No Longer Strangers

Transforming Evangelism with Immigrant Communities

Eugene Cho, Samira Izadi Page, Eugene Cho, Samira Izadi Page

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461153
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What does evangelism look like at its best?

Evangelism can hurt sometimes. Well-meaning Christians who welcome immigrants and refugees and share the gospel with them will often alienate the very people they are trying to serve through cultural misconceptions or insensitivity to their life experiences. In No Longer Strangers, diverse voices lay out a vision for a healthier evangelism that can honor the most vulnerable—many of whom have lived through trauma, oppression, persecution, and the effects of colonialism—while foregrounding the message of the gospel.

With perspectives from immigrants and refugees, and pastors and theologians (some of whom are immigrants themselves), this book offers guidance for every church, missional institution, and individual Christian in navigating the power dynamics embedded in differences of culture, race, and language. Every contributor wholeheartedly affirms the goodness and importance of evangelism as part of Christian discipleship while guiding the reader away from the kind of evangelism that hurts, toward the kind of evangelism that heals.

1

EVANGELISM AND THE WAY OF THE CROSS

Andrew F. Bush

As the cold and gloomy day slipped into night, a chilling wind blew through the streets of Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. Late February still held enough of winter to blow New Yorkers to shelter. With not much more than spare change in my pocket, the best I could find was a fast-food eatery. The counter was open to the sidewalk, but there was some warmth from the grills. A fifteen-cent cup of hot coffee was its own comfort. Coffee was cheaper in 1972.

Sensing the presence of someone hovering behind me, I jammed my wallet deeper in my jeans pocket. Then someone said, “Excuse me. May we talk to you?” Swiveling on my stool, I faced two teenagers. They looked like they were fifteen or sixteen years of age. Before I could ask them to leave me alone, the taller one spoke:

“May we ask you a question? Do you know where you will spend eternity?”

Flustered by this abrupt question, I shot back, “What? Who does?”

“You can know where you will spend eternity if you put your faith in Jesus,” he answered. “But you have to believe in him. The Bible says that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

Okay, I thought to myself. We are talking about religion. I needed a religious answer. “I grew up in church. I’m not into that now,” I said with enough contempt that I hoped they would be on their way.

No such luck.

The same fellow pressed on. “You can have a new life if you receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior. We could stand here all day and tell you about Jesus …”

“It’s night. And it’s cold,” I protested.

“… but you will only know how good believing in Jesus is if you receive him yourself.”

With their chance to drive home their witness quickly slipping by, the other young man tried to close their witness convincingly. He said, “It’s like drinking a cold glass of lemonade on a hot summer day. We could tell you about it, but if you had never tasted it yourself, you wouldn’t really know how good it is.”

It was a strange metaphor for a cold night. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Thanks for your concern. But I’m going to finish my coffee.”

I started to turn away, but one of the guys quickly pulled out a small pamphlet from his jacket pocket and extended it toward me. “Please take this and read it,” he implored. It said something about “Salvation in Jesus” on the cover. Hoping to end the conversation, I took it as nonchalantly as possible, slipping it quickly into my pocket. The dauntless young witnesses for Jesus wished me well and headed out into the night.

That was unusual, I thought to myself. I had been witnessed to by two street preachers. Well, it was New York City. You bump into all kinds on its streets.

Later that evening in the apartment where a friend was letting me couch-surf, I pulled the gospel tract out and looked it over. On the cover was a silhouette of Jesus. Inside was a list of Bible verses. On the back was a short prayer that urged the reader to ask God to make the love of Jesus real to him or her.

Alone that night, I slipped onto my knees. Perhaps it was the sincerity of the young Christian witnesses. Perhaps it was my gnawing loneliness that could not be suppressed. Whatever the reason, I prayed for the love of Jesus to be made real to me.

Two years would pass, but that prayer was answered. I was living among counterculture fellow travelers in northern New Mexico who had dropped out, leaving their college studies, as I did, or uptight jobs in the cities. From outward appearances I was as far removed as one could be from the strictures of religion. I would soon discover I was not out of reach of the love of God.

In my journeys, another witness for Jesus had given me a Bible. I had stuffed it in the bottom of my backpack, where it was largely forgotten. One day, for some reason, I pulled it out and started to read. Its words seemed to come alive. Who was this amazing man, Jesus, who both spoke words of forgiveness and called people to forsake their sin (John 8:11)? After several months of contemplating the life of Jesus, the love of God came flooding into my life. The revelation of that love broke through the fog of my confusion. The love of Jesus melted my stubbornness. I became a follower of Jesus. Forty-five years later, Jesus remains as beautiful, radical, and authoritative to me as on that first day.

A Legacy of Witness

Street preaching, distributing gospel tracts to strangers, is probably the most ridiculed form of Christian witness. Such activity is reckoned to be rude, intrusive, fanatical, and ineffective. Can someone who accosts strangers in public places and challenges them to make a decision to believe in Jesus on the spot be taken seriously? How can God be involved in anything so apparently foolish?

Those young men in New York City had no way of knowing it, but in spite of the apparent futility of their efforts, they sowed a spiritual seed in my life that would bear fruit in God’s time. They also were continuing the long line of women and men who have been witnesses of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ that began with the first believers in Jesus as recorded in the book of Acts and continues to the present.

A brief overview of the heritage of today’s evangelism should begin with Peter, the wavering apostle who denied the Lord Jesus three times after the arrest of Jesus (Luke 22:54–62). By the force of the reality of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, Peter’s doubt was replaced by faith. The reality of Christ’s resurrection was driven home to Peter by a large haul of fish that apparently materialized at Christ’s command. From that same catch Christ Jesus cooked a breakfast of fish for Peter and the other fishermen on the Galilean shore (John 21:1–14). Jesus had risen indeed!

Before he ascended to heaven from the Mount of Olives, the resurrected Jesus promised his followers that the Spirit of God would be given to them. Furthermore, when the disciples of Jesus received the power of God through the Spirit, Jesus said they would be his witnesses to the farthest reaches of the world (Acts 1:8).

A few weeks later, on the Jewish feast day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God did indeed dramatically fall upon the disciples who were praying in Jerusalem (Acts 2:1–8). Emboldened by the Spirit, Peter stood up and proclaimed the first public evangelistic message of the Christian community. He declared that Jesus, who had been crucified, had risen from the dead. This remarkable account describes the result of Peter’s evangelism: “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’ Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven….’ Those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added” (Acts 2:37–38, 41).

Three thousand people accepted Peter’s message of the euangelion,¹ the good news of salvation in Jesus! This was the first example that “God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21). The emerging community of believers in Jesus as the Savior and Lord, with its burning passion to communicate the good news, continued to grow.

Remarkably, when the first Christians were scattered from Jerusalem because of persecution, the Bible says they “went from place to place, proclaiming the word” (Acts 8:4). The canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had not yet been written. What did they proclaim? Certainly, it was this central message of the forgiveness of sins and of eternal life that there is in faith in Jesus Christ. How wonderful it would have been to hear those first evangelists! They were ordinary folks—women, men, and perhaps even some children—who had experienced new life in Jesus.

Then, in one of the greatest conversions of the twenty centuries of Christianity, Saul, the man who had led the persecution of the Jerusalem church that caused Christians to flee, had his own encounter with the glorified Christ Jesus. What an encounter it was! While Saul was on his way to arrest Jewish followers of Jesus in Damascus, bright lights shone from heaven and Jesus spoke aloud, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:1–19). Saul was smitten in conscience and brought to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

Saul, better known as the apostle Paul, more than any of the first disciples, became the one who paved the way for the gospel to be shared with gentile nations. His passion for the euangelion became the driving force of his life. He declared in his letter to the believers in Rome that he was “a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (Rom. 1:1). Paul declared that he would adopt whatever lifestyle would be necessary so “that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings” (1 Cor. 9:22–23). He sought to pass on this same zeal to his disciples, such as Timothy, whom he exhorted to “do the work of an evangelist” (2 Tim. 4:5).

The Dramatic Spread of the Gospel

In the first two centuries after Christ, the fervor to share the good news of God’s salvation in Jesus caused the steady spread of the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. Early followers of Jesus not only declared a message, they also conveyed through radical acts of servanthood the humility and the love of Jesus for all people. Historians describe that when the plague struck a city, causing its inhabitants to flee to the countryside, Christians intentionally went into the cities to care for the dying—and often died by their side. Unwanted newborns, thrown onto the public garbage heap to die of exposure, were rescued by Christians, who raised them as their own.² Even callous citizens of Rome were moved by the faith of devout Christians who gave thanks to God while being torn to pieces by wild beasts in the public arena.³

Such faith and witness won followers for Christ in all sectors of society in the Roman Empire. Three hundred years after Christ, it is estimated that one of every ten citizens in the empire—or about five million people—was a Christian!⁴

Since those first centuries, the Christian faith has spread throughout the world as women and men, gripped with the same fervor, proclaimed the good news of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ. Some of the most notable evangelists along the way include Patrick, who evangelized Ireland in the fifth century; the brothers Methodius and Cyril, who translated the Bible into Slavic languages in the ninth century; Francis of Assisi, who took the gospel out of the church and monastery and into the streets of Italy in the thirteenth century; and the Moravian community of Herrnhut in Germany, which prayed around the clock for one hundred years in the eighteenth century. Herrnhut became the first Protestant community to intentionally send out missionary teams to share the gospel in far-flung lands. John Wesley, it is reported, rode 250,000 miles on horseback to spread the gospel throughout England in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century was an era of dramatic global expansion of the Christian faith. Important gospel messengers included evangelist Phoebe Palmer in the United States, Ann Haseltine Judson in Burma, and Charlotte “Lottie” Moon in China.⁵

Billy Graham was one of the most influential Christians in the twentieth century. He preached the gospel face-to-face to more people—210 million, including satellite feeds—than perhaps anyone in history.⁶ He was a major catalyst for evangelism. At an international conference on evangelism in Amsterdam in 1983, Graham declared that Christians should “preach the gospel with urgency; preach it for decision. You may be speaking to some people who will hear the gospel for the last time. Preach it to bring your hearers to Jesus Christ.”⁷

This cry for evangelism represents the core value of evangelical Christians, who celebrated Billy Graham’s evangelistic “crusades” as high points of their movement. In the same effort to have as many people as possible hear the gospel of salvation in Christ Jesus, D. James Kennedy, a Presbyterian minister, founded Evangelism Explosion International in 1974.⁸ This program trains laypeople to share the gospel. It has been used by thousands of churches.

What has been the result of these centuries of evangelism by both luminaries and rank-and-file Christians? Just as when Peter preached the gospel on the day of Pentecost and thousands received the message by faith and were baptized, the preaching of the gospel throughout the centuries has caused the dramatic global growth of the Christian faith. Although the majority of Christians in the world have resided in the West for several centuries, Christianity has become a vital, global movement. In fact, today more Christians reside outside of the West (Europe, Great Britain, and the United States) than within it. Christian communities in Africa, Asia, and South America are growing much faster than those in the West.⁹

Evangelism, from the apostle Paul to Billy Graham, has been central to Christian faith. Earnest Christians have lived and died to advance the gospel of Jesus in the world. So, is it reasonable to conclude that as Christians face the twenty-first century, they should continue to evangelize whenever and wherever possible? To answer this, we need to consider another scenario of attempted evangelism—and the possibility that evangelistic fervor can also hurt.

When Evangelism Hurts

Consider this hypothetical situation involving fictional characters.

Ahmad, his wife, Suhad, and two small children, Saleh and Imad, are Syrian Muslim refugees. They fled their home in Idlib in northwestern Syria when the city was rocked by the conflict between the Syrian army and antigovernment insurgents in 2017. The family miraculously survived a perilous sea crossing from Turkey to Cyprus. Ahmad and his family spent months in a barren detention center before they were given a visa to the United States.

Their immigration to the United States was in part facilitated by the fictional Christian Refugee Entry and Employment Diakonia (CREED). CREED workers met Ahmad and his family on their arrival at the Atlanta airport. They drove them to a furnished apartment near other resettled refugees. In subsequent weeks, CREED volunteers delivered prepared meals and helped drive Suhad and Ahmad to government offices to continue their immigration process.

Suhad and Ahmad were grateful for the kindness of the workers. They kn...