The Importance of Telling: Genuine Evangelism”

  (Above: Peter Marshall)    (Lectionary for January 15, 2017  Psalm 40)

Because I am a long-time United Methodist clergyman, I have had difficulty embracing the notion of evangelism, that idea that part of my work was to convince others that my way of construing the world should by necessity be their way, too. I have rebelled against this notion since my ordination in 1970. I readily admit that my fear and loathing of this idea has only increased the longer I have lived.

This may sound very odd coming from the lips of one who has preached in over 1000 churches in nearly every state and 20 countries. Included in those preaching events were numerous occasions called “revivals,” where the basic point of the thing appeared to be that the preacher, me, was precisely in the business of telling an assembled crowd that the Christian thing was the only thing, and, by implication, any other thing was clearly secondary, not as good, or to be avoided like the dangerous foolishness it is. Yet, if my call to preach involves “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” a slogan my denomination has long espoused, and if I do not in fact think that that is precisely my job, then what is it I think I am doing when I stand in a pulpit and attempt to proclaim the word? Am I in the end only a charlatan, a mountebank, one who announces one thing but believes and practices another? (Right: a holiness preacher and farmer)

I admit that I have long been conflicted about this. I am a Christian, and do not hesitate to say so, yet I have no special conviction about certain “Christian” beliefs that seem to be absolutely essential to others who claim Christianity. I have no interest in a virgin birth belief, joining there the gospels of Mark and John who had no interest either; I do not believe that Jesus rose physically from the dead, though I stake my life on the narrative that describes it; and finally, I have no intent ever to stand on a street corner and harangue people into my particular construal of this faith, warning them that their refusal will lead them to a most uncomfortable and very warm eternity, because I do not believe that the God I know would be so monstrous as to consign any of the creatures God has made to an eternity of torment for one lifetime of poor choices. With Sartre, I imagine hell to be “other people,” or, if I may add, my human self as well.

Well then, John; just what are you doing in all those Christian pulpits? Perhaps Ps. 40 offers some clues. After all, I have some preaching assignments coming up in the next few months, and it would behoove me to express my reasons for accepting those assignments beyond the delightful notoriety and honoraria they promise.

My central task as a preacher is to announce what I know about the God I love. Concomitantly, it is not my task to convince anyone else that they should become like me. In fact, I might go so far as to say that if anyone aspires to be like me as a result of what I have said, I may have failed that basic task. Rather than be like me, I hope that they will see something of God that they previously have not seen, and (Above left: prophet Jones)  thereby draw closer to God, becoming more of themselves in the process. Now, if I can define evangelism like that, then count me in.

The poet of Ps.40 gets this right. “I waited with great patience for YHWH,” he/she begins (I repeat what I have long believed that it is not at all out the question that a woman could have written some psalms. The Bible is replete with the conviction that women were for eons the historians of the tribes, composing and singing poems again and again. And the superscription of this psalm, usually translated “David’s song,” could just as easily be read as “a song to David,” who became before the final collection of the psalms, the patron saint of music in Israel). YHWH’s response to the patience of the psalmist is to “incline to me, bend toward me, and to hear my cry” (Ps 40:1). And the psalmist is convinced that she has been heard, because she “has been drawn up from the chaotic pit, lifted out of the slimy bog, set firmly on a rock so that my steps are sure” (Ps 40:2).

And now comes the evangelism bit. “God put a new song in my mouth, a praise psalm for our God. Many will see and they will stand in awe and will put their trust in YHWH” (Ps 40:3). Note very carefully what has happened in this interchange between speaker and hearer. God has granted the psalmist a brand new song to sing, a song that has burst forth from an experience of God’s presence and power, and as a result the “great congregation,” as verses 9 and 10 describe the audience of the speaker, stands struck with awe.

And those verses 9 and 10 describe the evangelistic event again.

“I have recounted righteousness in the great congregation.
Without doubt I have not closed my lips! YHWH, you know!
I have not buried your righteousness deep within me;
Of your faithfulness and your saving acts I have spoken;
I have not hidden your chesed and your steadfastness from the great congregation.

The psalmist suggests that the act of evangelism is to tell what one knows, loudly, with assurance, and with all the conviction one can muster. God’s acts and God’s presence must be shouted from the housetops by those who have experienced them, but the response to such shouting (I speak metaphorically, please, though an occasional shout may not be out of place!) is not evangelism. Like the seed growing secretly, or the profligate sewer of the seed in Mark’s gospel, the results of the witness are unknown; it is God’s work alone. Body counts are not appropriate in an act of evangelism, no matter the usual view of such things. My job as preacher is to sew, not to count the harvest or lack thereof.

Sometimes, as we find in the psalm, people hear and are in awe. Sometimes, as has been the case with my itinerant preaching and teaching ministry, I know little to nothing of any harvest. Still, I have done evangelism in that I have spoken of what I know and have experienced. And I suppose, in the deepest recesses of my heart, I have hoped that my words have been a help to some, either to think some more, or to be uplifted again, or even to cause angry rejection leading to a different more helpful way.

But, I hear some of you say, how are we to stem the decline of our and other denominations if we fail to lure, urge, coerce others to join us in our churches? Recently, I have read of those who say it is exactly because of people like me, loose and lazy liberals, that the church is failing its God. We need more conviction, more certainty of the old verities, they say. Should anyone be a Christian minister who cannot hold dear the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the hope of heaven? I believe them to be quite wrong in this assertion. My task as evangelist is to speak what I know and have experienced; it is for God to determine who will find help and healing in my words. If the church loses members, as it surely has in great numbers in my lifetime, it is not because of liberals or conservatives, and the struggles between them. What we lack are truthful evangelists who speak what they know, not what they think their people want to hear.

My feet have been set on a rock by my God, and I must tell that to all and any I meet. I will continue to do just that, and leave the results to the God I love and proclaim.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)