Hold On and Let Go: Being Faithful in a Post-Modern, Culturally Creative World

Bruce Reyes-Chow
Organizing pastor, Mission Bay Community Church NCD, San Francisco

Presentation to the 2003 Covenant Conference
November 7, 2003
Washington, DC

(This presentation included slides and videoclips that are not shown here.)

Today we are going to talk about the church we are going to be and become in a broad way and looking at society and this whole idea of what it means to look at the post-modern world and our churches.

I ask you to think, what is the church that you dream about? What does it look like? Who is in this church? Who gets to decide who is in the church? This conference has been a really exciting time, because it has been a reaffirmation of what many of us believe. In some ways, though, I think we need to think about who we are. As I think about the church and what I hope it is to be, I think about my children. I have three wonderful, perfect girls who are the joy of my life. When I think about the church, I think about a church that they will have when they grow up. I hope that church is an exciting place to be, spiritually, physically, emotionally. I hope it is a place where they understand and experience God. When I look at our church today, when I look out here today, this is not the church that I dream about.

It is not very often that I can be in an entire conference and count the number of Asian-Americans on one hand. This place has some work to do. I go to conferences that maybe are a little more evangelical or conservative, and I bond with my Asian-American brothers and sisters, because they are there. Is it purely theology? I don’t think so. It is about approach, attitude, and posture. When I look at this group, and you hear that quote over and over again, “The Christian Church is one generation away from extinction,” that ain’t far from the truth.

Many of you have been faithful servants. Thank God for the roads you have paved for many of us. But look twenty years down the road, and many of us will not be here. This is not the church that I dream about for our children. I dream about a church that is whole as many of you do, but what that means for us in a larger picture. The Christian church has to be really bold, not just bold in the places that we are comfortable talking about and fighting about, but bold beyond all of it, because God has said to us, “All God’s children are God’s children.”

Let us pray. Holy and gracious God, may your spirit be with us this afternoon. May it be able to lift our hearts, our souls, and our spirits to you so that we may be open to all that you have gifted us with.

With all that wonderful introduction of why this church isn’t any good for you, let me begin by telling you a little about my background and why I feel like I can talk bad about the church.

I am your fault! So, you have no one else to blame but yourselves. I am born, raised, baptized Presbyterian. I come out of a small, multi-ethnic congregation in Stockton, California, a historically Philippino-American church founded out of the Central Valley farm workers strike — always a very social justice-minded church. It was very clear that my faith was about being active in the community, being connected to somebody, treating my neighbor as I would want to be treated. It was about being kind. It was about justice. It was about compassion. I was raised by the progressive part of our church — although I am finding out I am not as progressive as I used to think I was.

Now, as I look at our church and the way our church is moving, it is not lining up with the way the world is. Most of the time we would say, “Good!” but now it is to the detriment of our church. The world has gotten more progressive than us, and that scares me.

I think about that because I am in a church that is brand new. We are two years old, Mission Bay Community Church, and yes it doesn’t say Presbyterian, and no we are not tricking them into coming into the denomination. Many people say that we should put Presbyterian in the name, and I respond “Why?” It’s not like we hide it. We are a congregation that is hard to describe. I am one of the oldest people there every Sunday. I am 34 years old. Sixty people come on Sunday. There are about five people older than me. We have to do church differently. I cannot be the same kind of pastor I was when I was at a church that was predominantly 60- and 70-year-olds.

The church that I am in is focused on evangelism, the great E word of our church! David Bailey has the best way of talking about progressive evangelism. He says that in most churches it’s like, you are welcome to be in our church, but you have to cerebrally know that you are welcome. The congregation that I serve doesn’t let us get away with that. The congregation I serve is unapologetically about sharing the Good News of Christ in a variety of ways. This has been my struggle with evangelism in the more progressive part of our church. The most support I got for doing new church development in San Francisco Presbytery was not from the progressive churches. They are supportive in “Hope it goes well”; but when it came right down to it, our four biggest funders from our presbytery were all the most conservative churches. Funding a well-known progressive pastor. Would progressive churches fund an NCD for a well-known conservative evangelical church development? Probably not. 

For me, evangelism has been one of the most difficult things because we don’t always know what it is. For Presbyterians it has been even worse. There is this old story about the evangelism conference where the pastor is standing up front and asks the question, “What have Presbyterians contributed to the cause of evangelism?” and the whole conference is silent. Asked again, “What have Presbyterians offered to the cause of evangelism?” Nothing. Finally a gentleman in the back stands up and says, “Restraint!”

I grew up with a strong sense of my community. The communal aspect of my faith was ingrained in me. Every service ended in a circle; at every major event in anybody’s life the community gathered. But never once in my upbringing in the church did I talk in real language about my personal relationship with Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. We in the church have forced ourselves to choose between community and evangelism. We must be able to do both.

Some of you have heard this whole phrase about post-modernism. What the heck is that? Well, post-modernism in its essence is indefinable, but we are going to try. Post-modernism is that whole movement from a modern society of mechanics, of black and white, of structure, to a post-modern society which is generally a younger society that is into collaboration, that is about fluidity, that is about a life of chaos.

If you look at the dot.com industry where I pastor, that whole area, everybody would say the dot.coms don’t contribute to society. But those dot.coms, most of them, had a kind of family care within their company. They had all these things that had been fought for, but they weren’t talked about in the same way. That is from our Sixty’s parents’ upbringing. We are the generation of the divorced parents. Lives are unstable. Relationships are no longer set in stone. Vows of commitment are treated differently.
There was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a year ago that said dating is just practice for divorce. Sadly that rings true. The generation has a hard time looking for anything long-term. When I talk about being in the ministry for eight years, congregation members’ jaws drop. “Like, the same industry?” Yeah! “Not the same job, though, right?” Well, no.

Our young pastors are part of this post-modern generation that is unstable. It is a stressful time, but very exciting because it is a spiritual community. It is holistic. One of the wonderful things about post-modernism is this going away from rigid organizational hierarchy toward something closer to ordered chaos. If you look at the commercials, if you read business books, you see that marketing is going towards a post-modern culture. It’s addressing the rise of what they are calling the cultural creatives, 50 million people supposedly in the United States. It is a generation to which our churches will either say, “You are welcome and this is how we show it,” or “Really, you are not.” In the congregation that I serve, we try to do that.

Today I want to talk about a few ways that we as a church may do that. My first interest is about how we go about connecting people to God through our congregations. How do we live out this faith and worship in a way that may or may not bring folks into involvement? I want to talk about a few of those things, and they are not tools.

Post-modern ministry is not about what kind of music you do. It is not about whether you have coffee in the sanctuary or not. It is not about how tall your pulpit is. It is not about specifics at all. Our church in our modern way of thinking says, One plus one equals two, so we do this to reach this group. A post-modern way of thinking says, Well, this plus this over here might mean this, but on this end might mean this over here, so anytime we try to put something down you’re going to miss. We don’t talk about tools and skills. We talk about posture, approach, and being. What are the ways we are so that folks know that we are welcoming?

Two of the churches in San Francisco that I believe reach the highest number of people under 35 — what kind of worship do you think they have? Traditional! High church! Calvary Presbyterian Church, Laird Stuart’s church — Laird is a wonderful pastor, a great preacher — his church is high church, and they have a great number of young adults there. And post-modern! Our church probably has the second number. We’ve been around for two years. There are 18 Presbyterian churches in San Francisco, so that’s not so good. I offer to you these things not because I think I am any kind of expert, because in our denomination it doesn’t take a lot to be an expert on this.

When we talk about the struggles of the church, it is not about me saying here is how we need to change or here is how we are doing it, so you need to copy it. Nothing like that; it’s about us engaging in God’s journey together, and how in these brief moments we see glimpses of this amazing Kingdom of God that we will experience at the end of time. I offer you these things not as a way to say how bad your churches are or how great the one I serve is. It’s actually kind of sad that we have probably been one of the most successful in our denomination at reaching in any kind of big number — which is 60 — this generation of folks in a new way. These are not recycled Presbyterians. These are not folks who are transferring cities and looking for the nearest church. These are folks who as adults are experiencing Christianity for the first time. So I say to you, Gosh, this is really exciting for us. Maybe you can figure out a way to bring this excitement and amazing gift to your places of ministry.

I. The first thing is this. Be confident in Christ, confident in the saving power of Christ in our lives both physically and spiritually. One of the biggest deals for our folks is the instability of their lives. Every Sunday we pray for five or six people who don’t know if they are going to have a job. These aren’t folks in low-income industries. These are folks who have money for six months – but then what? These are folks whose parents are probably divorced. They themselves might have been divorced ,or are struggling with what it means to be in relationship these days. They’re struggling with theological issues, struggling with so much stuff, and we have to be able to offer Christ as a calming presence in the chaos. The reason I believe my brothers and sisters in a more evangelical setting are growing so well is that they are adjusting to this far better than we are. It is easier when our theology is black or white.

But the gift of the progressive part of our church is that we value and celebrate the gray. We look at our faith as a struggle. I never grew up seeing that as a gift. When we offer it to people we say, “You know what? Take comfort knowing that Christ is with you as you wander around.”

“Pastor, I’ve always thought about this. I’ve always questioned this. My last church didn’t let ask me this.”
I respond, “Alright! That’s cool! Let’s talk!”
“Really?
“Really!”

For us it is about finding this common presence in the midst of a world that is stormy. If you approach Christ in a way that we have been taught, our strength can be that calming presence for a whole generation that is experiencing nothing but chaos in their life. It saddens me that people are amazed that I’ve been married 13 years. It’s the best 25 years of my life I tell my wife, and she laughs — most of the time. It is amazing because in their lives, in their experience that seems like a really long time. Yes it is, and the journey is hard; but there is stability in the midst of that relationship just as there is stability in your relationship with Jesus Christ. Claim it! Own it!

I used to forget that. When people come to the Presbyterian Church for the first time, believe it or not, they are really not looking for community in a sense that we offer it. Most of the time they want to know if we actually talk about Jesus Christ. In San Francisco, as you can imagine, our greatest strength is the diversity of our spirituality, but it is also our greatest struggle. I have people coming to our church all the time saying they came here because you actually said God in your mission statement, and there are Christian churches that don’t. We could go to the Church of John Coltrane. We could go to the Wiccan thing down here. We could go to the Unitarian thing over here. We could go to the Methodist thing over here. 

I used to be in that whole Seeker movement. Take all that out! The new generation of folks are saying, Tell us what you believe. Claim it! Our weakness as progressives is that we often haven’t done that well. Folks come to the church looking for a connection to Christ, looking for a definitive understanding of how we live that faith out.

I was taught that by a lady at my first church, Covenant Presbyterian. It was an older church, and it combined with this younger group from the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown. They wanted to grow in this area that was growing with mixed ethnicity.

I was 26 years old when I was ordained. The vibrancy we bring as young pastors is a gift. The vibrancy combined with the arrogance of some of us that come out of seminary is not so much. I remember one Monday, there was a knock on the office door. Martha walks in, and she folds her arms. I know I’m in trouble. “Bruce,” she said (and I wanted to say, “That’s Pastor Bruce,” but she didn’t go for that), “do you know what happened Sunday?” I said “No, what happened Sunday?” — I’m thinking, oh no, did I swear in my sermon? Did I put the coffee on the piano again? “Bruce, the flowers were in the wrong place on Sunday!” I’m sitting there. Here’s what not to say. “Martha, I don’t care.” You know, it is one of those things where you say it (Oh God, bring it back!), and you can imagine her face if you watch cartoons – you can cook eggs on her head it was so hot.

I turned to my computer. “Dear Session. I quit.” I erased that and said instead that I have discerned God’s calling in my life. As Christ has guided my spirit…, and I called up my mentor, Cal Chinn, and I say to him, “Cal, I’m quitting.”

“Don’t quit,” said Cal.
“No, Cal, this is it. I’m done here. I can’t take it anymore.”
“Bruce, don’t quit. Let’s talk.”
“No, Cal. The letter is written. I’m going to print it.”
“Let’s go have lunch.”
“No. I’m set.”
“I’ll pay.”
“OK!”

So, we go to lunch, and Cal asks what’s going on? He then says to put out my hands. So I put out my hands like this, and he says, “OK, in this hand put all the cruddy stuff they’ve done to you. Put it in that hand and tell me what it is.”

“Well, Martha came and yelled at me today, and they’re making fun of this, and they don’t like the way I do this.”

Cal then said I should put all the good stuff in the other hand. “Tuesday I went to visit Barrie who is 104, and she served me tea in little tea cups which is kind of cool, and then the other day Raina was born, so I got to go see her in the hospital, and that was pretty cool. We have a baptism coming up!”

Cal said, “See? It’s a scale!” Then I went, “Mentors suck! I hate them!” — Did I just say that from the pulpit? I’m sorry! — It was one of those times where God says to you to suck it up, man! It was that gentle reminder for me.

We began to talk more and more, and he said, “You know what? You are right! The flowers don’t matter. You don’t care, but Martha does. Don’t mess with the way Martha really loves God.” He reminded me that that was how Martha connected with God. She went to church to connect with Christ. Those flowers were important for her, because that was some stability for her. There were parts of her life that were unstable. You come into that church, you start messing with the flowers, you start messing with the worship experience and the way that they experience God. You may not care, Bruce, but they do.

When we approach the post-modern world we have to give the same value to the way people want to experience God. People don’t come to the church expecting to leave. They come to the church hoping there is a reason to stay. When we are open with our understanding of Christ and say this is what Christ means for us, despite the instability of the world, the grayness can be a comfort, then we have said to a world that is so chaotic, there is calm. There is peace of mind and spirit, and this is a place you can find it. We cannot forget to be confident in Christ..

II. This is about not just confidence in Christ but humility of the spirit. One of the hallmarks of the post-modern generation is there is no absolute truth in anything. As soon as people begin to hear absolutism they run. We cannot be so absolute in things that we ourselves begin to say the transformative power of the Holy Spirit cannot infiltrate that which we are so sure of.

I think about all the positions I have ever held about anything, and what I have become and where I have been. My mother is an extremely liberal democrat and a Presbyterian pastor. She was this incredibly liberal democrat and worked for the legislature in Sacramento, California for about 25 years, and when I was in sixth grade I wrote two papers. One was on my favorite President which was Nixon. My mother just about had a coronary when I brought this home, and in her gentleness said “What the __ is this?????” — “Err, I liked the dog.” The second paper I wrote was on capital punishment. At that point I thought it was more humane to kill off the prisoners than to overcrowd our prisons. Liberal democrat mom was happy about that paper, too! At that point in my life I was so sure about where I was. My mom was so sure that she had just messed up.

Just as I have changed, we have to be open to all the things we believe God is leading us to. I say to folks in our congregation we are very mixed theologically. All of our clergy is fairly progressive, but our congregation is very mixed theologically. We have two committed gay couples in our church, and we have many folks who just believe it is wrong. It is amazing, I think, how a post-modern generation is ready to be in the same congregation, let alone same denomination I say to them that this is where I am, and I am 99% sure I am right. There are three pastors who work with that multi-ethnic congregation — one Asian-American, one Korean-American, one African-American. We’re the only denominational church, I am sure, that has three racial-ethnic pastors in a church that is not deemed racial-ethnic. Every year I go to racial-ethnic events. Well ,why? We are not a racial-ethnic church. Well, because it is important to me, because the justice in our denomination still needs work, the justice and the racism in our world still need work. And I say to the congregation (I hope I’m right), when I talk about my own struggles around race and how that informs me, and how I raise my children, and what that means about what we need to do as a denomination and as a church, I hope I’m right. I hope that when I read scripture, whatever God’s Spirit tells me that I need to say that Sunday morning, gosh I hope I’m right.

But I never say to them I am 100% sure, because when we take a 100%-sure stance on anything, we leave out that thing called faith. We leave out that possibility that God may say to us, “You know what? Change your heart.” We ask the other parts of our church to do that. We are in the business in this place of figuring out ways to change the hearts of these other folks. My challenge is not just around particular issues that we deal with here, but other issues in our church around who you see, who walks in, who is not there. Can our hearts be changed as well? Are we so sure of how we are to be as a church that we have left out and forgotten the transformative power of the Holy Spirit? Can we be humble enough to say, I may be wrong, but I have faithfully discerned that this is where God has told me to stand in this place and in this time? Can we be Esther in that moment? Can we also be the Pharisees who may change? Those who are converted? Can our experience of God also say to us sometimes that we may not always be right? We have to be humble in the Spirit.

Oftentimes we as a church, as a people, can be so stubborn, so sure of ourselves, that we allow ourselves to go on without any kind of experience of reconciliation. We are so unwilling to change in real ways. We never really say to God, “Change my heart, God. The transformative power that you carry is real for me, and I will live it out.” We have to be honest with the Spirit. When people come in, they want to know that we are not always so sure in our claims that there is no room for faith. Every time I say, I am here, and I am never budging, what does that leave out of my life and my faith and my experience of God’s amazing community? We have to be humble in the Spirit.

III. The last thing that I offer to you, in trying to make this church open to the community in which many of us live, is to trust in God. This is so simple yet something that I think we often fail to do and to show. Trusting God means to me that I hang in.

So often, my friends in ministry will come, and we will talk about the struggles they are experiencing, because the culture is one that says it is okay to move on after three or four years. In fact, if you are not moving on after three or four years, you are currently not wanted anywhere else. But the reality is that our churches will not thrive unless pastors stay. But my colleagues are leaving, and I remember going through that struggle with my first congregation. The Sunday I was going preach my last sermon, and trying to find some grace in the midst of it, my wife said to me — I’ll never forget it — Robin put her arms around me, and she said, “Bruce, just trust God.”

From that point on my ministry was never about how long I am going to be here. It was what am I going to do with the amount of time that God has given me to serve. There were no more risks in ministry because I trusted God. When we started this new church, with no people, no building, no money, folks would say to me it was such a risk. I said no, you know what? I trusted God has guided somewhere, so I’m not really worried about that! We have to be able to trust God. We have to be able to tell people in the same way they, too, must trust God. One of the worst characteristics of the generation and of the culture is this tendency to move on quickly. There is huge angst in the midst of any transition our young folks are making these days — job, family, church, relationships. We need to say to them to just trust in God: trust that there is something greater than you may even know right now.

The world is looking for us to say to them, Jesus Christ is real. The world is looking for us to say, we are really sure about this, but we are always faithful to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. And the world is looking for us to say, God is real, and you can rely on God. When we begin to approach this new generation of people who are all around us, some sitting in these very pews, when we really begin to live that out, that church that I told you about, that dream, then in twenty years, when my daughters are sitting in the chairs or the pews, or in the coffee house, wherever they may be sitting to have church, I will be able to sit back and say, “Ah! This is the church that I dreamed about.” When you all who will go on before some of us are watching over us, sitting with God, you can say, “Ah, I had a hand in the plan that brought about this church that we dreamed about.” When my children experience a church like this they, too, will be part of a church that says, in the future for them, this is the church that their children will be part of. When we do that, we are faithful to God. Be faithful to Christ. Be faithful to the transforming power of the Spirit. And trust in God. When we do that as a community faithfully, we are being faithful to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Let us pray:

Holy and gracious God, for the amazing spirit that comes upon each and every one of us, in the glimpses of grace, in the smallness of a child’s grin, the enormity of a thunderstorm, the wonder of a handshake from an enemy, the power of our own hearts being transformed, help us to see you, O God, in our lives this day so that we may live forth differently, that this amazing day you give us we do something faithfully. We do something joyously. We do something that transforms the world. We pray all of this in the name of Christ.  Amen.

Evangelism in a Pluralistic Society:
A Reformed Perspective

 Shirley Guthrie
Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology
Columbia Theological Seminary

Address to the 2002 Covenant Conference
November 8, 2002

Introduction

I may be wrong, but I suspect that evangelism is not high on the agenda of many of us who belong to the Covenant Network. The word is not mentioned in “A Call to Covenant Community,” our statement of purpose. While it does say that Jesus “called all to repent and believe the good news,” it only obliquely suggests that we are commissioned to be evangelists. Why this silence and its implied reluctance on our part to talk about evangelism?

Perhaps the main reason is that we are appalled by the kind of evangelism we hear on the radio, see on TV, and observe in some self-proclaimed evangelists in our church: Evangelism that is interested only in the salvation of individual souls in the next world and ignores or openly rejects concern for social justice in this world. Evangelism that is arrogant, intolerant, self-righteous and exclusive in its claim that only Christians worship the one true God while others worship false gods, and that God loves, helps and promises to save us Christians and nobody else. So we leave evangelism to “conservatives” and “evangelicals” who “go in for that sort of thing” (some of whom, by the way, may or may not believe what we think they do).

But there are several good reasons why we ought not to shy away from the evangelistic mission of the church. First, according to the New Testament, which we too confess to be the unique and authoritative Word of God, it is not something we may or may not decide to get into. According to Matthew, the last words of Jesus to his disciples were, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Then in Acts we hear that Peter, Paul, and other leaders in the early Christian community invited their hearers to repent, be baptized, and turn to the God revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus. From the very beginning and throughout its history, the Christian movement has understood its task to be not just to talk about the good news of God in Jesus Christ, or just to demonstrate it in the life of the Christian community. It is to invite people to accept, believe, and live by it themselves. That is our task, too.

Secondly, we in the Covenant Network ought not to be wary of the evangelistic mission of the church because we have resources in our own understanding of the good news that could help us understand evangelism not just as something we unfortunately ought to do but as something we can do — modestly but also gladly and joyfully.

Finally, if we in the Covenant Network (of all people!) took the lead in an attempt to discover a genuinely Biblical-Reformed theology of evangelism, we might discover — precisely in an issue that has divided our church into hostile liberal, conservative, and evangelical camps — a common ground that reconciles us and unites us in commitment to what God calls all of us to do — together.

Could that happen? Maybe. In any case, I believe it is worth a try, and in this lecture I want to make a few beginning steps in that direction. First I will propose a working definition of a Biblical-Reformed definition of the task of evangelism, then suggest some guidelines for fulfilling it.

I suppose that all Christians would agree that evangelism involves a two-fold task: It involves first of all witness in word and action (neither without the other) to the good news of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ, and in him the coming of the rule of God’s justice and compassion in and for the world. And it involves secondly the invitation to respond to this good news by confessing Christ as Lord and Savior, and committing one’s life to love and serve him as a member of the Christian community.

I believe that careful attention to this definition can enable us in several ways to understand and practice authentic Christian evangelism and to distinguish between it and distorted versions of it that are common in both liberal and conservative camps in the church.

I. Authentic Christian evangelism bears witness to God, not to our personal religious experience.

Some people are made uncomfortable by talk about “evangelism” and “witnessing” because these words remind them of self-congratulating and self-advertising Christians at “testimony” services or in personal conversation who talk mostly about themselves: how sinful, miserable and lost they used to be and how blessed, happy and saved they have become since they accepted Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and began to have a personal relationship with God.

Of course the witness Christians have to bear does include telling the story of our own “faith journey” and how we have experienced the presence and work of God in our own lives. But authentic Christian evangelism is distinguished from perversions of it in two ways.

First, the goal of authentic evangelism is not to talk about our personal religious experience as such, but to talk about the God we have experienced. It is not to lead others to know what great people we Christians are but what a great God we worship and serve. It is not to proclaim our faith in God but to proclaim the God in whom we have faith.

Second, the story we Christians have to tell is not only about how God has been present and at work in our individual lives; it is to set our little stories in the context of the story of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, David and the prophets of ancient Israel, Mary and her son Jesus, Peter and Paul (all of them Jews — and the reason why Jews can never be the target of Christians evangelism: They were the people of God long before we Christians came along.). To tell this story is to tell the long story about a just and loving Creator who created all human beings in God’s own image, and who from the very beginning and throughout the history of the world has been at work for the good of all human beings, every one of whom God loves just as much as God loves us Christians. It is to tell the story of the crucified Messiah of Israel whom God raised from the dead and made to be not just “my” Lord and Savior but Lord and Savior of the world. It is to tell the story of a living Christ who by the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of the God of Israel) continues his healing, reconciling, liberating work not only in the lives of Christians but also in the lives of people of other religious traditions and no religion at all.

Evangelism that interprets our little stories in light of this larger story is more difficult than evangelism that tells only “my” story. The story to which it bears witness cannot be told in a few minutes; it requires a long, on-going conversation and hard work. It requires the confession that we Christians are not people who have it made and know all the right answers, but rather that we are people who ourselves are only on the way to learning to understand our own lives and the lives of others in light of what the Bible tells us about the God we confess. It requires willingness to listen to the stories of people whose religious experience is different from our own, and openness to recognize the presence and work of the living God and living Christ we confess in their stories, too. Such evangelism is not easy, but it does set us free from both the burden and the pretension of making ourselves rather than God the center of our witness.

II. Authentic Christian evangelism bears witness to God, not to the Christian community.

Christian evangelism includes an invitation to join the community of those who confess and serve Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and who gather week after week to rehearse their story and learn afresh what it means to live by it. But there is a kind of evangelism that only replaces self-congratulating, self-advertising, and self-serving witness to personal religious experience with self-congratulating, self-advertising, and self-serving witness to the Christian community . It can take a conservative or a liberal form. And both of them compromise and contradict the good news authentic Christian evangelism has to announce.

Self-glorifying conservative evangelism sets out to bear witness to Jesus Christ as the way, truth, and life, but turns it into witness not to him but to Christianity as the only true religion. Instead of bearing witness to the living God of the Bible made known in the crucified, risen, and living Christ, it bears witness to orthodox Christian theology about God and Christ. Instead of bearing witness to how great that God is, it bears witness to the superiority of Christians and their church in comparison to non-Christians and other religious communities. Despite its good intentions, instead of exalting and glorifying God in Jesus Christ, it exalts and glorifies Christians, Christianity and the Christian religion (whose role in history has often been a questionable one!)

On the other hand, self-glorifying liberal evangelism is what Karl Barth calls “self-glorifying Christian moralism.” It sets out to bear witness to God’s justice, unlimited love, generosity and inclusiveness in Jesus Christ. But it subtly turns it into witness to how committed liberal Christian churches are to inclusiveness, diversity, “hospitality to strangers,” and friendship with people outside and inside the church whose faith and life are different from each other. But this subtle shift from how wonderful God is to how wonderful liberal Christians and their churches are only exposes the great difference between them. Even the most liberal churches, for instance, tend to welcome into their fellowship just about everybody except those whose conservative or evangelical theology, or political and social agenda, or position on moral issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and homosexuality differs from theirs. And in so far as that is true, liberals belie in their own life together, and make unconvincing in the world around them, the very good news about God’s inclusive justice and compassion for all people they want to proclaim.

As different as they are, self-glorifying conservative and self-glorifying liberal evangelism both place their faith and hope not so much in what God has done, is doing and promises to do in and for the world as in what we Christians and our church can do if we can only convince (force, if necessary) other people to believe like we do, or if they would only join us in fixing everything that is wrong with the world and help us bring in the kingdom of God.

Authentic Christian evangelism is distinguished from distortions of it by the way it bears witness to God’s truth, wisdom, righteousness, justice, and ability to save the world, not that of even the most orthodox or liberal or middle-of-the-road church or groups within it. It openly confesses that it is first of all our own stumbling and questionable efforts to discern and serve the will and work of God that are judged, found wanting, and stand in the need of correction. It freely acknowledges that sometimes we Christians see more of the justice and compassion of God, and the reconciling and liberating work of the living Christ, among non-Christians than we see in the Christian church. It is gladly open to learn from outsiders some things that we should have learned about God and God’s will from our own Bible. It invites people to join a community of fellow sinners who gather week after week not to congratulate themselves for what liberal or conservative or evangelical Christians know and do that no one else knows and does, but to hear again the good news of what the living God of the Bible is saying and doing for our good and for the good of the world around us, and to learn ever afresh, in every new situation, what we have to say and do thankfully, freely and joyfully to love and serve that God — joining hands with others who in different ways serve the cause of God’s justice and compassion for all people, everywhere.

III. Authentic Christian evangelism bears witness to the love of God for all kinds of people.

There is a kind of (conservative and liberal) evangelism that is interested in bearing witness to the good news about God in Christ only to people who are “like us” and would “feel at home” in “our kind” of church — people of the same ethnic identity, economic class and social class, with the same repressive or permissive moral standards and right- or left-wing theological and political convictions. Such evangelism can sometimes be successful in building big churches. But it says in effect, “If you are not like us, we do not care about you, we do not welcome you into our company — and neither does our God.” In attitude and action it belies the very good news it sets out to bear witness to.

Authentic Christian evangelism is a wide-open invitation to all kinds of people to come hear the good news of God in Jesus Christ, investigate it, and if they choose become a part of the Christian community. It is evangelism that is not only willing to accept them if they come, but actually seeks them out and takes the initiative to welcome them.

Such evangelism may offend some who want the church to be an exclusive club of like-minded people, but it sets us free not only to talk about but actually demonstrate the good news that God is not just for people like us but for all kinds of people — including those who in the church and in its wider environment are suspicious of one another, afraid of one another, and enemies of one another

IV. Authentic Christian evangelism bears witness to the saving grace of God. .

Almost everyone agrees that the evangelistic task of the church and of individual Christians is to bear witness to God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ by what we say and how we live together in the Christian community and in the world around us. But authentic, biblically based evangelism differs from distorted versions of it by the way it preserves three aspects of God’s grace that traditional evangelism tends to forget or ignore.

1. God’s grace is both “justifying” grace and “sanctifying” grace. One of the great strengths of traditional evangelical proclamation is its emphasis on what is called the justifying grace of God, the good news that God loves, accepts, forgives, helps and saves unworthy, undeserving sinners. But from the perspective of scripture and Reformed-Presbyterian tradition, one of the great weaknesses of much evangelism is a one-sided emphasis on this aspect of God’s grace. It leads evangelists to talk only about the “benefits” of Christ’ life, death, and resurrection — what God gives us and does for us in Christ. And it leads those who hear such proclamation to think only of what they “get out of” being Christians — to believe that the meaning and goal of Christian faith and life is only that they should be blessed; their problems solved; their needs met; their wishes fulfilled; their lives made happy, secure and successful; their souls saved. It leads, in other words, to what Karl Barth called “pious egocentrism” or “pious narcissism.”

What is wrong with such evangelism is that it makes the justifying grace of God an end in itself. It forgets that God’s grace is what Calvin called a “two-fold grace” — justifying and sanctifying grace, justifying grace that is fulfilled in sanctifying grace.

According to scripture and Reformed theology, God’s grace is indeed grace that promises all sorts of good things and frees people from anxiety about the future. But it is also grace that frees them from self-centered preoccupation with their own happiness and welfare in this life and the next so that they may be free to love God and their fellow human beings. It frees people from fear of what God will do to them if they do not believe and do the right things. But it is also grace that frees them from pious greed that thinks only of how God will pay off if they do believe and do right. It is grace that frees us from a religion based on greed or fear, and frees us for religion based on thankful, obedient response to God’s goodness.

The grace of God is the grace we Christians meet in Jesus Christ, who not only loved, forgave and helped sinners, and promised them salvation, but invited them to follow him and promised them the wisdom, courage and strength they needed as they set out on the costly and dangerous path of discipleship. It is grace that promises salvation to those who in Jesus’ company are willing to be the friend of religious, social and moral outsiders; who put commitment to the kingdom of God and God’s justice and compassion over commitment to making money and accumulating possessions; who love their enemies and the enemies of their society, and seek their good rather than to get even, seek revenge, and pay back.

Calvin taught us Presbyterians that God is a sovereign God whose work of saving grace goes on when, where, how, and among whom God pleases, also outside the church. But authentic Christian evangelism proclaims and demonstrates the grace of God promised to those who enjoy the blessing, gifts, and benefits of belonging to Jesus as they accept the dangerous consequences of belonging to him.

2. God’s grace reconciles people both to God and to other people. Evangelists have always proclaimed and invited people to believe the good news that through God’s grace in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, sinful human beings are reconciled to God. But popular evangelism has not always emphasized the fact that God’s grace in Christ at the same time reconciles human beings to each other. By its silence it has implied that it is possible to “get right” with God without getting right with other people.

Authentic, biblically based evangelism makes it clear that there is no such thing as a right relationship with God that is not manifested in and confirmed by a right relationships with others. “Those who say ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers and sisters are liars.” It is true that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but it is also true that this same Christ reconciles outsiders and insiders, educated and uneducated, haves and have-nots, male and female (Gal. 3.28). He is the Christ who breaks down the dividing walls of hostility that separate us form God and from one another.

Authentic evangelism, therefore, proclaims and invites people to receive and live by the grace of God that reconciles us to God as it both promises and requires reconciliation between men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, people of different races and sexual orientation, rich and poor, people like us and people who are different from us.

3. God’s grace is for individual Christians in the church and for the world. Traditional evangelism almost exclusively emphasizes the saving grace of God in the lives of individual persons and in the life of the Christian community. It has often ignored (even denied) the good news of God’s grace addressed to the world outside the lives of individual Christians and the church.

But that is not the way it is in the Bible. In the Bible God’s chosen people are not chosen to be God’s privileged elite, to be “in” with God while everyone else is left out. They are chosen to be “a light to the nationsthat my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”. Jesus was indeed concerned about individuals and their salvation. But his evangelistic preaching was not about that but about the coming of the kingdom of God and the rule of God’s justice, love, freedom and peace in the world. He was indeed concerned about the present and future well-being of the community of his followers. But before he taught them to pray for their daily bread, the forgiveness of their sins, and their deliverance from evil, he taught them to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God, that God’s will may be done on earth as in heaven. He promised that if they would seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, then everything else that was important to them (including their own salvation) would take care of itself.

To quote Paul once again, the good news is that God raised Jesus from the dead and made him lord not only in the hearts of Christians and in the church, but Lord over all power, rule and authority everywhere. Paul taught that the risen Christ, though the Spirit, is at work here and now to create not just individual Christian believers and the church but a whole new humanity in a whole new heaven and earth.

So according to scripture (and in contradiction to some traditional evangelism), we do not have to “take” Jesus to the world or “sell” him to the world; we go out to meet him in the world where as our risen Lord, by his Spirit, he is already at work before we get there to tell people about him. That means that authentic and faithful proclamation of the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ can make no split between commitment to individual salvation and social justice; life in this world and the next; the spiritual and the physical welfare of human beings; Christian love in individual relationships and Christian involvement in social, political and economic relationships; a religious sphere in which God and the living Jesus are present and at work and a secular sphere in which they are not. The good news is that people are called by God’s grace to live in and for a world that is and will be God’s world — a world that God is not against but for.

A Last Word

How will people inside as well as outside the church respond to evangelism along the lines we have been talking about? When they hear this version of the good news about this kind of grace, some Christian individuals and churches as well as other people may prefer another gospel, about a different kind of grace, that offers more self-serving “benefits” and less demanding requirements. But others who are weary and bored to death with the false promises of an evangelism of cheap grace, pious narcissism, and consumer religion — they may at least be interested in a kind of evangelism that tells the truth about who the God we come to know in Jesus Christ really is, and what that God really promises, not just for the good of us Christians in our little Christian sphere but for the good of all people, everywhere Who knows, some might even want to join a community of people committed to serving not just their own self-interest (and that of their nation!) but a great God and the great cause of the kingdom of God in and for the world. They might even want to become Christians! And even if they don’t, they might learn that Christians and the God Christians worship are not their enemies but their friends.

[Editor's note: Rabbi Joseph Edelheit offered a response to this paper.]

Evangelism in a Pluralistic Society:
A Rabbinic Response

Rabbi Joseph Edelheit
Senior Rabbi, Temple Israel, Minneapolis (ret.)

2002 Covenant Conference
November 8, 2002

These comments were offered following Shirley Guthrie’s paper, “Evangelism in a Pluralistic Society: A Reformed Perspective.”

I am profoundly honored to share in your community’s reflections. I always acknowledge synchronicity; Einstein once said, “Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.” My participation in these significant conversations overlap the 64th anniversary of Kristlnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, November 9-10, 1938, the pogroms throughout Germany that mark the beginning of the Holocaust. That you have asked a rabbi to join you in these important intra-Presbyterian conversations represents a significant commitment to breaking the cycles of religious hatred and insularity, and I am duty bound to recognize the continued prophetic presence of the Reverend Tim Hart-Andersen whose invitation for my participation affirms this church’s role in witnessing God’s presence in an inter-religious community of equals.

Dr. Guthrie’s paper is a wonderful invitation for dialogue. His re-formulation of “authentic Christian evangelism” is both insightful and inclusive. He helps us understand that we must continue to do the work of theology in a “public” fashion, responding to what our common teacher, David Tracy, calls the “situation” of the world-of-our-being. Guthrie’s guidance may be considered risky in certain venues, but as one who represents at least a sample of non-Christians, I feel both comfortable and comforted by his demand that “there is no such thing as a right relationship with God that is not manifested in and confirmed by right relationships with others.” I feel that I am included in that “right relationship” and willing to listen carefully and respectfully to the story/witness of God’s grace as you experience it through the Christ.

Having affirmed this primary element of Dr. Guthrie’s proposition, and being mindful that as a respondent I have much less time, allow me to challenge the conversation with a move to praxis. I represent 30 years of a congregational rabbinate, a communal engagement with interfaith relations, and most recently a ministry among HIV/AIDS activists, thus any theology of evangelism must meet a standard of can we “walk our talk”.

Mindful that our dialogue is anchored in our shared commitment to scripture, allow me to suggest a common text from which my move to praxis can be better understood. Genesis 4:1-7, the first part of the Cain and Abel material, provides us with a fascinating example of a spiritual triangle, or using Guthrie’s idiom, “inauthentic” evangelism. Here is the very first example of serving God in different forms, in which one offering is accepted and the other rejected. The text provides no details, but suggests that Abel’s worship was from among “the choicest” while Cain’s was not.

The jealousy and arrogance implied in the text lead directly to the all-too-often competitive evangelical approaches of many faith communities. We have all experienced those who have no shame in expressing how their relationship with God, their worship, their theology, and their community is the “choicest” offering before God. The God with whom I have a relationship, with whom I am covenantly bound through Mitzvot, commandments, will not accept the offerings of those who claim that they already have God’s grace and blessing. When I re-read Cain and Abel, I push the text about God’s involvement in creating this first triangle of spiritual rejection. Why didn’t God accept both offerings, allowing for the differences, sparing these siblings the jealousy, anger, anguish and arrogance that fueled Cain’s horrific reaction?

Evangelism risks the same kind of spiritual triangles, where some offerings are acceptable and others rejected. In a world of increasingly polarized religious violence, we cannot accept religious communities’ abusive claim that they are sure about God’s authoritative acceptance or rejection of another. Let us share the obligation in warning each other of these all-too-human lapses, made so vivid in the description of Abel, the claim that some bring their “choicest” offering at the expense of what others bring.

Let me offer two practical but very complex and ambiguous applications from a pastoral turn to these questions. One is global and the other very particular. How will Presbyterians live their “authentic evangelical” identities in the presence of the exponentially expanding AIDS pandemic? As the transmission of the virus increasingly infects communities where Western faith communities are either minorities or non-existent, Christians (and Jews) will be confronted by faiths and religious cultures that actually conflict with our spiritual discourse. Will we be able to adapt to the urgency of need, when increasingly the claim on us will come from those who do not confess God as we do? Guthrie prophetically argues, “First, the goal of authentic evangelism is not to talk about our personal religious experience as such, but to talk about the God we have experienced.”

Projections now suggest that five countries representing 40% of the world’s population will bring the total infected to 75 million by 2010. These countries, Russia, Ethiopia, China, Nigeria and India, represent a plurality of non-Western, non-Christian communities. Can we move beyond even Guthrie’s corrective, and be willing and able to talk not about “the” God we have experienced, but merely “God,” allowing for the most universal, truly cosmic presence of a single creative and radically all-inclusive God? If we continue to struggle with the language of evangelism among Christian communities or between Jews and Christians, how then will we meet the challenge of the tens of millions who do not know the Christ and still have a claim on our common shared humanness?

The pastoral theologies we have used for the last 20 years of responding to AIDS here in America must be reconstructed as we collectively face the global pandemic without the inappropriate burdens and agendas of bringing the “good news of the Christ” to those who need our help. The God who calls Jews and Christians to witness a Divine presence in our countless communal ministries expects us to accept this challenge, to understand that in our post-Modern, post-Christian world this global pandemic provides no ambiguities; all offerings must be accepted.

A second, and more local but still very provocative pastoral challenge to an authentic Christian evangelism is the issue of interfaith marriage, specifically Jewish-Christian interfaith marriage. Where does the Presbyterian Church stand on this all-too-common social reality in America? When our children grow up together and we live out the inclusive witness of our faiths, always affirming the shared singularity of God, does it really matter when a Jew and Christian marry?

Given the alarmingly high rates of interfaith marriage and the immediate threat it poses for Jewish survival, I am prepared to risk my honored presence here this morning in order to challenge this community to put this topic on your agenda. What is an authentic Christian evangelical position regarding non-Christian life partners and the children born into those families? How are we preparing our students in seminary for such pastoral situations? Is an authentic Christian identity enhanced when pastors are willing to officiate at interfaith weddings with rabbis? Should the sacred dimensions of a Christian wedding service be adapted, even syncretized, in order for a Jew to participate in a church wedding? Most painfully, how is an authentic Christian evangelism experienced when we are asked to counsel a couple that have yet to decide the religious identity of children?

Let me be clear in my challenge in this dialogue: is an authentic Christian evangelism committed to the survival of the Jewish community? In a post-Holocaust world, the dialogue between Jews and Christians has tackled a myriad of issues, none of which is as risky as the now all-too-common pastoral challenge of interfaith marriage.

Taking this conversation toward praxis models the risk of witnessing any faith in this 21st-century global community, a time of radical ambiguity and a community of uncompromising diversity. May God bless all of us in our common strivings.