Transforming Evangelism

David Gortner, James Lemler

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780898695854
• eBook ISBN: 9780898698190
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

An exploration of the Christian mission of Evangelism in the context of the Episcopal faith.

At once "travel guide" and vision for the future, the Transformation series is good news for the Episcopal Church at a time of fast and furious demographic and social change. Series contributors - recognized experts in their fields - analyze our present plight, point to the seeds of change already at work transforming the church, and outline a positive new way forward. What kinds of churches are most ready for transformation? What are the essential tools? What will give us strength, direction, and purpose to the journey?

Each volume of the series will:

• Explain why a changed vision is essential
• Give robust theological and biblical foundations
• Offer a guide to best practices and positive trends in churches large and small.
• Describe the necessary tools for change
• Imagine how transformation will look

How can Episcopalians reclaim evangelism primarily as an enriching spiritual practice? How soon will we recognize that our traditional hands-off approach has led to a crisis of evangelism with our own children? How can we learn to practice evangelism in an multicultural and multifaith society? and to what purpose? What styles and practices of spirituality do most to enrich our sense of evangelical calling?

These are some of the questions David Gortner asks in this book on evangelism for clergy and congregational discussion. He delivers both good and bad news about Episcopalians and evangelism, and provides models and spiritual practices to feed the growing hunger in our churches for good news.

chapter one

“Go Therefore and
Make Disciples”

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19–20a)

Evangelism is your natural expression of gratitude for God’s goodness. Gratitude and wonder, born of grace, drive evangelism, propelling you outward beyond yourself to places you have not gone before. Your story compels you to give yourself to others, expressing in word and deed the wonder and delight of God’s love for you and all humanity. In the process of offering your stories and hearing the stories of other, you help create new community. After hearing Jesus name her honestly and without reproach, the Samaritan woman is so amazed that she runs to tell others about her encounter. She doesn’t have eloquent words—she is simply straightforward about her experience, and asks a question of the heart: “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” (John 4:29).

Go. Make disciples. Baptize. Teach. These are highly active words. Jesus invites his disciples, stunned and giddy with wonder and joy, up onto a mountain at the boundaries of their known world to witness his departure and to look beyond their own horizons. There, he invites them further into the pilgrimage of evangelistic life: to spread good news, to find kindred souls and searchers for God wherever they go, to share their stories of encounter with Jesus, and to bring people the promise of new life and enduring love in God.

Evangelism is a spiritual practice: active—and receptive. Just as in prayer, study, and acts of compassion, in evangelism you experience a sense of your movement not being entirely your own. Receptive to the Holy Spirit’s activity within you—and trusting that the Spirit is active in others all around you—you move into action as the Spirit’s partner. You become actively attuned to seeing and celebrating the presence of Christ already at work in the lives of others before you arrived on the scene. Energized by your active and practiced gratitude for all that you have received as gift from God, you enter your public life daily with a readiness to share your gratitude and wonder with others—and to hear their own experiences of God’s abundant goodness. This kind of evangelism, the giving of your delight, returns to you abundantly as you are nurtured and strengthened by listening for and sharing good news.

True evangelism emerges only out of your own transformation. Your message of hope, of abiding faith, of joy—your “song of love unknown”—can only become natural, free, and open when you recall for yourself those moments of rescue, reorienting, awakening, and invigoration that are the result of God’s work within and around you.

It is your stories of personal transformation that make evangelism possible. They are the source of energy propelling you toward others with the urgency of gratitude and wonder. Fear slips away as you trust, and then learn, that God is working in others like God has worked in you—that transformation is happening or ready to happen all around you. The practice of evangelism grows stronger as you allow the Spirit to awaken in you the love of others that God already has for them. It continues to transform you and your perceptions of the world as you willingly embrace a discipline of listening in a new way to people in your everyday encounters.

This book attempts to offer a new understanding of evangelism—not as a duty to be performed but as the practice of expressing our delight and wonder at the work of God. Evangelism is not something to be institutionalized or programmed, but is the work of individuals and communities bearing witness to Christ in their own unique ways. Evangelism is not something one simply does to another for another’s sake, but is a spiritual discipline that nurtures and transforms the one who bears good news and recognizes God at work in others.

Unfortunately, since rejecting the religious passion roused by George Whitefield, John Wesley, Devereux Jarratt, and other leaders of the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, the Episcopal Church has never been comfortable with evangelism outside of foreign mission. We inherited some of our reticence from the Church of England, which, although supportive of foreign mission at different points in its history, has its own history of resistance—until recently—to the ideas and practices of evangelism. And in the religious culture surrounding us, we sometimes see and hear examples of ugly and unhappy evangelism, motivated by guilt rather than gratitude, delivered with arrogance rather than humble mutuality, and offered through canned rhetoric and emotional manipulation rather than genuine, heartfelt human story. But evangelism doesn’t have to be this way. For a change of mind and habit to take place, we must first understand the assumptions that have both directly and indirectly undermined evangelism, and begin to identify those practices that have engaged evangelism effectively in the Episcopal Church. This will take self-recognition on our part. It will also require a scriptural and theological reimagining of evangelism—a new vision of what evangelism might be—with the assurance that others are already practicing this kind of evangelism and that we can indeed learn something new.

I hope that this book can in some small way help to transform our habits of evangelism. In this chapter, we will examine the Episcopal Church’s attitudes to evangelism and its implicit and unquestioned barriers to personal evangelistic work. In chapter two, we will seek a new theological vision for evangelism that follows the leading of the Holy Spirit in a holy pilgrimage that recognizes the Spirit’s work in our own lives and in the lives of those we meet. We will then hear in chapter three the stories of real people and real faith communities that have actually embraced evangelism as a spiritual practice. An array of exercises follows in chapter four that will encourage the development of spiritually grounded evangelistic habits. And in the final pages we will consider several ideas and images for our future as fellow pilgrims together, embracing the practices of individual and interpersonal evangelism rooted in the hearing and sharing of stories as part of the great and continuously unfolding story of God’s redemptive work.

two stories

I grew up a “mongrel Christian”—the child of Lutheran parents, one American Lutheran (which later became part of the ELCA), the other Missouri Synod. A few years after my baptism as an infant, my parents left their Lutheran heritage behind, and we embarked as a family on a spiritual pilgrimage through multiple denominations—Methodist, Presbyterian, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Presbyterian (again), and Evangelical Mennonite. Our spiritual sojourn at times coincided with geographic relocation, as we left our Pennsylvania origins and followed my parents’ unfolding careers and callings to New Jersey and then Indiana. There, during high school, and a few years later in college in Illinois, I began playing piano and organ in various churches—United Brethren, Roman Catholic, and, finally, Episcopal.

The small Episcopal mission church where I played was a bit “lackluster” in appeal when I started there. But over a period of four short years, I saw tremendous, steady transformation of spirit from a weary and somewhat embittered community to a fellowship of energy, exuberance, and deep and joyful celebration of faith. The change of heart I saw in people struck me deeply, and I found people who were profoundly genuine about their faith in God and who celebrated the love of Christ, while still being very real and honest about who they were as human beings.

Nonetheless, despite such a positive experience of congregational renewal, this Episcopal mission community expressed an unwavering aversion to the word “evangelism.” Members were happy to reach out to people who entered the doors of the church—but they did not warm up to the idea of bearing their life of faith out into public places and speaking to people in the surrounding community. Across the slow-moving muddy river behind the church sat a large apartment complex. Our new vicar, along with several of us, suggested to church leaders and choir members that we set aside time to go meet people in the apartment complex, talk to them about our growing joy in the Christian life, and invite them to our church. The responses ranged from quizzical silence to a noncommittal “Oh, that’s interesting” to outright resistance. I will never forget one choir member’s words: “Why do we need to talk to people in the neighboring apartment complex? They can see the church plainly—if they are interested or curious, they will come.”

Another story. A few years ago, when I was leading a workshop on young adult ministry in an eastern diocese, Sarah, a high school senior, spoke up and told us how her church had dismissed her interest in forming a congregation-based young adult ministry. Sarah was clearly dedicated to her church and devoted to her faith; she was delighting in a vibrant high school youth ministry. She and her friends had participated regularly not only in her local youth group, but in diocesan events, camps, and the national Episcopal Youth Event. Her church also had a definite commitment to ministry with and by its youth, and to the raising up of young leaders in the church: Sarah was a full voting member of the parish vestry and worked alongside other lay people in supporting and strengthening the ministries of the congregation.

Sarah wanted the dynamic fellowship of her peers to continue beyond high school. She came to the vestry with a proposal: to create a post-high school, young adult ministry group that would allow young people to continue their journeys together and to support one another in the faith. “I had had this great experience, and I looked down the road and saw that there was nothing for us as young adults after high school. I wanted the church to help us create something.” Sarah was surprised by the vestry’s lack of enthusiasm. But she was even more surprised when a late middle-aged woman on the vestry responded, “Oh, honey, this is the time when you will go away for a time, and have adventures, and do some things you might regret. And then you’ll come back, and we’ll forgive you, and we will all be together again.”

These two stories exemplify some common assumptions and habits that undermine our efforts in evangelism in the Episcopal Church. In the first story, good Episcopalians limited themselves to the common assumption of “red door evangelism”: “If we paint the door red, then people will notice what a beautiful red door we have, and they will be curious and come inside to find out what it is all about.” This passive means of engaging in evangelism ignores the active response Jesus asked of us in the first clause of the Great Commission: “Go and make disciples.” The second story makes explicit a common assumption of older church members regarding upcoming generations: “Sure, young people will leave for a time and rebel against church, but they will come back when they are more settled—perhaps when they are married, but surely when they have children, a mortgage, and pledgeable income.” More pointedly, this story betrays an underlying laissez-faire tradition of evangelism with upcoming generations that dismisses the last clause of the Great Commission: “Teach them.”

the mis-practice and
non-practice of evangelism

During the heyday of mainline Protestantism in the mid-twentieth century, churches grew quickly—more people came to church, more people joined, more programs were developed, and membership and involvement in a religious community was not only widely accepted but expected in American society. The growth curve reached its peak during the decade following World War II, when many denominations engaged in programs of rapid expansion and vigorous new member recruitment. And at first, people responded. They came, joined, and participated in religious communities—with widely varying degrees of interest, understanding, or investment in Christian life and faith. And mainline denominations enjoyed a sense of social prominence, respect, and public influence.

Episcopal churches participated in this general campaign of growth while continuing a long-standing pattern of “habitualized institutional Christianity”— concluding that people would perpetually sustain their denominational allegiance, and that denominational membership was essentially the same as Christian commitment. Two assumptions prevailed: 1) We are an American religious institution and part of the identity of what it means to be American; 2) Our unique culture of habitual expressions of religious life will continue from generation to generation, as our children carry on the traditions we ourselves inherited or created.

When church people start talking about putting people in the pews, they’re already speaking the language of decline. If our focus is to receive the life God is to give us, and live that transformed life, the question of evangelism takes care of itself. — Bishop Marc Andrus

Bishop Claude Payne and Hamilton Beazley discussed the “maintenance model” of Christian community in their book Reclaiming the Great Commission, pointing out how the union of church and empire locked the church into a maintenance model that has continued since the time of Constantine. This “maintenance” approach to congregational ministry in the preindustrial and early industrial periods was perhaps legitimate. For centuries church membership had been geographically defined by residence in nearby neighborhoods and communities (what Anglicans and Roman Catholics called “the parish”). Religious identity was closely tied to cultural or ethnic identity, and adult children were more likely to settle in homes near their parents and thus more likely to continue attending the church of their birth.

But in the face of ever-increasing social mobility, steadily declining membership, and decreasing denominational loyalty, the “maintenance” approach is no longer tenable, and the church is slowly but steadily moving to adopt a “mission” approach to ministry. As we move into the twenty-first century, a number of dioceses, congregations, and ministries in the Episcopal Church are working to adopt a more mission-oriented approach to our religious life.

However, the institutional habits of generations continue to perpetuate a low regard for evangelism. Many of my lay and ordained colleagues in the Episcopal Church still wince at the word “evangelism,” as it conjures up images of televangelists, mean-spirited street preachers, incendiary Jack Chick tracts, and Jehovah’s Witness missionaries knocking at one’s door. The maintenance approach over generat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• a note from the publisher
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. “Go Therefore and Make Disciples”
• 2. “The Road to Jerusalem is in the Heart”
• 3. Living the Pilgrim Faith: Models of Evangelism
• 4. With Open and Courageous Hearts: Tools for Evangelism
• 5. “Were Not Our Hearts Burning Within Us?”
• A Guide for Discussion
• Resources
• Notes and Sources