In the last three editions of the “Fight Club” series I looked at worship and its role in evangelical Protestant-dom. I started out by saying that our emphasis upon worship songs is just not right, and that if we had any awareness of the disconnect between what we are and what God is, then our worship would be vastly different. I then said that true worship is a sacrifice, and if it is an acceptable sacrifice then God will consume it. We each have one life to live and it is being sacrificed to something and consumed by something–is it God or is it the American dream of happiness, health, status, financial security, and an abundance of material possessions?
Finally I said that true worship is for God but takes us ultimately into engagement with other people and the world around us. If we truly love God then we have no choice but to love the people around us–all people created in His image who are unique expressions of some facet of His personality and whom He loves and desires to be in relationship with. Worship that leads us into our own solitary worship islands of “Jesus and me and who gives a s–t about anyone else?” is just not good enough.
In this edition I wish to look at evangelism.
My chief frustration with the evangelical approach to evangelism (how’s that for alliteration?) is that so many in the world of evangelical Protestant-dom see our ultimate purpose as believers to be nothing more than evangelism. Different varieties of evangelical Protestant-dom will put a different skin on it–fundamentalist Baptists and Pentecostals will talk about “witnessing” or “soul-winning”, Calvinists will see it as throwing the Gospel in the faces of an unregenerate world so that “the elect” can be called out, while the seeker-sensitive regions of evangelical Protestant-dom will talk about “relational evangelism”–developing relationships with nonbelievers and leveraging those relationships for the sake of the Gospel. But underneath it all, it’s all the same thing: The true work of the Kingdom is in sharing the Gospel with other people in one-on-one communication situations–whether in one-time encounters or in the course of sustained relationships.
This is very problematic for me, because my one-on-one social skills are rather sketchy. I do much better at writing and public speaking, where I have the opportunity to prepare in advance and control (to a certain extent) how I present whatever it is that I am trying to communicate. Yet these giftings, within the present culture of evangelical Protestant-dom, are not as highly valued as the ability to present the Gospel in one-on-one communication situations.
I expressed a lot of these frustrations in an earlier post from a couple of years back, entitled “Who Let the “Rabid Dogs of Evangelism” Out?????”. The title of this post was taken from a speech given by a prominent Baptist leader who was upset by declining baptism statistics in the SBC, and spoke into this by throwing down the challenge for his fellow Baptists to become “rabid dogs” for evangelism. My views on evangelism have not changed since then, so you might want to go and check that one out.
