Confronting the Impasse in Evangelism

Can evangelical Christians overcome the sins of silence and reticence?

Soon the organized church will be able to keep tabs on the whole world population. By using computers it can collect a master file of religious case histories. Data on the spiritual encounters of persons from Anchorage to Ankara might then clatter across one centralized console.

These prospects are exciting, for they also pull the Church within reach of presenting every man on earth the choice of accepting or rejecting Jesus Christ.

But before it can effectively use electronic technology in fulfilling the biblical missionary mandate, the Church must confront the impasse of personal reticence. This barrier is widely recognized but seldom discussed. To put it another way: Christians lack individual evangelistic motivation. Despite a recent trend toward more personalized evangelism (see April 29, 1966, issue), many still shy from persuasive words and overt deeds that declare their faith. In short, the Church suffers from an acute shortage of willing witnesses.

Reticence thrives among those whose theology is sound. The preacher thunders the Gospel before thousands but suddenly contracts laryngitis at a cab-driver’s profanity. The layman regularly presents his tithe but recoils from risking material success for an unpopular principle. The affluent Christian homemaker cringes at the thought of venturing into an underprivileged neighborhood to do a loving service. The evangelical student is hip to everything but the spiritual need of his roommate.

“The great need today is to get individuals inviting individuals to Christ,” says Harry Denman, Methodism’s elder statesman of evangelism. “We have a lot of people who are talking about evangelism and saying that what we need is evangelism, but they themselves do not extend the invitation to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.”

Unless the Church finds a way around this impasse, it will make poor use of the vast aid to evangelism offered by new research and development, including automated data-processing. Without personal application, modern technology can do little more than perpetuate orthodox Christianity’s long tradition of seeking painless ways to evangelize, and the Church will sink further into a remnant role.

Christian reticence is all the more tragic in our day of unparalleled evangelistic opportunity. The World Congress on Evangelism lifted the ecclesiastical mood to an advantageous new plane. Suddenly evangelism was “in,” and almost everyone talking about it assigned it at least respectability, if not credibility. Even though some now exploit the term, and interpret it in other ways than its historic sense, the very fact of its resurrection begs for new evangelical action.

Last fall’s historic congress in Berlin produced not only an immediate new image for evangelism but also consequences that promise to remain. The respected Presbyterian churchman John Coventry Smith predicted that “the Berlin congress will mean a world-wide quickening of evangelical concern.” He noted in an official report that sixty-seven meetings based on denominations or geographical areas were held privately to discuss local implementation.

Smith’s observation offers a clear rejoinder to any who might have thought the congress little more than a ten-day emotional jag. Some specifics have already appeared that refute any description of the Berlin assembly as merely a sophisticated indoor camp meeting. Delegates swung into action spontaneously even before the benediction was pronounced. One, for example, reports that while in Berlin he “got the ball rolling” to provide an Eastern European country with its first Christian film unit. Another, in a vision of grandeur, drew up a fifty-seven-point mobilization program for evangelization of the world, including a flow chart for coordinating evangelism-in-depth strategy on a global scale. Delegates from Muslim Pakistan projected for 1967 a school of evangelism with three three-week terms, each followed by door-to-door Scripture presentations and evening meetings for non-Christians. Individually, there were new visions, new resolves, and revolutionized ministries (“the spiritual event of my life with the greatest impact,” said one delegate).

These developments are obviously but a drop in the bottomless bucket of the world’s spiritual need. Congress planners hope for wide local implementation. The congress has brought the evangelical world to an embarrassing realization of the crucial impasse in personal responsibility. But unless twice-born Christians take it from here, the congress will fail to attain its real objectives.

Evangelicals must face the fact that their present behavior and speech make no substantial impact upon unbelieving worldlings. Many churchgoers—even preachers, missionaries, and evangelists—bother little at all about the spiritual state of those with whom they rub shoulders. Superficial conversations about politics, sports, cars, fashion, other people, sometimes even religion in general, are the rule. How many manifest a winsome love (agape) and raise the question of man’s need for a new birth? Many prominent evangelicals would have to admit that it has been years since they have on their own initiative sought out a single person with the intention of seeing him find a saving faith in Christ.

From the perspective of church history, an inhibited Christianity is a comparatively new problem. The Church has hurdled many obstacles (see below), but none quite like this one. Fear of tyrants and lions has been replaced by the fear of rebukes or of loss of face.

Another reason for Christian reticence is that religion has become so highly subjectivized in today’s pluralistic society that the believer feels he would be trampling on his neighbors’ toes if he suggested that in their own convictions—or the lack of them—they might be in error. Ecumenical momentum reinforces the inclination to speak only of religion-in-general, devoid of distinctives, lest one appear to be proselyting. The concept of tolerance has been stretched to become a cloak for spiritual inaction and disobedience to the Great Commission.

Historically, Christians tended to cluster together in urban centers or to be isolated in rural areas. Either way, there was little opportunity for direct contact between believers and unbelievers. Now, as national churches fade, people of varying faiths and no faith mesh in the work-a-day world.

Why do Christians ignore the challenge of this culturally integrated society? The answer lies partly in the scientific mood of our time. Even among Christians, there is the inclination to take seriously only what seems to be established by empirical data. All other realities, if not regarded as implicitly suspect, are thought somewhat irrelevant.

Social conditions also contribute to the evangelistic impasse. The affluent are deafened by pride, the poverty-stricken by shame. Rapport is a prerequisite for witness to either group. Christians need to achieve a balance of what Leighton Ford calls the three strands of New Testament evangelism: loving (koinonia), service (diakonia), and proclamation (kerygma). As one World Congress prayer partner haltingly put it, “I am a Latin American who not believes in capitalism or Communism as the real solution for the problems of our mankind but I believe in the Christianism of Jesus Christ, which open his mouth and finger point out to heaven … but with heart and the whole right hand helps without reservations the biblical solution for injustice and hunger.”

Reticence is seen not just in what we fail to say but also in what we fail to do, and here the age-old gap between word and deed may be catching up with the Church. A backlash is now developing. The younger generation particularly is tempted to paste a “phony” label on many institutions dear to Protestant hearts. There’s security in institutions, and Christians leave to professionals what they themselves are too timid to undertake. But the longer this goes on—the more mission is overtaken by structure, with its problems of status quo and “this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it”—the more the hypocritical element sticks out to anyone taking a fresh look.

The High Cost of Church Growth

Source: Statistics of Church Finances, National Council of Churches, 1965 and 1966 Reports

Perhaps the crucial factor in the impasse is the lack of leadership. The ecclesiastical elite fail both in teaching how to witness and in demonstrating by personal example. There is almost no instruction for the layman apart from an occasional inspirational sermon, no correlation of modern vocation with the biblical mandate, no sense of continuing urgency.

It may be time to declare a moratorium on all so-called revival meetings and Bible conferences and to concern ourselves more intensely with evangelistic training. People in the pew are being devotionalized to death while the really big priorities are neglected. Many evangelicals live spiritually undernourished lives, partly because of their steady diet of soupy sermons hurriedly cooked up on Saturday night. Weak preaching makes weak laymen, who then try to turn the church into a soul-saving station, the one and only means of evangelization, instead of using it as a learning center for external evangelism. Altar calls assuage the guilt of failing to act under the discipline of Scripture and get the preacher off the hook for not addressing spiritual problems that might offend someone.

Where should we begin? The problem is clearly one of motivation, and computers cannot help at this point. But as soon as Christians become convicted over failure to witness, they begin devising programs. Soon their energies are being expended in the programs rather than in evangelism.

Broadly speaking, the Church already has the best possible structure for reaching the unbelieving world. As any politician knows, work at the precinct level is what counts most, and what institution has more precinct potential than the Church? True, the Church is, among other things, a million little paper mills. But it permeates society! It can be found at every cultural level and in even the most isolated nook and cranny.

One World Congress delegate proposed that every local church in every land begin a program of mass evangelization by teams—starting, at least, by devoting just one evening a month. But here goes program again.

There are many other problems facing effective evangelism, such as the need for theological definition and for unity, or at least a cooperative approach. But until the impasse of personal reticence is overcome, evangelism will be largely stymied. Evangelical churches ought to confess their plight openly and to consider carefully the reported boast of a Communist Chinese:

“Everyone in my country knows of Marx and Stalin. We did in ten years what you Christians failed to do in one hundred.”

The World Congress on Evangelism has provided a new stimulus. Where do we go from here?

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