Evangelism (xxi)

FPC, Lowville, NY

This is the twenty-first posting in this series working on what it means to be a church, based on eight criteria the Mars Hill Church uses to define its branch congregations as churches. The series began (here). We have finally arrived at the eighth and final criterion, which reads, "The church is an evangelistic community where the gospel of Jesus is constantly made visible by its preaching, its witness of the members, and its Spirit-empowered life of love."

In the previous posting, on the seventh criterion, Fellowship, I stole some of the thunder of this last criterion. The point there, you will recall, was that the earliest church grew for a number of reasons including the person of Christ and the quality of its loving fellowship. Evangelism, as such, wasn't a key factor. Paul's commitment to full-time itinerant evangelism was very much the exception rather than the rule.

When I taught early church history to seminarians in Thailand (for about four years or so), I emphasized the fact that it was the quality of church life rather than aggressive evangelism that motivated many to join the earliest churches. In Thailand, generations of missionaries had ingrained in Christian converts the importance of evangelism, emphasizing that it was the most important ministry of the church. So successful had they been in this emphasis, that the churches had virtually become one dimensional churches. Even funerals and weddings were conducted with an eye to evangelizing participants who weren't Christians.  The result was that other vital ministries of the church has never been properly developed, including Christian education and pastoral care.

The lesson from the mission field is that the unmodified, bald statement that, "The church is an evangelistic community" is dangerous to the church.  Churches carry out evangelism as one of their outreach ministries.  Some members and leaders feel themselves called to be evangelists.  But the church has other ministries, other callings, all of which have their vital importance to the life of the church.  Short-term, an evangelistic emphasis may result in rapid statistical growth, but long term it is all but certain to cripple the full life of the church in question.