Evangelism: The Heart of Missions

Proclaiming the Good News is “especially the responsibility of missionary boards and agencies” yet some now reflect “a declining stress on evangelism”

The nineteenth century has been called the “Great Century” of Protestant missions. In 1815 there were only a few hundred Protestant missionaries throughout the world, and many of these belonged to “missionary societies” not directly related to the Church; but by 1914 the number had grown to an amazing 22,000. The great denominations had come to recognize missions as central and had set up agencies to foster the enterprise in the world. Protestant churches had been planted in almost every nation. The Bible had been translated into more than 500 languages. And in North America the Student Volunteer Movement was vigorously challenging youth with chapters on every campus, and with its great conventions in which thousands heard the eloquent appeals of great leaders.

While the proclamation of the Good News is the responsibility of the whole Church and includes student movements, Bible societies, and lay efforts, it is especially the responsibility of missionary boards and agencies set up by the churches for this very purpose. The stance of these agencies is therefore a matter of vital concern. How are they fulfilling their commitment? Has evangelism continued to be the primary driving force in missions? Or are there other accents that tend to abate or obscure it?

Some aspects of the present situation are reassuring;

1. The 42,250 Protestant foreign missionaries throughout the world reported by the Missionary Research Library in its 1960 survey constituted the largest total recorded in any year up to that time, and the number continues to increase.

2. North American Protestants have more than doubled their missionary personnel since 1945, and the present number stands at approximately 28,000. This significant increase must be seen in the light of the drastic depletion of forces resulting from the financial depression of the 1930s and from World War II, so that the gain in part represents the retaking of lost ground. It stands, nevertheless, as a solid evidence of life and growth. Of the present 28,000, some 38 per cent represent boards and agencies associated with the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches; 44 per cent are from societies affiliated with the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (EFMA), the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), and the Associated Mission Agencies of the International Council of Christian Churches (AMICC); and 18 per cent belong to societies which are “independent.”

3. An avowal of evangelistic purpose is contained in the official statement of aim of almost every mission board or agency. This can be affirmed on the basis of a private survey made at the end of 1965. A brief questionnaire addressed to twenty-three denominational agencies affiliated with the Division of Overseas Ministries and a like number related to the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association elicited seventeen replies from each group, thirty-four in all. Twenty-eight of these, an equal number from each group, gave an emphatic place to evangelism, though some of these mentioned other corollary aims. Six agencies did not reply specifically to the question.

4. Most of the thirty-four agencies that replied to the questionnaire feel there has been a strengthening of the evangelistic aim in their work during the past twenty years. On this point the seventeen DOM boards voted: “Yes,” twelve; “No,” four; and “No comparative basis,” one. One of these boards explained that it did not have a specific “evangelistic” category but used the term “church development.” While these are not equivalent terms, the church-development group has been counted as evangelistic for the purposes of this analysis. The seventeen EFMA societies voted: “Yes,” fifteen; “No change,” one; and “No comparative basis,” one. The overall ratio of evangelistic missionaries in the total force is reported by the two groups as follows: DOM, 40 per cent; EFMA, 75 per cent.

Significant as these facts and figures are, they cannot be taken as a conclusive sign of the strength of evangelism in the missionary program. There are other questions. What is meant by “evangelistic work”? What is the nature and content of the “Gospel” that is being preached? What are the grounds on which boards and agencies determine that this emphasis has been strengthened in their work? For example, a large DOM-related board that says evangelism has gained a stronger place in its program during the past two decades nevertheless shows in its published reports that the ratio of evangelistic missionaries has declined from 68 per cent of the total in 1945 to 45 per cent in 1965. During the same period, appropriations for evangelistic work, exclusive of salaries, have declined from 15.4 to 8.4 per cent of the total budget. Yet this is a board generally known for a relatively strong emphasis on evangelism.

Several factors awaken concern:

1. Many boards have revised, or are revising, their statements of aims. In general these revisions reflect a declining stress on evangelism as the central business of missions. The evangelistic purpose is not left out, but the inclusion of other coordinate or subordinate aims detracts from the pre-eminence of evangelism.

2. The emergence of “national churches” has confronted the boards with a new dimension in their work. An insistent question today is: “What should be the continuing relation between the missions or sending societies and the indigenous churches that are a result of their work?” Preoccupation with this problem has caused many boards to make far-reaching changes in policy. There is a new emphasis on “church development” or “interchurch aid.” Some boards have come to feel that pioneer evangelism is no longer an appropriate function of foreign mission agencies in such situations, and that their role now is to stimulate the national churches to undertake missionary endeavors of their own, to work aggressively through and with them, and to offer help with men and money. In any given field the “mission” organization is to be dissolved, and missionaries, together with all funds for the work, are to be turned over to the indigenous body and administered by it through its own agencies. New missionaries would be sent only on invitation of, and for assignment by, the national church. The board becomes, in effect, a subsidizing agency.

It is not surprising that this radical change of direction has met with considerable resistance from missionaries and loyal supporters of the work. There is a basic difference in scope and function between a mission and a national church, and a recognition of this is essential to an understanding of the problem. Why have missionaries been reluctant to see the administrative control of missionary funds and personnel pass to the indigenous churches? To suggest that they are loath to relinquish authority, or are committed to a sort of “colonialism,” is to do them an injustice. There is a better explanation. The indigenous church is an organized ecclesiastical body with a wide range of interests and responsibilities of which missions is only one, and sometimes not the principal one. It must be concerned with its own internal organization, its institutions and agencies, its publications, its discipline, the support of its ministry, and a dozen other matters. It is peculiarly subject to the temptation of using available money and men for the development of all phases of its program. It is not a distinctively missionary organization.

A mission, on the other hand, is supremely concerned with evangelization, outreach, and extension. It is not strange that missionaries are zealous to keep this emphasis. For this they have left home and native land. It is this to which they were commissioned by the church and in which they are supported through prayer and sacrificial giving. They are anxious to help the growing fellowship on the field as much as possible, to give it their love and cooperation, to serve it in all ways consistent with their primary obligation; but they will not easily accept interchurch aid as a substitute for missions. Their interest is in winning new believers and establishing new churches, not in subsidizing existing ones.

Further, it is pertinent to ask whether national churches can really be expected to develop a sense of their own missionary responsibility under such a system of subsidization. They tend to be confirmed as “receiving churches,” whereas all churches should be “sending churches.” For missions is primarily a matter, not of church-to-church relations, but of the relation of the church to the unbelieving world.

It is inconceivable that the coming into being of a relatively small body of believers in any country should put an end to the initiative of men and women who have been called of God to preach the Gospel to every creature. There are few countries in which Protestant missionaries are at work today where as many as one-tenth of the people have been won to the Christian faith. Any philosophy of missions that diverts attention from this unfinished task and interprets our continuing role principally in terms of interchurch aid must be seen as a major retreat in missionary strategy and a weakening of evangelism.

3. Any comparison of present missionary strength with that of former years must take into account the increasing category of “short termers.”

The latest annual report (1964) of the Division of Foreign Missions (now the Division of Overseas Ministries) of the National Council of Churches gives an analysis of the new missionaries sent out in 1963 by thirty boards and agencies affiliated with the division. These are classified by vocations and terms of service. The tables show a total of 864 sent during that year, of whom 155, or less than 18 per cent, are placed under the classification “evangelistic and church work.” Further, 244 of the 864, or 28 per cent, are listed “short term.”

There is no intention here to speak disparagingly of short-term workers, many of whom are superior in training, experience, and dedication; but they are not the group with the greatest promise in the field of evangelism. Most of them serve as “specialists” in such fields as Christian education, church organization, social service, agriculture, medicine and health, business and administration, teaching English, or various technical vocations. Since their tenure is seldom longer than five years, and sometimes even shorter than one, few acquire the language proficiency indispensable for evangelism.

Evangelistic work presupposes a depth of rootage in the country, and an understanding of its history, culture, social customs, attitudes, language, and religious inheritance, that can be gained only through prolonged residence. The short-term worker has his special contribution to make, but the growing tendency to attract young people by offering them a brief assignment in some missionary situation is already proving a discouragement to life-commitment and to evangelism.

4. Undoubtedly the chief cause of the waning emphasis on evangelism is the widespread erosion of faith within the Christian fellowship itself. No one who reads the papers can be unaware of the tides of unbelief sweeping through our pulpits and churches.

The missionary enterprise cannot be separated from the faith of the Church. The incentives for Christian missions derive from beliefs about the nature and character of God, the relation between God and man, the destiny of fallen humanity, the sufficiency of Christ as the Redeemer of the world, and the nature of the Gospel. When these premises are undermined, missions and evangelism lose their essential meaning.

In this decline of faith, three forces in particular work against evangelism:

a. Universalism: Despite the clear biblical teaching on the “lostness” of man, a tacit universalism questions the urgency, or even the need, of missions and evangelism. Emphasis on the love of God, to the exclusion of his righteousness and justice, has caused many to trust in a sort of divine indulgence instead of the costly and redemptive work of Christ. Such a view makes the Cross of no effect and actually distorts the love of God by making it seem that he permitted the sacrifice of his Son without sufficient purpose.

b. Syncretism: A newly active syncretism presents itself again as an obstacle to evangelism. The vigor and sincerity of our missionary efforts, indeed of our preaching at home or abroad, rests upon our conviction that God, in his plan for the redemption of the world, sent his Son as the one and only Saviour. The Christian faith recognizes no rivals. It lays claim to an absoluteness that denies the ultimate validity of any other faith. It represents itself as the only hope of man. It presents Christ to the world not as a way of salvation but as the way of salvation. If this position seems narrow, we must accept the criticism. Only let it be acknowledged that the same judgment must apply to the whole doctrine of the New Testament. The missionary enterprise, as developed in the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, rested upon precisely this view of the uniqueness and sufficiency of Christ. As the late Robert E. Speer put it in one of his books, “The early church believed that there was none other name given among men whereby they must be saved. All men everywhere needed Christ and Christ was enough. Neither Greek, nor Roman, nor Semitic religion had any correction to make or any supplement to add to Him.” And a vigorous evangelism can stand on no other ground.

c. Secularization: A secularized Christianity dismisses the Gospel of faith and salvation as having little relevance to life and accepts instead “another gospel,” drawn from platforms of political, social, and intellectual liberalism. The vital spiritual dimension of the encounter between God and man is virtually ignored by a so-called Christianity that can see little beyond man’s physical and social needs as a higher animal. Soteriology gives way to sociology: what God has done yields to what society must do; good news is replaced by good intentions; and evangelism disappears in favor of reform. As Dr. Eugene Carson Blake is quoted as saying, “We are not doing well. Society is becoming more and more secular. People are making up their minds in the light of what they hear from sources other than the pulpit” (Presbyterian Journal, Feb. 16, 1966, p. 4). And he could have added that some pulpits are finding their canonical authority more in secular voices of change and revolution than in Scripture.

Now, evangelicals consider the reaction to social injustices valid; but they hold that social structures cannot be evangelized. Regenerate Christians can influence these structures, and in the task of seeking regenerate individuals the historic denominations are, on the whole, failing badly.

It is not easy to determine just how far missionary agencies have been affected by this moral and theological confusion. One continues to hope and believe that they are the last to surrender to the pressures of unbelief. But they cannot remain forever impregnable. They are a part of the churches they represent and must sooner or later reflect the trends already evident in almost every denomination. It is not reassuring to read the record of the annual meeting of the Division of Overseas Ministries last October, in which the major emphasis was on the need for secularizing the missionary’s message, summarized in the following statement by an official of the division: “The amateurism and sentimentality of most Christian ministries overseas is no longer acceptable.… In theological enterprise, missions must take leadership in the growing movement toward a genuinely secular Christian faith—that is, an understanding of our belief not in terms of archaic philosophical concepts but in terms relevant and luminous with meaning in the scientific, world-affirming and world-understanding age in which we are set.” There seems to have been no statement of dissent from this position on the part of any of the five hundred delegates of the boards and agencies represented at that meeting.

By and large, it is the reluctantly confessed feeling of this observer that the evangelistic thrust of the “old-line” denominations in overseas work is declining along with their proportionately diminishing place in North American missions as a whole. Fortunately, to offset this trend, there comes into view at this time an ever

growing army of missionaries from other associations of societies—denominational, interdenominational, and independent—who are bringing new life and strength to the Christian witness abroad. Already these groups have more than 62 per cent of the total number of missionaries from this continent. Not all their methods will meet with full approval, but they are dedicated to the Gospel. Three-fourths of them are in evangelistic work. The message they preach is the good news of salvation. Their work is being blessed. Thousands are being brought to Christ. Increasingly, the gifts and prayers of Christian people are offered in their support.

No need is more critical in this day than to bolster the fundamental affirmations of the Christian faith and to reflect these in a New Testament call to evangelism. The need of the world is not abated. The sin-sick and sorrow-worn are still there. It is the supreme duty and privilege of those who have known the grace of God in Christ to preach the good news in all the earth, especially in those places where the beginnings have not been made and the Gospel of our Saviour is a strange story.

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