Leaning Both Ways at Once

Methodist Evangelistic Mission at the Intersection of Church and World

Jeffrey A. Conklin-Miller

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781498291460, 9781498291484
• eBook ISBN: 9781498291477
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

How should the Methodist tradition continue to embody its evangelistic mission? Some believe effective evangelism requires ecclesial adaptation seeking relevance to attract outsiders. But does this strategy result in the church's embrace of consumer market practices, pandering to a world of church shoppers? Others suggest the most evangelistic thing the church can do is to be the church, displaying to the world the attractive beauty of a holy community. But could this ironically distance the church from its context and neglect the many ways the church is called to engage the world?The Wesleys formed a people called Methodist, embodying an evangelistic mission combining commitments to disciplined spiritual life and vital social engagement. In this book, Conklin-Miller suggests faithful (United) Methodist evangelism requires living in the tension between the church and the world, "leaning both ways at once," emphasizing the holiness of the church as a particular people, but at the same time, being a people sent to intercede in the world as servants, advocates, and witnesses. This understanding constitutes not only a broader reframing of evangelistic mission but also a vision for the identity and agency of the church in the Wesleyan tradition: a Methodist missional ecclesiology.

1

Evangelism, Church, and World

Evangelism is a practice that is performed at boundaries and along the edges of difference. Because of that, nothing could be more important to a theology of evangelism than clarifying the nature of that difference and . . . the Christian community’s posture toward the world along those boundaries.32

Mission is certainly not just the exercise of a kind of hyperactive communications strategy. But neither is it simply sitting, and hoping somebody might notice.33

Introduction

In this chapter, I will consider the means by which the theological relationship, and more specifically, the theological distinction, between the Church and the world plays a role in a theology of evangelism. This distinction is crucial if the practice of evangelism participates in the formation of what a Wesleyan would call “holiness of heart and life.”34 If holiness at least names the difference Christian identity and practice makes, then concern for this difference should play a constitutive role in an account of how such Christian identity is formed and how Christian practices take their shape at the intersection of Church/World.

As a step toward developing such an account, first we must ask, “Why employ the frame of ‘Church/World?’” What is it about that particular theological construction that becomes so important for a conversation in the theology of evangelism? A concern for the Church’s identity and agency vis-à-vis the world is to raise questions in the domain of ecclesiology and ethics, and such an engagement, as I suggest in this book, is crucial to developing an account of evangelism. In other words, to draw a focus on the Church and the world demands accounts of each, their relationship, and what faithful evangelistic practice might look like at that intersection.

Why the Distinction of Church and World?

In conversations about the theology and practice of ecclesial renewal, congregational development, and the “missional church,” the practice of evangelism continues to inhabit troubled space. Given long-standing divisions in North American Christianity, rooted in developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embodied and described in a variety of dualisms (“modernists versus fundamentalists, liberals versus conservatives, and social gospelers versus personal gospelers,” for example), evangelism became understood as a practice primarily concerned “to shape individual convictions,” while “social action” came to describe Christian “direct action aimed at changing the social structure to bring about social justice.”35

Such divisions have played significant roles in the twentieth-century ecumenical conversation concerning the relationship between the evangelistic proclamation of the gospel and the Church’s participation in ministries seeking social justice in the world. As Norman Thomas notes, following the insights of David Bosch, “The focus of the church’s mission during the first three decades of [the twentieth] century was on evangelism.”36 From that time forward, Thomas argues, stretching from the ecumenical gathering at Tambaram in 1938 to the meeting of the World Council of Churches (WCC) at New Delhi in 1961, “the church was the primary focus,” presumably as the final destination toward which evangelistic efforts were all aimed.37 Indeed, this was part of the reason for the founding of the WCC in 1948, namely, “to support the churches in their worldwide missionary and evangelistic tasks.”38 But Thomas notes that the ground had moved by 1961, with the gathering in New Delhi, where a discernible shift of emphasis was placed on the world “as the primary focus for God’s concern.”39 Yet, as John Howard Yoder argued, the division between evangelism and social witness has roots more deeply planted in the history of the Reformation, as some place hope for renewal in a transformed spiritual life, others in the broader development of a holy society, divided by differing accounts of where the center of “historical meaning” is located.40

But Yoder introduces an interesting problem at just this point. He argues that because differing traditions of renewal locate historical meaning in different places, they cannot, finally, find peace with one another, which results in an endless “oscillation” in the Church between spiritual renewal and social renewal. What is necessary, then, is the grounding of both forms of renewal in a more primary location for historical meaning, namely, in the “People of God.” The identification of the Church as a particular “People” offers an ecclesiological identity that is instructive to an account of evangelistic mission. Bryan Stone, for example, drawing on these insights, claims that “Christian evangelism requires as a condition of its very possibility the presence in the world, though distinct from the world, of a visible people, a new society, into which persons may be invited and formed.”41 However, because the Church has lost much of this sense of its own identity and mission in the world, Stone rightly suggests that this “neglect of Peoplehood may well be the central challenge facing Christian evangelism.”42

The possibility for such a Peoplehood is premised on a theological understanding of the differentiation of Church/World. For Yoder, and thus, for Stone, that which is world is still God’s creation, but it is a part of creation that is distinguished from the Church not in orders of being, but rather by virtue of its resistance to the confession that Jesus is Lord. In Yoder’s words, “Church and world are not two compartments under separate legislation or two institutions with contradictory assignments, but two levels of pertinence of the same Lordshi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Evangelism, Church, and World
• Chapter 2: The World
• Chapter 3: The Church
• Chapter 4: Intercessory Evangelism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography