Say It Again

I’m over at Stand Firm this morning.

In all the reading I did a while ago about Cancel Culture, and then after that Virtue Signaling, the thing that interested me most was the shift to what one might call a New Evangelism. I mean, no one has called it that. It is only occurring to me this moment as I contemplate the readings for today but I think it is exactly the term I have been searching around for.

Abram in the Old Testament Lesson, is called by God away from his home and his family and is sent into another land where he will become “a great nation.” After many long plodding chapters and centuries, this great nation is swept up around the throne in Revelation, praising the Lord. The one nation turns out to be not the usual kind, all descended biologically from one ancestor, but rather from every “tribe, and people, and language.” Midway between the two Jesus sends out, that is commissions (it’s called The Great Commission), his friends to “make disciples of all nations.” And so for centuries, Christians have basically heeded the call, taking the good news about Jesus to every place, to every people, because Jesus himself told them to.

Of course, the message that he gives is excessively embarrassing. It is not very nice to have to explain why Jesus coming into the world is such good news (because we are so bad), and just now, it is more out of fashion than ever. Just as the message has gone into all the corners of the world, so have Christians bumbled along, sometimes preferring to argue about what the message means, and how it should be expressed, and to both feel sorry about their own failures, and the failures of others now and in the past, and often to castigate each other for making such a hash of the project. When people who don’t yet belong to this “Great Nation” stumble across some outpost of it, they don’t generally find themselves landing on the word “great,” nor “nation” for that matter. It looks mostly like a pathetic group of superstitious scolds who should really go away and try something else.

Between Jesus’ “Great Commission” and the “Great Gathering” around his throne is the Valley of the Shadow of Failure, frustration, confusion, and defeat. Which is another reason why the message doesn’t often bring in whole throngs of people wanting to get in on such a good deal.

Still, God made man and woman together in his own image, in his image and likeness created he them, and one of the things that is central to that creation is the business of telling other people things, call it “Evangelism.” We are, in some mysterious sense, hard-wired to pass on news, of one kind or another. We will do it even when we don’t want to, even when we’re not really trying, even when we think we are not doing it. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks….read the rest here!