of Evangelism

I write this as our youth mission team and their leaders are in the Tuscaloosa area clearing debris and making repairs after the record setting recent outbreak of tornados in that area. Except for an unpleasant encounter with some ticks and ants, not to mention the heat, things seem to be going well. Before leaving Sunday one of the team leaders said to me, “I don’t know what good we’ll do, but I know we’ll do some good.” That is a cardinal statement of faith; perhaps a prayer we might say every morning when we rise to face the potential of the new day. Archbishop William Temple, former archbishop of Canterbury, said that the church solely exists for those outside its doors. That’s evangelism: bearing the “good” to our world. That makes us all evangelists.

In our culture the term “evangelicals” usually refers to the politically ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christian sect in America, whose principal function is to recruit members for Christ, bring them into the fellowship of the saved, and thereby reap the abundant fruits of the kingdom, which often means success and prosperity. Using the word evangelical in this context is unfortunate because for most progressive Christians it has a negative connotation. I was told that there is an old joke in the church that the Episcopal Church doesn’t evangelize because anyone who would be an Episcopalian already was one. It must be an old joke because I’ve never heard it, and certainly never experienced it; perhaps it circulated in the fifties when white churches worried about what “type” might come through the front doors. The tacit meaning of the word in the modern west has become “recruitment.” But that old joke, such as it is, reinforces the negative misinterpretation of the rich word evangelism, euangelion in the Greek, which means good news. It was a common term used in Roman Imperial propaganda posted around the empire….. “the good news (euangelion) of Caesar, Son of God, that the world be well and at peace” (The stele bearing this quotation is in the British Museum) The shrewd gospel writers co-opted this term( as well as the term Son of God) and used it in reference to living the way of Christ, an alternative version of good news….the “good news” of Christ that there is salvation for your souls….salvation meaning well being and dignity….evangelism a highly charged socio-economic and political term challenging the social order…Jesus taught, as the gospel writers attest, that it is through mercy and compassion, justice and nonviolence, mutual concern and living for the good of the whole in community, sharing the abundance of God among us that saves…not oppressive hierarchical power lorded from the top of the socio-economic pyramid. In short it is salvation we evangelists bear from the grassroots in the milieu of daily living…. salvation meaning well being and dignity for those outside our doors….which means as evangelists we may still be called on to challenge the social order.

Salvation then is something we give away as evangelists…..It is not for us to hold onto as a possession, this love of Christ, guarding our own well being, our self interest, but it is for us to share it where it is most needed….that is just what our youth and their leaders are doing in Tuscaloosa this day….sowing the seeds of God’s love in acts of kindness and generosity…..we don’t know what good their work and sweat will bring, but we know it will bring good….They are about planting the seeds of well being and dignity, loving their neighbor, which will bear fruit, perhaps even a hundredfold. May we all live into our call as evangelists, and may others join us in this gospel enterprise, because we are stronger together…..and never doubt that our suffering world counts on this good news we shall bring.