Why Evangelism Methods Must Change

Reflecting on the nature of faith in a recent sermon, I pointed out that believing that Jesus died for your sins and rose from the dead is not sufficient for saving faith. Too many people in America believe that they are Christians, that they are “going to heaven” simply because they believe the facts of the gospel. That is not saving faith. Faith is requires more than agreement with the facts of the gospel; it actually treasures a Person, Jesus Christ. Because faith is the result of a process of hearing the gospel, seeing the gospel, and embracing the gospel over time, our evangelism needs to accommodate this reality, as well as nurture true faith, not just mental assent. I was recently asked what I think about Evangelism Explosion (EE) as an evangelistic tool. Although it provides a clear explanation of gospel basics and is very good at training people to parrot biblical answers, it does not do the hard work of contextualizing the gospel. Moreover, I have a few other concerns about EE and evangelism programs in general. In short, our evangelism methods must change if we are to see true, saving, perservering faith emerge. Many evangelism programs are deficient on these counts:

1. Deficient view of Heaven. Many evangelism programs are focused on “getting people to heaven” not treasuring Christ or living out his mission. Ultimately, we don’t GO to heaven; heaven comes to earth through the already/not fully lordship of Christ. Moreover, going to heaven is not the goal of biblical discipleship. Treasuring, obeying, and sharing Christ is.
2. Tend toward a mental assent view of Faith. Although many cover some of the gospel basics, they lend themselves to a mental assent understanding of faith. I realize there is a statement in the EE process that denies this. However, the 7, 8 or 9 steps are typically information-centered and mechanically driven. Less open to process evangelism. The Kennedy Questions operate on the assumption that “knowing the right answer” is central, answers that have been conditioned through modern lenses, answers that many Christians can provide without truly “believing.”
3. They aren’t in the vernacular of most Americans. Most Americans are inoculated to the EE way of “sharing the gospel.” –“If you died tonight and stood before God and he said: “Why should I let you into My Heaven?” what would you say? — Most Americans can answer that question, and many believe it, without a modicum of desire for Jesus. We need a new language for evangelism that is biblically faithful and culturally relevant.

Tools for Missional Church

I have started a new page called Tools for Missional Church (see also link above) that organizes practical tools for missional church. The links are a mix of articles and blog posts that have proven useful to others based on feedback and hits. It will take me a while to sort through my blog history, so fresh content will be hitting the page each week for a while. I hope this of some help to fellow missional disciples, planters, and pastors. With you on the missio Dei!

The Study of Evangelism

There are a lot of useless books on the topics of evangelism and mission. For starters, a lot of them divorce evangelism from mission; evangelism is reduced to a method or project, effectively subtracting narrow gospel proclamation from the broad path of mission. We need a whole gospel for whole mission. We need deeper philosophical, theological, and practical reflection on the practice of evangelism within the broader context of mission. The Study of Evangelism: A Practice of the Missional Church delivers.

This book is a collection of essays written by top missiologists, theologians, and practitioners such as: David Bosch, Carl Braaten, Walter Brueggemann, Darrell Guder, George Hunsberger, Lesslie Newbigin, Ron Sider, John Stott, and Hwa Yung.

Six propositions guided their selection of essays and articles for this book. The propositions alone are worth the book (emphasis added):

1. Evangelism is a vital part of something larger than itself, namely the missio Dei.
2. Evangelism is a process more than an event.
3. Evangelism is concerned with discipling people in Christ.
4. Evangelism is oriented toward the reign of God.
5. Evangelism is a missional practice of the whole people of God.
6. Evangelism is inescapably contextual.

Various Books on Pastoring

Alexander Strauch, Minister of Mercy: The New Testament Deacon

A reliable guide to understanding the biblical qualifications and expectations of the role of deacon. Strauch’s Biblical Eldership and Study Guide are also very helpful in working out functional eldership.

Mark Driscoll, On Church Leadership

One of the best concise treatments of what the Bible has to say about Elders, Deacons, and Members. See also John Piper’s resources on Elders and Deacons.

William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying

An refreshingly biblical read on preaching from an old Puritan voice.

David Powlison, Speaking the Truth in Love

I can’t get enough of Powlison, a biblical counselor that pushes truth and grace through everything. He is editor of the Journal of Biblical Counseling, which contains a goldmine of pastoral wisdom for just about every occasion. He challenges and renews my soul.

Stages of Organic Growth (or building missional teams)

In preparation for a Missional Core Teams workshop I am co-leading with Rick White at the Acts 29 Bootcamp in Dallas, I’ve been going back over my notes from the core team days of Austin City Life. For those interested, I am including a narrative timeline of our first 9 months of core team development. We tried to follow the Spirit organic style (and still try), so we never launched but have grown intentionally and steadily in gospel depth and number. Glory to God! So here are the Stages of Organic Growth we experienced.

Meals and Mission (1 month)

Our first three or four meetings focused on community and vision. Instead of holding “vision-casts” in which disconnected contacts came to an informational meeting and left disconnected, we started our meeting with home-cooked meals and fellowship. This became a hallmark of our missional communities (aka City Groups). The intention was to build the church on Jesus-centered community with a missional identity. We felt like we should emphasize relationships and vision first, which meant cultivating community and mission in the gospel.

Vision and Mission (2 months)

The next couple of months were spent imparting and discussing the core values of the vision of Austin City Life. This was conducted in a very dialogical fashion, which allowed the values to percolate and to be refined in our community. It also afforded us the opportunity to contextualize our values. For example, after a discussion regarding “truth,” “gospel,” and “word” as a core value, we deliberately chose not to use “gospel” terminology since “gospel” is so misunderstood in Texan Christian culture. We opted for truth. During this time I explored and encouraged non-Christian attendance. We had one conversion and several de-churched people attend or join. The resistant nature of many unchurched Austinites made building a mixed (Christian and non-Christian) missional core group very difficult.

Commitment Night

At the end of about three months, I met with each family and asked them to consider committing their time, creativity, spiritual gifts, and finances to the vision of ACL. This gave me an opportunity to field questions that had not been asked in public, filter prospective members, and receive encouragement regarding the Spirit’s work in our community. Then we had a commitment night in which we celebrated with a grand meal in our home, at a long table, and I gave some biblical and cultural reflections on being the church in Austin. I distilled the big vision into three very basic, biblical concepts that were easy to grasp. We ended with communion and worship.

Bible Study (2 months)

Next we moved into a phase that increased the elements of church by adding the authoritative component of teaching. I led them through a study I developed called Themes in Luke-Acts: The Seeds and Shape of the Missional Church. It was didactic and dialogical. It allowed our people to get a sense of my ability and style of teaching, as well as to grasp the biblical foundations for missional ecclesiology. Many remarked how studying the Bible strengthened their convictions and practice of missional church. Eventually this grew into a full-blown service that met in a really ugly office building, but it was centrally located and free. The main intention behind this meeting was to provide a final component of extended worship and preaching. We had 20-25 core people and floating visitors.

Strategy and Community (3 months)

After a sufficient depth of community and practice in mission was established, we introduced a strategy/community meeting that met for a much shorter amount of time during the week. This meeting ran in addition to our Saturday Bible Study/service and was aimed and cultivating deeper community, missional health, and ministry basic structures and leaders. I developed some Missional and Structural Health Indicators to guide us toward a “launch.” This ensured that basic ministries would be in place once we went public (Children, Worship, Hospitality). We corporately wrestled with timing of launch and if a launch was even necessary. During this time we introduced a monthly prayer meeting, training for City Group leaders, and deployed the City Groups prior to a public service. This was an intentional move to build the church on missional communities, not on a service.

Services and Children’s Ministry

We eventually moved into a city center location that we had been praying about for months. God dropped a killer theatre into our lap for way below market value. We moved into that venue and initiated Sunday morning services once our missional and structural health was in place. We did no advertising and simply invited people in our social networks, believers and unbelievers. We began to grow in our service and in our City Groups from the beginning. Children’s ministry took a lot of energy and was worth the effort. Lay leaders were critical.

This is an excerpt of a slightly longer document called Stages of Organic Growth.

Missional Church Refresher

The most helpful, readable introduction to missional ecclesiology I have found is Craig Van Gelder’s The Essence of the Church. Many readers were grateful for my partial review of his book The Ministry of the Missional Church. In The Essence of the Church, Van Gelder explains what the church is, its historical development (pros and cons), articulates a clear missional ecclesiology, and charts a way to organize the missional church.

I am currently working on a master document that re-roots our functional ecclesiology in biblical theology, while also outlining a long-term vision of mulitiplication and growth. I forgot that Van Gelder does some of this in Essence. I went back to Van Gelder for a refresher and have been wonderfully refreshed. He describes the church as “a people of God created by the Spirit to live as a missionary community.” Though this description doesn’t include the gospel, it captures the missional nature of the church very well. He certainly is gospel-centered and warns us that “Failing to understand the anture of the church can lead to a number of problems. Defining the church functionally—in terms of what it does—can shift our perspective away from understnading the church as a unique community of God’s people.” A good word. A good book, for that matter.

Partners not Members

Some churches do members classes; we have a Partners Class (we took this name from the Austin Stone Church). The reason we call it a Partners class is that we believe the church is a partnership of Spirit-led disciples who follow Jesus. The church isn’t a country club bound by exclusive membership; it’s a missional community bound together by the gospel.

Read about it here.

Erwin Raphael McManus: Gospel Lite?

Justin Taylor cites from Phil Johnson on the gospel-lite writing of Erwin Raphael McManus:

. . . my fundamental quarrel with McManus is not about whether he repudiates this or that label. It’s not even about the menagerie of high-flown titles he does load his resumé with. It’s this: clear gospel truth is almost impossible to find in the material he publishes and posts for public consumption. And in that regard, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between Erwin McManus and Joel Osteen. He’s Osteen with blue jeans and an occasional soul patch rather than a shiny suit and a perpetual grin.

Am I being too hard on McManus? I expect we’ll get lots of commenters (including the usual suspects and some first-time drive-bys) who will insist that I am. McManus seems to have lots of passionate devotees online. To them I say: Welcome to our blog. Convince me. It should be easy to do if I’m wrong. Simply show me a few places where McManus makes the gospel plain and clear for his audience, with straightforward, biblical explanations of sin, atonement, and justification for sinners—including a distinct and compelling summons for sinners to repent.

Urban Insight from Harvey Cox

Harvard Professor and author, Harvey Cox possesses some of the most penetrating cultural and urban insight I have found. His most recent book, When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today, contains some great insight on finding common moral ground among religions. However, it lacks a gospel-centered approach. Harvey’s Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller and was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century. This book challenged me to think deeply about urban life, social norms, and the complexity of urban renewal.

In the Secular City, Cox works out the insight that Christianity uniquely facilitates the emergence of cities. He notes that the “universality and radical openness of Christianity” detribalizes people; it enables them to bond on something universal as opposed to local. Athens, he argures, never became a true city, in part, because it was so tribalized; the gods were all localized, unopen to outsiders. He writes: “Only after the beginning of the Christian era was the ideal of an inclusive metropolis conveivable, and even then it took nearly two millennia to relize it.” To a significant degree, Christianity is inclusive; it rules no one out on ethnic or cultural grounds. In fact, if you believe that Christians will ultimately be represented from “every tribe, tongue, and nation,” then Christianity reaches the height of inclusive without the theological vacuum of universalism. Not only does it include people; it reconciles them through Christ. Christians should not be useless citizens or angry neighbors. The gospel, then, should compell us to engage the peoples and the cultures of the city and the world in a way that renews, not ignores or exploits, urban life. I go back to it again and again and have not come close to exhausting Cox’s  insight for church planting and urban ministry.

Today I picked up his The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People’s Religion, published in 1985 and look forward to gleaning from his understanding of religion, it’s blessing and curse. So, I thought I would recommend Cox. Note: He is not bedtime reading. His mental rigor and inter-disciplinary thought is both inspiring and challenging, but its worth the struggle.

New Ike Opportunity

(Posted Sept 19)  TRIP #3 TO HOUSTON planned for Monday:

We will be taking another two trailers filled with Water, Ice, and Food… we will also be focusing on recovery and cleanup of some of the poorer neighborhoods in Pasadena (East Houston) assisting with the local efforts of Mision Baupista Adonai and surrounding areas.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

One of two ways…

1) VOLUNTEER:  We need Trucks, possibly trailers, and people… Let us know if you want to be involved by emailing us at volunteer@southaustincares.org

2) GIVE:  We’ve received emails from other states asking how they can help from a distance.  The best way is to donate financially.

You can DONATE directly through www.PayPal.com by “sending” funds to donate@southaustincares.org