A Lesson in World-Winning

The chief task of the Christian church is to make Jesus Christ known, loved, and obeyed in all the world. When it is put in that way Christians nod their heads in agreement. But that task begins with making him known and loved, which is evangelism, and when we say, “What the church needs is more evangelism,” people begin to back away.

They react in somewhat the same way as the Koreans did to my father in the early days of mission work in Korea. He was a pioneer in North Korea in the days when great sections of the country had never seen a white man before. He had also taken one of the first bicycles into that land, and, dressed in black with his white face, he was a strange sight indeed in a country of white clothes and darker faces. One day, out itinerating, he came to the top of a pass and began to coast down toward a little village that lay at the foot. Some Korean children were playing a game something like hopscotch at the edge of the village, but when they looked up to behold a strange creature in black clothes and white face, coat-tails flapping in the breeze, swooping silently down on them on an infernal machine at an incredible rate of speed, they scattered to the far corners of the village, shouting at the top of their voices, “Look out, look out! Here comes the devil riding on a pair of spectacles!”

There are American Christians who react in much the same way to the coming of the evangelist. Why?

Some are afraid of the evangelist because they say he is too emotional. They are still thinking of evangelism in terms of a Peter Cartwright camp meeting on the great American frontier. They remember the tales of the chroniclers, how the long-haired young dandies would come to the meetings to jeer and to scoff only to be seized by the power of Cartwright’s preaching, until in an emotional spasm their back would bend almost to the breaking point. Then, the tension suddenly released, they would snap upright, their long hair cracking audibly like whips. The whole congregation would then be seized by the mass emotions of the revival, leaping, jumping, jerking. It all seems bizarre to us, and not a little frightening.

Others remember tales, which are always popular, of evangelists who turned out to be rascals and money-grabbers. Still others think of evangelism as a critical and divisive movement, mushrooming in a warm, dark, unhealthy growth outside the normal, clean atmosphere of the organized church, where preachers preach and laymen only listen. We have had a few evangelists in the Orient who held great meetings and preached with effectiveness, but at the end of their crusades closed by warning their converts against any and all existing churches, and then departed never to return to those parts again. All they did was to leave behind leaderless little groups of suspicious converts, divorced from the strengthening fellowship that only the church can give, too easily drifting back into the darkness from which they came.

These are the major criticisms of evangelism. They are mixtures of truth and error. But the most alarming thing about this kind of reaction against evangelism is that it has virtually paralyzed great sections of the church of Jesus Christ in our time. The critics have made Christians afraid of evangelism.

But if the chief task of the church begins with making Jesus known so that he can be loved and obeyed—if it begins with evangelism—how dare Christians be afraid of it? It’s like an army afraid to fight. If any army no longer believes in fighting it has no business being an army any more. If the church no longer believes in evangelism, it has no business being a church, for evangelism is the business of the church. “Evangelize,” said the Lord, “and make disciples.” Those were his marching orders.

As a matter of fact, if it is true that we no longer believe in evangelism, we may not have a church much longer. How long can United Presbyterians go on losing over 20,000 members a year?

Moreover, there is a recently emergent religion that does believe in evangelism—if you can call propaganda for a false faith evangelism. It not only believes in evangelism—it practices it. This new faith is Communism, and the Communists are out-evangelizing us.

I am quite aware that the church faces other dangers and problems which are quite as urgent, and I do not believe that America’s most pressing internal problem is Communism; it is racial injustice. But in my part of the world the more pressing problem is Communist totalitarianism, so let me speak of it, not in the spirit of an anti-Communist crusade, but as a reminder that others are doing more than most Christians in evangelism.

I watched the Red tide sweep across China. We Protestants had been trying to win that country for Christ for one hundred and fifty years. The Communists took it in thirty years. What makes them so successful? Their armies? That is no small part of the answer, of course. But as I lived behind the bamboo curtain and watched them for more than two years, I became convinced that the real secret lies deeper. I am inclined to believe that the main reason the Communists are so successful is simply this: that they believe in and practice evangelism with greater intensity for their false faith than most Christians do for the true faith.

We saw this when they first rolled over us. After the soldiers moved in, the Communist evangelists came out of hiding and put on the greatest evangelistic campaign I have ever seen in my life, and I have heard Billy Graham! They staged meetings that lasted from early morning to after midnight, great mass meetings drenched with emotion. They put on plays and concerts and operas and movies, presented by the drama corps that is attached to every Communist army division. It was an avalanche of evangelism that swept students and villagers off their feet. One of my own students, son of a Christian pastor, was soon coming to me to try to convert me to Communism. “Dr. Moffett,” he said, “you stay with us fifty years and you will see. We will have a paradise on earth right here in China.”

Evangelism, you see, is more than mass meetings, and the Communists know it. It is also personal witness. Six months after the Communist wave washed over us, a little freshman at the Christian college near Peking where we were teaching came in great distress to one of her Christian advisers. Her father and mother were earnest Christians in South China, which had not yet been taken by the Communists, and she was worried about them and about herself. “I wonder,” she said, “if my family knows how hard it is for me to remain a Christian.” She went on to say that her three roommates were all members of the Communist youth corps, which had taken as one of its objectives the conversion of every young Christian on that campus to Communism. Twenty-four hours a day those roommates would work on her, ridiculing, arguing, frightening, pleading. When they were tired, others would step in to relieve them and keep up the terrifying pressure, urging her to throw away old superstitions and get into step with the New China. All the adviser could do was comfort her, counsel her, and pray with her. From time to time afterwards she saw the girl, but the freshman didn’t talk to her much any more. Then one day on the library wall which carried the slogans and announcements of the student body, this notice appeared, signed by the little freshman: “I wish to announce to my fellow students that I am no longer a Christian. I have discovered my mistake, and how I have been deceived.…” Communist evangelism had gained another convert, and two grief-stricken parents in South China soon knew how really hard it was for their girl to keep the Christian faith.

This is the kind of evangelism that has made Communism the greatest evangelistic movement since the rise of Islam. It is a steady, relentless propagation of the faith. I have seen the Communist armies at work and also the Communist evangelists. And I am more afraid of the evangelists. I have seen their zeal, a zeal most Christians have abandoned to fringe groups, such as “holy rollers”—and to Communists.

A woman in Bogota, Colombia, once told a missionary there that she had won nearly two hundred and fifty of her fellow students to Karl Marx in one year after her conversion to Communism. Make no mistake. Communism is an evangelistic faith. It keeps its cutting edge sharp and hard, and every Communist is an evangelist.

And what about Christians? How do you and I compare, for example, with that young Communist in Colombia? How many people did you ever win to Jesus Christ in one year? The answer to the future of the world in our generation may well lie in that bitter comparison, for it is the evangelist, and not the soldier, who will ultimately win the world.

But if as Christians we look tired, discouraged, and ready to give up on a world we are losing to others, then we are no longer worthy to bear the name Christian. Remember the words of the Lord to his disciples, who were also at times too easily discouraged: “In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And remember again how he said, “Ye shall receive power … and ye shall be my witnesses … unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Perhaps I have spent too much time speaking of the Communists and their evangelistic zeal. We must be aware of that, but our example is not the Communist but the Christ! So, while we must be aware of the power of Communist propaganda, we must remember that our power is not in propaganda. It is in Christ. We must be aware of the Communist menace to the freedoms of the world, but that is not the only menace, and I am not calling Christians to evangelism as to a holy war against the Communists. The Christian’s call to evangelism is a higher and a holier call than that. It comes from Jesus Christ, who looks out on fields white unto the harvest and asks us to be his evangelists. The need is great, and the laborers are few, and the enemy waxes bold, but how can the Christian be discouraged when God himself says that power is available, and that the victory shall surely be to Jesus Christ?

Stop looking at the enemy for a moment, and look at Him, and look at the need all about you. Some people say that this is a Christian country. We put “In God We Trust” on our dimes. We open the Senate with prayer. We don’t let people swear on the radio and TV—at least we try to keep them from it. Our president is a Christian, and our secretary of state is a Presbyterian, and our politicians always speak well of the Bible. Doesn’t that make us a Christian country?

Listen. There are people in our mountains who have never heard of Jesus Christ, and people in our churches who act as if they had never heard of him. Many American cities are more pagan than the one in which I live in Korea. In the United States we say all men are brothers, but we don’t practice it. There are seventeen million young people, we are told, in this country who have never once darkened the door of a church. And if all this is true, then right here in America, the chief task of the church, as everywhere else, is still evangelism!

Sometimes it may be by great mass meetings. There are so many millions to be reached. It would encourage me to see in America a revival of mass evangelism. I would not be frightened by it. Too emotional? A religion which doesn’t reach the emotions never really becomes vital at all.

But again, let me remind you that evangelism is more than mass meetings. The hardest and most important evangelism of all is not that which you let others, specially gifted of the Holy Spirit, do for you, but that which you, by the same grace of God, do yourself.

I had lunch with a Jew one day. I was in New York, and the restaurant was crowded, and he came up and asked if he could share the table with me, which I was glad to let him do. He was a friendly and curious soul and began to ask me questions. His name was Sam Birnbaum. He was in the metal equipment business. “What line are you in?” he asked. “I’m a Presbyterian minister,” I said, and he thought that over for a while.

Then he said, “I don’t usually talk about this, but seeing as you are in the religious line, why do Christians hate the Jews?” And that kept me silent for a moment. How relentlessly our failures in race come back home to roost. But then I said, “They don’t. Real Christians do not hate the Jews. Jews are really nearer to Christians in faith than anyone else.” And that started us off on the Jewish problem. He told me all about his synagogue, his rabbi. We got quite friendly. Then he asked me some more about my work, and I said I was going to be a missionary.

“You mean,” he said, “that you are going to go out and try to convert people?” I nodded, and he looked at me unbelievingly. “Why?” he asked. “You wouldn’t want to convert me, would you?”

What should I have said? He was a fine fellow. We were getting along famously. I had taken a good step forward in bringing the Jew and the Christian closer together, as they should be. Shouldn’t I have continued along the same line and answered, “No, of course I wouldn’t want to convert you. You are a fine fellow as you are”? That was what he expected me to say. But I didn’t. I said, “Yes, I’d like to convert you.” And he was as surprised a man as I have seen in some time.

But in a case like that, doesn’t the Christian have to say “Yes”? Our Christian conviction is that men are not all right as they are. They need Christ, and without Christ, no matter how nice or how good or how wise they are, they are not all right. Only because Christians have believed that strongly enough to do something about it, only because faith led to evangelism, only because the first Christians were evangelists, are we today Christians. The Greeks were wise, but Paul knew that they needed evangelizing. The barbarians were fine, spirited civilians, but Boniface and Gregory and Augustine knew they needed Christ. So does Sam Birnbaum. So does every man who has not opened his heart to the Lord Christ.

Sam knew all about Jesus. He told me himself what a fine man Jesus was—a Jew, too. Sam also liked Cardinal Spellman. But if that is all there is to it, if Jesus is just another fine man for fine people like Sam Birnbaum to approve of, then we can all go home and forget it. But if Jesus Christ is our risen Lord and Saviour, the Master and Captain of our souls, the Son of God; and if God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life—if Jesus is Lord, and if men are lost, and our faith is true, then Christians have a job to do. And sometimes that job is right in our own home town, at a restaurant table. It can be harder right there than in Tibet.

If you think you can’t do it, if you say you are not ready, if you answer only with an excuse—then don’t sit there and complain while the Communists take the world away from you!

Samuel Hugh Moffett is dean of the Graduate School and professor of historical theology at the Presbyterian Seminary in Seoul. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Princeton Seminary and has the Ph.D. from Yale University.

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