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Towards a New Way of Evangelism
Evangelising the ‘Saved’ Non-Christian
A note of explanation:
In this article I am arguing for a way of evangelism based on the broader and more generous understanding of divine relationship discussed fully elsewhere on this website. In so doing I am not for a moment denying the validity of coming to God via Christ as taught in John’s Gospel and other parts of the New Testament. Indeed this is the way most Christians have come to God, myself included. The great problem, however, has been that as evangelicals we have mistakenly understood the Johannine/Pauline way as the only
permissible route taught in scripture. This fundamental error has resulted in a particularly powerful ‘blinkered’ approach to evangelism which unnecessarily and dramatically reduces Christians’ ability to effectively share the good news of Jesus and his teachings in our world at the onset of the third millennium CE.
“Talk to them as if they know me already.”
Not long ago I read the true story of a young woman who had recently become a Christian. With great zeal she set about trying to share her new faith with everyone in her world, but her only achievement was to alienate people and create resistance in them toward the Christian message. Sound familiar! Finally one day in desperation she cried out to God in prayer asking to be shown how she could witness more effectively. The answer she received was instant, and far too revolutionary to find a place in any evangelical book on ‘evangelising the lost’. What she felt God say to her was this, “Talk to them as if they know me already.”
The traditional evangelism model: three major problems
1) The traditional evangelism model works on the assumption that non-Christians know nothing whatsoever of the love, presence and power of God in their lives.
The very language we use sets us up for this assumption. We talk in terms of ‘the saved’ and ‘the unsaved’. We say Christians are the only ones ‘in the light’ with God; the rest of humanity live ‘in darkness’ without God. We define our evangelism in terms of bringing people out of this total darkness into the full light of Christ. For all practical purposes we refuse to believe that God could or would ever be in real ‘saving’ relationship with anyone who does not subscribe to our salvation formulas.
Some evangelicals would admit that, yes, God could be in a type of relationship with the sincere seeker after truth, but only in so far as this is intended to draw them to the point of accepting Christ in the manner prescribed by the Church. They would hastily assert, however, that while in this limited sense the person ‘knows God already’ such a relationship must not be confused with a ‘saving’ relationship. Sadly, such special pleading comes from those desperate to avoid the clear implications of Jesus’ synoptic teachings regarding the variety of doorways into genuine human-Divine relationship. (See the other articles on this website.) In these three gospels Jesus makes it abundantly evident that people do enter into eternal life despite their having no specific commitment to himself in the way that either the early Church or later evangelicals were to claim is mandatory. An example of this can be seen in Luke 10.26ff.
If ‘relationship’ is defined as God taking the initiative and connecting with a person at a heart-to-heart level (whether the person is conscious of this or not), I would contend that there is no such thing as a relationship with God that is not a ‘saving’ relationship! Most fortunately for humanity God refuses to obey the Christian Church’s salvation edicts and moves potently in his world regardless, relating in love and power to all who in any way, no matter how slight, lift their heads and aspire to goodness and God as they understand him.
2) The traditional evangelical approach does to others what we Christians hate having done to us!
All my life I have faithfully endeavoured to win people to Christ. Time and again, especially after a sermon or training seminar on ‘how to witness’, I would go off to work all prayed up and bursting at the seams to ‘witness’ to my work colleagues, only to find that most were not interested. Those few who did have any interest in things spiritual became increasingly wary of me as they sensed my hunger to ‘convert’ them to my version of the only true way to God. I struggled with deep discouragement and felt grieved that I had, so to speak, ‘brought my witnessing harp to the party but no-one wanted me to play’. What made it worse was that I was a good communicator, able to provide what I felt were excellent answers to people’s objections and questions. But I was increasingly aware that no matter how careful and gracious I was or how nifty my answers seemed to be, I still managed to turn more people away from God than attract them to him.
Most times I told myself and other Christians that this reflected the ‘hardness of people’s hearts’. Yet I fully understood why people felt the way they did about Christians’ attempts to ‘convert’ them. I knew only too well that when I was on the receiving end of a ‘conversion’ attempt, be it by a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon or an Amway sales person, I not only felt defensive I was often deeply offended, especially when the Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon implied that because I wasn’t ‘one of them’ I didn’t, and in fact couldn’t, have a real relationship with God. They were, I believed, amazingly arrogant to imply that ‘they alone’ knew the way to God and that, to achieve salvation, I would have to sit at their feet, do exactly as they told me and accept that their interpretation of the Bible was the only correct one. I saw their steadfast refusal to admit even the possibility of my being in a relationship with God which fell outside their rigidly prescribed boundaries as a deliberate attempt to invalidate my personal integrity, my intelligence and my ability to enter into divine relationship.
This, I knew, was exactly how non-Christians felt when we treated them in like manner.
It was clear that our claims to be the only ones able to be in any sort of a relationship with God, and the resulting ‘energy of judgement’ which exuded so palpably from us, drove away the very people with whom we wanted to share the wonders of Christ. Without doubt we turned far more people away from seeking after God than we ever turned towards God. Yet there seemed to be no other way. Wasn’t it true that the New Testament teaches that God regards only us Christians as being in any sort of relationship with himself? And wasn’t it a fact that people do have to sit at our feet and accept everything we tell them or God will judge them and send them off to hell?
I suggest that this dilemma is one that most Christians struggle with. I also suspect that, unable to deal with the frightening implications of the questions it raises, more often than not they stifle it as quickly as possible.
3) The exclusivist salvation model is like a light switch without any dimmer capability.
Evangelical Christians regard as ‘saved’ only those who have accepted the full salvation package of a conscious ‘faith in Christ’. Unless individuals stand in the full light of the revelation of Jesus Christ they are said to be ‘in darkness’ and therefore outside the covenant of God’s saving grace. The light is either fully on or not on at all. In this salvation model God’s saving grace never extends to those who, despite not consciously ‘believing in Christ’, are nevertheless in some degree of spiritual light, as the synoptic Jesus would define that.
As has been pointed out in other articles on this website, such a model is based on seriously flawed assumptions. It fails to take into account all the biblical evidence and studiously ignores many key Bible passages which show that God and his Christ have a far more generous interpretation of what it takes to live in valid divine relationship.
I fully recognise that there are people who, by virtue of the unmistakable ‘bad fruit’ that their lives consistently produce, clearly do ‘live in darkness’. For such people the traditional evangelical salvation approach may be the only way to powerfully confront them with their sin and selfishness and shock them into the bright light of Christ. However, our error as evangelicals has been to automatically assume that everyone who is not a committed Christian lives in this sort of darkness and is therefore a ‘lost soul’. Unable to recognise the telltale signs of divine life within them, we approach them as if they don’t know anything of God already. In doing so we come across to them in ways that they cannot fail to register as both condescending and judgmental and, accordingly, our attempts to ‘save’ them more often than not go down like the proverbial lead balloon.
However, I believe that there is another way of understanding these people’s relationship with God which far more accurately describes where they are. I call this the ‘dimmer light switch model’, and I maintain that this model is far closer to what Jesus taught, when all of his statements are taken into account.
The ‘dimmer light switch model’
This view asserts that God is in real or ‘saving’ relationship with many people who, while not having a conscious commitment to Jesus Christ, nevertheless exhibit the good fruit of a life soundly based on the golden rule (Matthew 7. 14-23 and Luke 10.26ff). While such people may not live in the bright light that a conscious knowledge of Christ can (potentially at least) bring, the light is nevertheless on, and even in this ‘dimmer’ zone their lives are lived ‘under grace’.
Before we become too condescending and complacent, it must be clearly noted that there is strong biblical evidence to suggest that some of these people may be living lives which are far brighter and closer to God than some Christians. Jesus gives an illustration of just such a person in his famous story of the ‘good Samaritan’. Here he describes a man who, by virtue of being a Samaritan, would have undoubtedly had inadequate doctrinal understandings and no belief in or commitment to himself. Yet Jesus makes him a shining example of the sort of person who lived by the great commandment and was therefore counted as having eternal life. The vast scandal for his Jewish listeners lies in the fact that Jesus deliberately makes it clear that while this hated Samaritan heretic has eternal life the doctrinally correct Jewish clergy in the story clearly do not! (Luke 10. 25-37)
The ‘I’m not religious’ mind-set, (so common among non-churchgoers) is the direct result of the Christian ‘non-dimmer’ salvation understanding.
In past centuries the Christian church held powerful sway over governments and society in general (especially in western countries), indoctrinating even those who never darkened its doors. A major part of this societal indoctrination was the Church’s relentless message that God refuses to be in real relationship with anyone who is not attending a church and has not committed themselves knowingly to Jesus Christ according to prescribed Christian formulas. This message was so successfully engrafted into the mind-set of society that those outside the Church shrugged their shoulders and accepted what the experts on religion told them. Like the tax collectors and ‘sinners’ of Jesus’ day, most saw themselves as outside the grace and protection of God.
As a result, generations of non-churchgoing ‘publicans and sinners’, believing that God would not relate to them without their becoming ‘religious’ or ‘full-on churchgoers’, wrote over their lives the sad epitaph “I’m not religious”. They had no right, as they saw it, to be interested in the things of God. The tragic fact is that if anyone had ever bothered to ask them many would have told of events in their lives when they were strangely helped by a loving ‘greater power’. Yet most drew back from concluding that maybe God was with them. Hadn’t the Church told them that this was not possible?
Over the years, however, the Church’s influence in society has waned dramatically. Generations of people are now beginning to come through who have either not heard that they must be part of the Christian Church to have a relationship with God, or have simply dismissed such teaching as narrow bigotry. Ever since the rise of the counter-culture and New Age movements in the late sixties and seventies, huge numbers of people have been seeking a spiritual life outside of any religious ‘box’ - be that box Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or New Age. An increasing number of people are beginning to pursue a home grown and smorgasbord type of spirituality and are finding that God is more than willing to relate with them.
A warning to Christians: These people might look like a wonderful mission field ‘ripe for harvest’, but they are not.
In fact trying to get such people to accept the evangelical version of salvation is extraordinarily difficult, for the following reason.
The normal evangelical approach requires that these individuals firstly be persuaded to believe that they do not have and never have had any authentic spirituality. Evangelicals require them to get to the point of labelling all their previous spiritual experience as basically satanic deception. However, the great problem for the would-be Christian evangelist is that these people already have what is tantamount to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit within, so they ‘know’ that this is just not true! Accordingly, and indeed fortunately, they simply won’t buy any evangelical condemnation of their existing spirituality. The only thing such condemnation does is to confirm to them, more surely than ever, that evangelical Christians are just a bunch of arrogant, condescending bigots. And in a sense who can blame them!
The good news is that there is a better way to awaken people to their need to actively seek the will of God.
This is a radical yet profoundly biblical way which has to be seriously considered. To explain how this ‘better way’ works I need to share how God broke through my lifelong evangelical mindset.
As has been explained elsewhere, I was for a number of years a Baptist minister. Prior to this I had been a voluntary worker with the ‘Open Air Campaigners’, a strongly evangelistic group of open air preachers. Once in the ministry I was very active in all sorts of evangelism, from pulpit preaching, to door knocking, to attending several Christian outreaches at the large New Age rock festivals common in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. I was widely read in all forms of Christian apologetics and gifted in the area of sharing with people about Christ.
In 1988 I was powerfully called out of the ministry and told to go back into ‘the market place’. Several years later I went though an amicable yet deeply painful marriage separation and divorce. At the onset of this most traumatic period I felt God tell me that I would undergo ‘crucifixion followed by resurrection’. Through the painful grieving of the months which followed I was to experience both the loving presence of God and the most amazing guidance of my entire life. It was during this time that I was clearly guided to attend a weekend workshop for those serious about doing the will of God. It was a weekend that would change my life.
The weekend that changed my life: “What’s a good Baptist boy doing at a workshop full of New Agers?”
Led by the woman who would later become my wife, the workshop had attracted mainly people of alternative/New Age spirituality. There were a few with a ‘fringe Christian’ background. I was the only evangelical Christian to attend.
Despite knowing that I had been clearly guided to go, I was quite frankly fearful and uptight over the prospect of spending a weekend with what I regarded as deceived New Agers. These were the very people against whom I had preached while I was in the Baptist ministry. So I went all ‘prayed up’. I had consciously put on the armour of God and under my breath I was regularly quietly praying in tongues. I believed my role would be that of bringing the truth which would correct their deceived doctrines.
The initial conversations around the Friday evening meal table confirmed my worst suspicions as these very nice people came out with comments that made my theological hair stand on end. Most seemed to see God in ‘energy’ terms, using words like ‘the universe’ or ‘the great ones’. I also heard some talk of Christ as if he was only one of a number of other ‘great avatars’, and this in particular made my Christian blood boil. What’s more, most seemed negative and defensive towards organised Christianity. As I had identified myself as an evangelical Christian they were not sure how to take me. I could almost hear them think, "What on earth is an evangelical Christian doing at a weekend like this?" By now I was seriously asking myself the same question!
During that first evening session we sat in a circle, each person in turn sharing their ‘spiritual journey’. This proved to be one of the more threatening experiences of my life, due mainly to the fact that as people began to share the things that had happened to them over the course of their journey they recounted times of quite amazing divine guidance and wonderful answers to prayer, as well as what was clearly costly sacrificial loving service to others. It dawned on me that they sounded very similar to a group of Christians sharing their testimonies. While most of me wanted to write it all off as simply the devil’s counterfeit I found myself being so deeply moved that slowly I began to admit to the ‘possibility’ that perhaps ‘God was in this place and I knew it not’. Perhaps somehow God was with them. It is one thing to demonise anonymous people from behind the safety of a pulpit on the basis of perceived doctrinal error and stereotyping; it is a completely different thing to demonise people who are a few feet away sharing their hearts and stories of divine happenings which sound identical to your own. I remember thinking the radical thought, ‘Perhaps God isn’t as concerned about sound doctrine as we Christians are!’
I went to bed that night confused but strangely warmed. My confusion centred on the fact that I felt God had actually ministered to me through these ‘heretics’ and that, even worse, I just might have learnt something from them! My warmth came from the fact that, for the first time in my life, I had heard the hearts of people I had only ever read about in Christian ‘anti-New Age’ books, or argued with briefly at the New Age festivals I had attended. I heard myself reflect that just maybe the things people ‘believed’ were of less importance than the state of their hearts. Could it be that I was beginning to see things in the way God does?
Early the next morning the group met in the chapel for a time of meditation. By this time the glow of the night before had worn off and my judgmental and angry feelings had returned. We were asked to meditate on themes suggested by the leader. While I found these themes hard to fault, there was still no way I was going to ‘meditate’. Instead I prayed silently and began to call on Jesus Christ for his guidance and protection. That was when it happened.
Over the years I have had several powerful experiences of God/Christ speaking in my heart over major issues where it was vital that I get his guidance absolutely clearly. What happened next was one of these rare yet unmistakable experiences. As I reached out to Jesus for his presence and power he ‘spoke’ to me and what he said changed my life. I heard his strong gentle voice coming from within accompanied by a penetrating love and real sense of grief. He said to me, “Bruce, if I were sitting where you are sitting, do you think I would have the same attitudes of judgement and anger towards these people that you are feeling?”
That was all it took to undo me completely. It was one of those amazing moments that come with such relentless yet gracious power one is changed forever. In an instant a flood of ‘knowings’ began to flow over me and up from within me. Without the slightest doubt I knew that Jesus would not be sitting there full of anger and the palpable energy of judgement which cannot help but put an impenetrable wall between hearts. I knew that Jesus, his heart full of love for them, would look past people’s theologies straight into their hearts. I knew that their doctrines, erroneous though some of them might be, would not have been a major issue with Christ. I realised I was being called on to ‘become as Christ’ to these people. In the best way I knew how in the moments which followed I quietly yet deeply repented of my judgmental attitudes and prideful anger, asked for God’s forgiveness and pleaded that he would gift to me his heart towards these New Age ‘Samaritans’.
The outcome was nothing short of dramatic. In the minutes that followed I was profoundly set free from what I can only describe as the ‘evangelical spirit of judgement’. Christ, as it were, pulled the bung in the bilges of my soul and fifty years of accrued judgmental evangelical exclusivism drained out of my being. In its place I was filled with what I believe is the love of God and (in as much as a fallible human can contain it) the attitudes of God towards his human creation. I felt as if a weight had been lifted off me and the destructive legacy of the years radically removed from my spirit. Deep down I felt clean. I walked out of the chapel changed.
From then on I found I could relate free of the previous powerful evangelical ‘magnetic attraction’ to the doctrines people espoused and of the resultant judgmental spirit which had previously arisen when they fell short of what I regarded as the biblical standard. Now, without any effort, I could look past what I still regarded as ‘incorrect theologies’ into people’s hearts. Even better, my deep primal response was to love and accept them as they were where they were. The results were profound.
Previously, despite my best attempts to prevent or at least to hide it, I had projected a powerful evangelical ‘ray gun’ of judgement. People cannot help but intuitively pick it up and this, of course, calls forth a similar judgmental response from them. It is a clear case of what Jesus warned against, "- - in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Matthew 7.1-2) The result was, of course, a wall that closed off both hearts from each other.
I began to see how much like the Pharisees we evangelicals are in this regard. We have our own version of hated Samaritans. They are anyone who won’t dot our I’s and cross our T’s of biblical interpretation. This of course applies especially to the despised ‘New Agers’ and those of alternative spirituality.
The rest of the workshop was transformed for me. People continued to speak from their fuzzy theological understandings but that no longer mattered. I was now magnetised to their hearts, not their doctrines. What happened next was most interesting.
There was one woman in particular who was, in my estimation, the most ‘way-out’ as far as her theology went. Of all the people on the workshop she was the one I had felt most uptight with. Yet, later on that day she approached me and, amazingly, was comfortable enough with this ‘evangelical Christian’ to ask me, of all people, to help her work through a particular issue of living in God’s will. As we shared I realised just how free I was of the previous drive to correct her and ‘set her straight’ - free to move at her pace and to above all relate open-heartedly and with deep love. As for her theology, well that was God’s issue not mine. If she could find it within herself to seek ‘the universe’ for ‘its’ will in her life then I was sure the ‘universe’ would lead her at its pace into greater truth. I realised that God was not at all upset by people who called him by unorthodox names as he saw their hearts and was perfectly capable of translating their languaging. This was only a problem for the orthodox!
Reflecting later on this amazing weekend I remembered the words of the song ‘Little Country Church’, written by the Christian group ‘The Love Song’ during the ‘Jesus revolution’ which swept through the hippie communities in California during the 1970’s. It told the story of a small country church (Calvary Chapel) which suddenly experienced an influx of mixed-up, drugged-out, smelly hippies flooding into its services and mingling with the conservative middle class congregation. The words, as I remember them, went like this:
Little country church on the edge of town
People coming every day from miles around,
for meetings and for Sunday School -
It’s very plain to see it’s not the way it used to be.
Long hair, short hair, some coats and ties -
People finally coming around -
Looking past the hair and straight into the eyes,
People finally coming around."
Sharing the gospel in the second millennium Jesus-style.
What is it that we are to encourage people to aspire towards?
Our task is to seek to awaken those who are slumbering in the desertlands of endless materialism and triviality. We are to encourage these people to lift their eyes beyond mere materialism in all its forms and to seek those things ‘closest to God’s own heart’. In other words, our role is to fan the desire in people’s hearts to actively seek God’s will and plan for their own lives.
We are to endeavour to excite them with the thought that they were put on this earth for a divine purpose - that their lives do have meaning. We are to give them courage to embark on a spiritual journey which involves their beginning to seek out just what this ‘will of God’ means for them personally. (And if at this stage they find the term ‘God’ too difficult a concept, we are to encourage them to use whatever name is real for them, remembering that God can so easily translate the cry of the human heart.) But even more than that, our role is to encourage them to lift their eyes beyond even ‘God’s will for me’ and to begin to understand what God’s will is for his universe as a whole and what is to be their role in the fulfilment of this grand Divine purpose and plan.
Just as Jesus honoured those outside the covenant of Israel who showed the telltale signs of divine life, we are to honour all those who already show a heart for spiritual truth and have an active spiritual life, albeit of a variety other than expressly Christian. We are to look past their doctrines straight into their hearts, and refuse to demean them by playing the usual evangelical games of dismissing their spirituality as counterfeit and false.
We are being called to honour them as a fellow brothers or sisters on the journey into God and to ask them, just as we would ask a fully fledged Christian, to share with us their story. And we are to listen to that story with humility and an open heart, knowing that God may well want to teach us something new through their testimony. My experience has been that when we are able to approach individuals in this spirit it sets them free to, in turn, actually want to hear our story and to be open to consider carefully our unique Christian distinctives. I stress however that I am not talking here about some sort of devious witnessing ‘technique’ where one merely pretends to honour the spiritual journey or to want to learn from the non-Christian in order to manipulate and deceive. Such an attitude is the worst sort of spiritual abuse.
What was at the heart of Jesus’ call to discipleship?
When all the terminology is boiled down, what Jesus was calling people to was a costly lifestyle which had as its central motivation ‘doing the will of God.’ “When you pray,” Jesus taught, “say….. ‘Our Father…. may your Kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’” (Matthew 6.9) An integral part of this was seeking to live out the Father’s ‘righteousness’ (Matthew 6.33), as opposed to the righteousness of the Pharisees. Jesus taught that the Father’s righteousness was all to do with keeping the Great Commandment with its call to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. (Luke 10.25ff.) This of course echoes the constant cry of the Old Testament prophets, "He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6.8)
It is crucial to note that Jesus was very comfortable about directing people to seek firstly the will of God and God’s righteousness, without any iron-clad requirement that this must of necessity involve a commitment to himself. If seeking the Father’s will and righteousness alone was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for us Christians! Sadly, most evangelicals are deeply uncomfortable with ‘merely’ encouraging people to seek the will and purposes of God for their lives without this involving the ‘full monty’ of compulsory commitment to Christ in the prescribed evangelical way. For them, it is as if having a relationship with God the Father is not good enough!
At this point I can hear Christians saying, “But surely, even if non-Christians who produce ‘good fruit’ do have salvation, doesn’t coming to God through Christ, in the traditional way, provide, potentially at least, the fastest route into and greatest opportunity for the fullest expression of Divine will and purpose? And isn’t this, after all, the unique aspect of ‘doing the will of God’ that we Christians are responsible for sharing?”
The answer to both questions is, of course, yes. I firmly believe that entering into a conscious genuine heart-based faith in and understanding of just who Jesus Christ is and the place of the Holy Spirit cannot fail to profoundly increase the light and power in any spiritual journeyer’s life. It certainly did for the Roman centurion Cornelius. (Acts 10) I believe that an important part of our Christian ‘evangelism’ is to share with these non-Christian disciples of God’s will just where Jesus and the Holy Spirit fit into the purposes and plan of God - not in order to ‘save’ them but to further enrich and empower their existing spiritual lives. Indeed, these amazing truths are Christianity’s unique and wonderful contribution to the worldwide web of faith.
The huge problem has been, of course, that our exclusivistic interpretation of salvation has meant that Christians almost inevitably exude the destructive energy of judgement and the ‘hunger to convert’, with their powerful built-in message that it is only Christians who can have a valid relationship with God. The inevitable outcome is that most people today, be they spiritually aware or not, run a mile whenever they come across what they tellingly call ‘a God botherer’.
It has become very evident that since being delivered from the evangelical spirit of judgement I have had, on a day-to-day basis, many more opportunities to talk quite naturally about God and/or Jesus with people than ever before. This, I believe, is because people somehow sense that I am not out to recruit or convert them. Such a ‘knowing’ sets them free to listen, confide, absorb and often show interest in a way that was never present in the days when I was imprisoned in the “I’m out to convert you” mode.
Our role is not to ‘convert’ people, nor to ‘save’ them, nor to get them into Church.
Evangelism in our world is all about helping people find the courage to begin actively seeking the will of God. We are then to trust God to lead these disciples, in His way, and at their own pace, into all that Jesus Christ taught.
By and large, most people have little problem believing in the existence of God, and almost all have a very positive view of Jesus. Their problem is almost always with the Church. As one woman wrote, "I have huge problems with the Christian Church, but I love Jesus." Most people today don’t believe any longer the Christian Church’s assertion that God can be found only through its institutions and salvation formulas. They love and value Jesus as a mysterious and divine teacher of profound truth, but they hate the Church’s exclusivistic interpretation of him.
The DO’s of encouraging people in spiritual growth
1) DO get delivered from the deadly evangelical ‘spirit of judgement’ virus.
The thing which made Jesus so loved and accepted by the common people, and especially by those outcasts (or ‘sinners’ as they were called) from the Church of the day, was that he did not exude the energy of judgement at either a doctrinal or moral level. Christ was always ‘looking past the hair and straight into the eyes’. He looked past the hair of ‘false doctrine’ or even ‘no doctrine’. He looked past the hair of imperfect theological languaging or muddled sexual morality and connected with people at a heart level. As a result they instinctively felt his strong love for them. This was not to say that he had little regard for the importance of either theological truth or morals, nor was it to say he never taught on such issues. Of course he did, but in most cases his emphasis was on love-based ethical behaviour long before it was ever about correct theology or what we would today label correct ‘Christology’. By connecting at a heart level Jesus was able to pick up instantly the particular blockages in each individual he spoke to and to address those needs.
2) DO stop trying to ‘convert’ and ‘save’ people. It doesn’t work, and it is not our job!
As I have already emphasised, we hate it when anyone tries to convert us to anything, so don’t do to others what you hate others doing to you.
3) DO stop assuming that we Christians always know who isn’t ‘saved’!
On the whole we Christians assume we know pretty much who isn’t in relationship with God and who is. Yet the yard-stick which we use to determine this is seriously flawed, omitting as it does most of the criteria used by Jesus (as the other articles on this website have pointed out).
Have you ever noticed that in the synoptic gospels Jesus doesn’t go around holding evangelistic missions in order to get people to ‘believe in him’ in order that they might be saved? What he does do is to preach that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that people are to “seek first the Kingdom of God”. His emphasis is about people becoming hungry to seek out God’s will for their lives. (Matthew 6.9) “When you pray,” Jesus instructs, “say ‘Our Father who art in heaven…. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’”, the implication of which is ‘and please start by doing your will in my life’. Which leads us to the next requirement:
4) DO assume that everyone you meet has, to some degree, ‘the footprints of God’ in their lives.
They may be conscious or unconscious of this fact. Often divine footprints will manifest as an ongoing commitment on a person’s part to genuine goodness, or as experiences of divine help and guidance at critical times in their lives. Such people may have little if any ‘God talk’ vocabulary as such and may claim that they are not ‘religious’, but remember the answer to the young woman’s prayer, and speak to them as if they know God already!
A man recently shared with my wife a vivid memory of having his car spin out of control one frosty night as he was negotiating some seemingly innocuous bends on the open road. He told of being instantly flooded, in that awful moment, with a great peace and of very distinctly feeling a hand overlaying his on the steering wheel. After three full rotations, during which time miraculously no other vehicle appeared, his car came to rest still on the road and facing in the direction he had been travelling. Enveloped in a cocoon of peace he continued on his way. When asked if he believed in God the man replied that he wasn’t sure about the term ‘God’ but that he did believe in a higher power, and in the fact that that higher power had taken care of him.
5) DO rejoice over the fact that God is pleased to be in relationship with those outside our churches and doctrinal formulas. This is not a threat to the Christian Church but is in fact the answer to our prayers for revival!
Our problem with ‘out of church’ spirituality stems not only from our failure to recognise what constitutes ‘true revival’, but from the disconcerting fact that this is happening outside of our jurisdiction and control.
The Nottingham University Year 2000 Millennial Survey showed that around 80 per cent of people questioned (and a large majority of these were not practising Christians) said that they had had experiences in their lives where they felt they were in some way helped by a loving power greater than themselves. This was virtually double the figure of a similar survey conducted in 1979. During the same period regular church attendance in Great Britain declined by around twenty percent! This seeming contradiction suggests that God is, and always has been, at least as active (and perhaps even more active) outside the Church as he has been inside.
It is fairly safe to assume that there will be in most people’s lives events and happenings which they have already acknowledged were the result of being ‘strangely helped’ from ‘the man upstairs’ or ‘providence’ or ‘an angel’ or some ‘guiding presence’. People’s histories are full of these serendipitous events. We frequently hear them say things like, ‘Someone was looking after me’, or ‘I was just meant to meet that person’, or ‘What an amazing coincidence’. It is most noticeable that, at least here in New Zealand, it is now acceptable for the non-churchgoing public to talk openly about these personal spiritual experiences. Our television news stories and documentaries increasingly tell, without the embarrassment or snide comments so common a few years ago, of people who ‘prayed’ and/or felt they were helped by God.
The postmodern evangelist more easily does God’s bidding if he or she is able, from the heart, to deeply honour the work of God in the lives of non-churchgoing people. Our task is to help individuals recognise the presence and footsteps of the loving God who is already active in their lives. When we affirm that God is with them after all people are more likely to become increasingly conscious of God’s presence and more proactive in seeking God’s will and purpose for them.
Sadly, the standard evangelical approach has been to belittle or negate such happenings. The usual implication is that these experiences should not be allowed to fool the person into thinking that God actually does walk with them in any ‘saving’ sense. Worse, there may be the implication that these experiences are nothing but satanic counterfeits designed to deceive a person into thinking they have a relationship with God, so keeping them from faith in Christ. Such acts of evangelical ‘disenfranchisement’ are as insulting to the person as they are to God, reeking as they do of the spirit of Pharisaical exclusivism. Not only have they no consistent biblical support, such acts seriously violate the attitudes shown by Jesus towards the publicans and ‘sinners’ of his day.
6) DO be as flexible and ‘non-formulistic’ in your dealings with people as Jesus was.
Trust God and meet people where they are. What is so radical about the way Jesus related to people is that he seemed to have no overt ‘evangelistic salvation formula’ at all, nor any one fixed method of approaching people. Unlike evangelicals, he did not seek to lead people to the Father’s will by forcing them all to accept one particular doctrinal salvation model. While there were, undergirding his ministry, strong basic theological beliefs which he summed up in Matthew 7.12 and Luke 10.25-28, his approach to gaining ‘eternal life’ was still dramatically flexible and individualised.
Some people he told to ‘believe in and follow him’. Others he instructed to ‘keep the Great Command of loving God and others as yourself’, and required no ‘believing in himself’ as such. Still others, like the good Samaritan and ‘the sheep’ in Matthew 25.33ff, he clearly regarded as having eternal life on the basis of their loving self-sacrifice towards their fellow humans, despite their inadequate doctrines and lack of commitment to him. Jesus pinpointed love of money as the thing that was keeping one young man out of the Kingdom of God while, regardless of his obvious violation of the great commandment, the thief on the cross was accepted because of a last minute recognition of both his own sin and the messiahship of Jesus. As for Nicodemus, Jesus told him he had to be ‘born again’ by a radical encounter with the Spirit of God.
Strange, isn’t it, how the evangelical church has fixated on this one instruction to Nicodemus and made it the sole, exclusive and ‘only way’ to God, while ignoring the many other salvation causing responses Jesus taught.
But what about the early Church? Didn’t they all preach that ‘faith in Christ’ was the only way to God?
Like most evangelicals I had always believed and preached that, at least among the Apostles, there was total harmony and agreement as to how salvation was entered into. Yet a close look at the book of James, Jesus’ half brother, shows that this was simply not the case at all.
Any impartial reading of the Epistle of James will show that the James-led churches of Jerusalem and its surrounding area held a version of divine relationship that was far closer to the teachings of the synoptic Jesus. James taught that right relationship with God was birthed by listening to and living by ‘the word of truth’ and ‘the word implanted in you which is able to save you’ (James 1.16-25). Here this ‘word’ is not the person of Jesus Christ, nor is it a ‘word’ about Jesus Christ in any Pauline/Petrine sense. Rather, this ‘word implanted in you, which saves you’ is nothing other than what James refers to as the Royal Law, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself" (James 2.8). Nowhere in this epistle is it stated or even implied that entry into right relationship with God is reliant primarily on ‘believing in Jesus Christ’, and this despite James referring to his readers as those who had ‘believed in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ’ (James 2.1). It is abundantly clear that James has major issues with key aspects of Paul’s ‘salvation by faith alone’ teachings and argues vigorously for a thoroughly ‘synoptic Jesus’ version of entry into eternal life. He seems to be trying to counter what he regards as Paul’s over-emphasis on one side of the coin of salvation truth. It was this fact which made Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation and champion of all things Pauline, declare that the Epistle of James was an ‘epistle of straw’ which should be removed from the canon of scripture!
Clearly, it is a serious mistake to assume that Paul’s version was the only accepted salvation model among the Apostles in the years leading up to James’ death. It is only in the years following the martyrdom of the Apostle James in 61 AD that the Pauline, Petrine and Johannine model of salvation steadily suffocated to death this last faithful expression of the salvation teaching of the synoptic Jesus. From then on Paul’s way became for all practical purposes the only accepted salvation understanding of the Christian Church. It is this monumental loss of truth which is lies behind the ever widening gap between postmodern humankind and the evangelical Church.
The only hope the Church has of stemming the inexorable decline in its influence on the world is a return to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ, along with a realisation that the Pauline/Johannine salvation version, valid though it was, forms one side only of the coin of salvation truth. It is not the whole story. We must grow beyond our ‘Paul-ianity’ and return to an authentic ‘Christ-ianity’, rediscovering in that process the other side of the salvation coin, Christ’s ‘lost teaching’ on how to inherit eternal life.
The next step: an evangelical Mea Culpa to the world
The time is fast approaching when we the evangelical Church may well have to find the honesty and courage to offer our own version of the recent Papal mea culpa (‘I am guilty’), apologising to the world for declaring countless multitudes of non-Christian ‘good trees’ lost souls. We the Christian Church are being called to own up to our failure to follow all the clearly enunciated salvation teachings of our founder, Jesus Christ. We are to find a new radical humility which allows us at last to honour these non-Christians, recognising them for who they are in God - that is, none other than our spiritual brothers and sisters and part of the great family of disciples of the will of God on earth.
Then, and only then I suspect, will these good folk be set free from the cycle of judgement and mutual recrimination caused by Christian exclusivism. As we honour them and find the humility to learn from and be enriched by them so they in turn will be able to hear us and be enriched by us. Some at least will as a result recognise Christ as much more than a great human teacher and, like us, acknowledge him as the great ‘I Am’, the Word who created everything that was made, whose task it is to sustain, guide and propel the universe inexorably into Divine will and purpose.
‘Loking past the hair’ of our half truths and judgmental attitudes, they will perhaps at last look into our eyes and we into theirs. And in so doing we will together be able to grasp with new wonder the greatness, might and, above all, the love and grace of God.
By Bruce Puddle
www.ists-spiritualschool.org
From section: Inclusive Christianity
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