, people listen.
  • Translators. They have an ability to bring an idea into the mainstream consciousness. They can translate from one discipline to another, and draw connections where others see only dichotomies.
  • Practice Embodiment. They do not merely speak, but they live in a new way. They demonstrate the new by the way they move through their lives.
  • Self-Aware. They are concerned with the ways they come of to the ones they seek to influence. This is not to suggest that they “go by the pols” but they are strategic in the way they present themselves.
  • Rooted. They are not iconoclasts. They are a part of a community, they are accountable to others, and they know where they came from.
  • Mentors. They do not believe that it is all about them and their success. They seek out others and mentor them to do what they have done.

One significant theme that ran through the film was the reality that most influencers are a part of the “young creative class.” Part of what was named is the reality that most younger persons cannot afford to be a part of the system and are not willing to “sell out” to become so. As a result, they tend to establish an almost entirely separate network and work around the establishment. Their influence is a direct result of trying to figure out how to express themselves given their limitations.

To me, this feels like a good place to start in looking for a new understanding of evangelism.