The Mystic Way of Evangelism

A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach

Elaine A. Heath

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780801098598
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493410323
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Elaine Heath brings a fresh perspective to the theory and practice of evangelism by approaching it through contemplative spirituality. This thoroughly revised edition includes a new study guide.

Praise for the First Edition

Outreach Resource of the Year Award Winner

"[Heath's] biographies of the mystics are inspiring, and her emphases on suffering and spiritual depth as the antidote to a prepackaged, method-obsessed, consumer-oriented evangelistic approach are refreshing."--Outreach

Part One
Purgation

One
Into the Night

A dark night of the soul is descending on the church in the United States. The signs are everywhere: a steady decline in church membership, especially among mainline denominations;1 a striking increase in the percentage of Americans who do not attend church;2 dropping numbers of young adults preparing for ordained ministry;3 the loss of moral authority and credibility among clergy and churches due to widespread sex scandals and financial misconduct at the hands of clergy;4 an increasing hermeneutic of suspicion toward the church by the Internal Revenue Service; and other forms of distancing between American civic and religious life.5 With the growth of religious pluralism and spiritual syncretism in postmodern culture, the church’s historic primacy as America’s spiritual and moral compass continues to erode. As Philip Jenkins notes, while the church (especially Pentecostalism) is growing rapidly in the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, the era of Christendom in the United States is over.6

Many Christians view the decline of Western Christendom with alarm, as if God had fallen from heaven. Enormous effort is put forth to launch church growth programs to shore up membership, increase giving, and keep denominational ships afloat. But the history of God’s people is a history of life cycles, a history of clarity about call and identity, followed by complacence, followed by collusion with the powers, followed by catastrophic loss. Contrary to being a disaster, the exilic experiences of loss and marginalization are what are needed to restore the church to its evangelistic place. On the margins of society the church will once again find its God-given voice to speak to the dominant culture in subversive ways, resisting the powers and principalities, standing against the seduction of the status quo. The church will once again become a prophetic, evangelistic, alternative community, offering to the world a model of life that is radically “other,” life-giving, loving, healing, liberating. This kind of community is not possible for the church of Christendom. Christendom opposes prophetic community with its upside-down power and its exposure of golden calves.

Thus Walter Brueggemann describes the declining Western church as the church in exile, comparing it to the Jews exiled in Babylon. The church’s exile is cultural rather than geographic, but holds the same kind of disorientation, anxiety, and intensity of grief over the glory having left the temple.7 Brueggemann disturbs us with the reminder, “In the end, it is God and not the Babylonians who terminated the Temple project.”8 Ironically, to once again become evangelistic in the healthiest, most holistic sense, the church in America needs the “severe mercy” of great loss.

The dark night of the soul is precisely that—a divinely initiated process of loss—so that the accretions of the world, the flesh, and the devil may be recognized and released. It is a process of detachment from disordered affections, a process of purgation and de-selfing.9 Though the dark night is perilous, with no guarantee of a good outcome, it holds the possibility of new beginnings. Out of the night the church could emerge into a dawn of freedom and fidelity.

The dark night is here, even now. While the sun sets on Christendom in the West, the saints, mystics, and martyrs beckon to the church as a great cloud of witnesses, calling us to transformation. The church will persevere through the night and emerge alive on the other side, not because of church programs, but because God’s love has kept it.10 But to get there, we need the wisdom of the mystics, the holy ones of God.

The Gift of Detachment

While many Christian mystics and saints have described experiences of a dark night, the term is associated primarily with John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite whose stunning poem Dark Night of the Soul continues to challenge and nourish Christians from many spiritual traditions. The depth and breadth of meaning in John’s ascetical theology is beyond the limits of this discussion and has been well described from diverse perspectives.11 John distinguishes between active and passive nights of the senses, and active and passive nights of the spirit, for example. Each of these aspects of the night is purgative, freeing the soul from attachments that hinder the ability to receive and give God’s love. Jessie Penn-Lewis, writing from the Keswick movement more than three hundred years later, described the dark night using her own language and pneumatological framework, which, though less intricate than that of the great Carmelite reformer, contains the same general meaning. The night is the time to surrender the “spiritually religious self,” religious views, old ways, thought patterns, and activities that have become idolatrous substitutes for God in and of themselves. “If we surrender even the manifest presence of God, we become rooted and fixed in God. Not that He wants to take all away, but He wants us to surrender, that He might reveal himself as an abiding reality.”12 In consideration of the process of the night for the church, then, it is helpful to take a broader view of the night as described from a wider theological spectrum rather than a narrow, strictly Carmelite perspective.

In the Bible we find many stories of God’s people in the night. Sometimes in these narratives the night has to do with the apparent thwarting of the divine call or promise in an individual’s life. We see this in Joseph’s years of imprisonment in Egypt, Moses’s decades as a shepherd, David’s long years of exile during Saul’s increasingly paranoid reign. The night is also revealed in God’s people as they experience the seeming absence of God during times of oppression or suffering. It is revealed in the barren yearning of Sarah, Leah, and Hannah; in Habakkuk’s complaint; in Jeremiah’s anguished cry; and in the mystery of Job’s suffering. The dark night reaches its climax in the cry of Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”13

The detachment described by so many who have traversed the night is often from religious rigidity, or from religious activity that has become in itself a god. This detachment takes place gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, at other times with great struggle and grief. Often those who are in the night are unaware of the nature of their attachments, especially religious attachments. One thinks of Nicodemus, for example, who surreptitiously questioned Jesus about the spiritual path. Nicodemus was unable to name for himself the religious ossification that prevented him from seeing the kingdom of God, though there were intimations drawing him to Christ.14

Gerald May notes, “Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating. But this is not why the night is called ‘dark.’ The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding.”15 One of the clear signs of a dark night is its very obscurity, as if an opaque veil protects the cleansing, purifying work.

The cumulative effect of the dark night when embraced by God’s people is the deconstruction of self-centeredness and the removal of subtle idolatry in terms of mistaking God for religious feeling and activity, or created things, or viewing God as one more “thing.” God is nada, no “thing.” The dark night brings about a necessary detachment so that God’s people may freely love all things in and through the love of God rather than in and of themselves. Religious activities, rituals, and practices especially are cleansed so that they are now, in the oft-quoted imagery of Thomas Merton, fingers pointing to the moon and no longer mistaken for the moon itself. The fruit of the night is about the transformation of relationships into expressions of love of God and neighbor, and love of self for the sake of God.16

May is correct in his assessment that John of the Cross has often been misunderstood by subsequent interpreters, especially when used to promote negative images of God.17 For the love of God is present and active in the night, bringing about growth, healing, and freedom, gifts of detachment from enmeshed relationships, compulsions, addictions, and idolatries that are not immediately apparent to those who have yet to emerge from the night.18

In some sense the emergence from the night is never complete in this life, for the process of God’s leading to further growth and freedom in obscurity is lifelong. It is part of the process of sanctification,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Purgation
• One Into the Night
• Part Two: Illumination
• Two Love Is God’s Meaning
• Three Broken Bread and Poured-Out Wine
• Four Coming Home to Love
• Five Healing the Threefold Wound
• Six Redeeming the Earth
• Part Three: Union
• Seven A Hermeneutic of Love
• Eight Giving Ourselves Away
• Nine Homing Prayer
• Ten New Tongues of Fire
• Eleven Your Will Be Done on Earth
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Study Guide
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover