Mission and Evangelism in a Secularizing World

Academy, Agency, and Assembly Perspectives from Canada

Narry F. Santos, Mark Naylor

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532675980
• eBook ISBN: 9781532676000
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Secularization, as a movement away from a religious orientation to life, is strong in Canada and has influence worldwide. In this volume, missiologists and practitioners across Canada consider how an agenda of Christian mission and evangelism can be advanced in a secularizing environment. How can believers be"curious and engaged rather than defensive and fearful"? What changes are required from the evangelical community so that there is productive dialogue and action in ways that maintain faithfulness to the cause of Christ? What should the approach of mission be to a new generation steeped in secular narratives? How do we answer negative caricatures of Christian mission in light of the history of Residential Schools? What examples from the past teach us about developing an irenic approach? What positive trends are currently evident in Canada and around the world that counter the secularizing narrative?These questions and more are considered in this volume by Canadian scholars who recognize the importance of being relevant to society while maintaining integrity with the Gospel message. The essays address secularism in Canadian and worldwide contexts with seriousness, insight, and an underlying theme of hope, recognizing that "God's mission has been accomplished, is being accomplished, and will be accomplished."

Part 1

Mission Perspectives from the Agency, Assembly, and Academy

1

Doing Things We Have Never Done Before

Sam Chaise

We have never been here before. The Canada in which we live has not existed until now. This means that we will need to try things we have never tried, think thoughts we have not had to think, imagine futures we have not yet seen, and act in patterns we have not yet experienced—if we want to see outcomes different from what we are seeing today. This assumption underlies everything that is in this chapter. This also means that, if we are honest about it, none of us can be certain about what we are to do. But we know that, if we keep doing what we are already doing, we will continue to see what we already see. If we want to see different outcomes, we will have to not just do things differently but rather do entirely different things.

My Context

Context matters, of course, and I speak out of a particular context. I am male, born in London, England, to parents who had emigrated from South India, and have lived almost all of my life in Canada. My parents were Christians, so I grew up in the Church. Most of my adult life, I have earned a salary from churches or Christian organizations, so I am the definition of an insider. In other words, the current system of churches and Christian agencies has “worked” for me, so perhaps I am exactly the wrong sort of person to be writing this chapter. Perhaps this chapter should be a panel discussion with people who are not a part of the Church and who have mixed feelings about Christianity.

I am fifty-five years old; that makes me a young Baby Boomer, which means, I have never known a time when Christianity was dominant in my culture. This means that I do not long for the “good old days,” because I have never known them. (As a side-bar, I would question whether they really were all that good for all peoples in Canada.) I spent many of my early years in ministry, church, and congregational planting, which means that for twenty-nine years, I have been thinking about how Gospel and culture intersect and interplay.

Canadian Context

As we begin to think about the Canadian context, we realize that there are many contexts, not just one—urban Toronto is not the same as rural Saskatchewan. At the same time, in our era of hyper-connectivity, which includes the rapid sharing of information, stories, and opinions through digital networks, these various contexts are more alike than ever before.

Something is very different in the current Canadian zeitgeist, compared to the one thirty years ago. We observe it numerically, as we measure things we think might be important, such as people in seats on a Sunday morning and dollars in offering plates. We see it in public and cultural discourses, as attitudes toward Christianity in particular and religious belief systems in general grow more negative. We participate in it relationally, as the life patterns of our friends and families (and perhaps ourselves) embody practices and values that are less expressive of God’s shalom and more expressive of non-shalom than they might have been a few decades ago.

We can see this change through different lenses: postmodernity, post-Christendom, neo-liberalism, or the triumph of subjectivist-expressivist attitudes. These and other influences have interplayed, leading to the new Canada that we face. How might we describe the salient features of this new reality? While we might debate specifics, I think we can agree that:

1. There is no belief in a single conceptual, ontological Truth that lies outside our experience and to which we aspire. We have multi-truths: your truth and my truth.

2. There is a growing rejection of Christianity. Christianity is not seen as having a positive influence in the Canadian mosaic. The question being asked today is not whether Christianity is true, but whether it is good for Canada and for being human. Increasingly, the answer is “no.”

3. There is a growing rejection of religion (of any sort) as a shaper of culture and values. We are moving past ambivalence toward religion and moving fast toward antipathy, especially when religion is seen to hinder personal freedom. Rather than desiring a secular space that values all religions and non-religion, Canada is shifting toward privileging non-religion over religion in the public square and in cultural discourse.

4. Spirituality is valued as an individualistic, private experience, but it is seen as over-reaching if it impinges on the freedoms of others.

5. “Jesus” is a positive brand, but “Christianity” is not.

Meanwhile, in the Church, we might note that evangelicalism has fragmented. The relatively recent big-tent coalition, with its iconic figures of Billy Graham and John Stott, has fragmented into multiple camps with varying labels, each seeking to be a reformation or rejection of the evangelical movement. For the most part, these fragments are not in dialogue with one another but rather in competition for attention, influence, and dollars.

How Might We Respond?

In listing some of the things that are different now than they were thirty years ago, I am not saying that these are necessarily completely bad changes. A lot of violence has been perpetrated in human history by people who believed they had found ontological truth, so maybe a little epistemological humility is good for us as a species. And while I love Jesus, I do not love everything about Christianity, so I feel little need to defend it. Maybe the fact that people like Jesus but not Christianity is not all bad. Maybe it is time for us to stop seeing the current situation as a problem but instead discern the opportunities the Spirit has put in front of us. It is different than it used to be (so that part is hard), but that does not mean that there are no positives in our environment.

How might we respond? Let me offer some thoughts. These are not everything that could be said. They are not linear nor do they build on each other. Think of them as pieces of a larger mosaic.

1. We need to acknowledge that we do not know, for sure, what to do.

We cannot be certain. We do not know where this cultural shift will end up, and it may last longer than some of our lifetimes. This means that we do not know all the steps we will have to take because the ground is going to keep shifting on us. Our journey will be more akin to an improvisational dance than a straightforward walk.

We are in a time of massive multi-polar and multi-valent change, and our job is to navigate as well as we can. This need not discourage us; the Church has been here before in the last 2,000 years. This means, though, that we need to learn how to lead when we are not certain where we are going and we need to learn how to dance steps we have never danced before.

2. We need to shift from framing evangelism as “agreeing with these ideas” to evangelism as “tour guides on an interior journey.”

Our culture does not mind conversations about spirituality, but it detests having religion or epistemic certainty marketed to it. To be a tour guide is to help others journey by responding to their questions, noting and suggesting that attention might be paid to certain things. We share our own travel experiences and suggest practices that facilitate the journey.

We need to stop insisting that others use our vocabulary or enter our language world; instead, we need to learn how to be missionaries into their language world. Rather than insisting that people enter our thought world, let us learn how to enter theirs. After all, is not God larger than our linguistic attempts at articulating him? Might we even be playfully adventurous in our tone, curious and engaged rather than defensive and fearful?

3. Let us shift from “certainty” to “confidence.”

Certainty is a product of modernity, not a product of the Spirit; certainty is usually about a body of knowledge that is “out there” that we think we can know objectively. Confidence, on the other hand, is about trusting something—trusting Someone—and trusting the story that that Someone is writing. The early Church did not try to convince people of its understanding of an ontological category called “god”; rather, this Church era declared and demonstrated that Jesus had risen from the dead and had reordered all of life into a new pattern that was observable by the people around them.

4. Let us value people’s freedom as much as God values theirs.

Jesus let people walk away from him when they disagreed. Do we do that? Or do we get mad, shaken in our confidence? We should be fans of a multi-religious, pluralist society because in that sort of society, religion is a valid topic for private and public discourse. In that sort of context, the Spirit can be in the conversation. What we should guard against is society sliding into an ideological secularism where religion as a category is privatized into the non-tangible and non-public spheres of life. We do not need a privileged place in society as Christians—after all, we worship a Savior who gave up his privilege—but we do want to co-labor with other faith groups to ensure that all faiths are at the table.

5. Let us return to an embodied apologetic, instead of keeping an apologetic that is trapped in words.

This is how the Church began. People saw something at Pentecost and wondered what was going on, so Peter told them. Or people saw the way those early Christians loved each other, so they became intrigued and decided to find out more.

A few years ago, I visited a food security project in South India and was shown its “Demonstration Farm,” where they grew small sections of various crops and showed local farmers what they were doing. In my naivety, I asked why they went to all that trouble. After all, would it not be faster and more efficient to save a step by training the farmers with the better crop-growing techniques? Our project coordinator looked me in the eye and said these simple words, “We do this because ‘seeing is believing.’ When they see the crops we are growing here, they will want to know how we do it.” In the Kingdom of God, the Church is the demonstration farm of the Kingdom because seeing is believing. When people see the Gospel, they may want to hear the Gospel. Let us learn how to be artisans of the common good,1 who are people and communities that cultivate grace and irrigate soil for the Kingdom to be planted.

6. Let us become local gardening experts.

We are not looking for a “silver bullet” (one expression of the Gospel that will work everywhere). We are not franchisors of a salvation product; we are gardeners of the kingdom. The global Chur...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Mission Perspectives from the Agency, Assembly, and Academy
• Part 2: Mission to the Next Generation
• Part 3: Mission in Global Christianity
• Part 4: Mission and Strategy for a Changing Context
• Conclusion: Next Steps for Mission and Evangelism in a Secularizing World