Turning to Christ

This is the title of Dean Urban Holmes’ book on evangelism. It is now a classic, and it is my favorite phrase for understanding evangelism. Holmes also had a great insight into a problem TEC has with evangelism. He pointed out that the Church has a linguistic problem. We all share the same vocabulary, but often we mean different things when we use terms. When it comes to the word evangelism, our problem is that all of us know and use the word, but often we mean different things by it.

When I served in Southern Ohio, the Bishop asked me to chair a new commission on Evangelism. Holmes’ point was driven home in our first meeting when I asked each member what they meant by evangelism. The answers varied greatly, and I remember two responses. One person said, “Evangelism means proselytizing other people and I am here to make sure we Episcopalians don’t do it.” A second person added, “I came from an evangelical denomination, and I joined the Episcopal Church because we don’t do it.”  This latter answer is something that I will return in a later blog when I discuss the resistance within the Church to doing evangelism. The first 5 meetings of the Commission were spent just trying to reach some agreement about the word evangelism.

I also learned the painful truth about how people use the word. After a year of discussion and planning, we went back to the bishop to suggest a strategy for evangelism in Southern Ohio. After he read it, he said to me, “That’s not what I think evangelism is.” The bishop a disillusioned former evangelical now believed evangelism meant advocacy and social change. At first, I felt let down by the bishop, but Urban Holmes’s comment helped me understand that I was naïve to take on the work without finding out first what the bishop meant.

As the Church prepared for the decade of evangelism in the 1990s, our bishops spent much time coming to a definition for TEC. They built on William Temple’s saying that “Evangelism is the presentation of Jesus Christ in such ways that men and women are led to accept him as Savior and follow him as Lord. When Temple's definition was expanded to “follow him within the fellowship of his Church,” English evangelicals led by John Stott objected to this. They stated that our job was “to proclaim” the good news of the Gospel and not to attach people to the Church. They argued that evangelism was centered on the decision and not on church membership or formation.  Of course, the baptismal service affirms the role of the Church in the formation of a new Christian. Fortunately, our bishops embraced Temple’s fuller definition and added the words “in the power of the Holy Spirit.” After all, evangelism is God’s endeavor through Christ and not based on human determination to “make” people believers.

What is evangelism according to TEC? Our official definition is “Evangelism is to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit so that persons are led to believe in him as Savior and follow him as Lord within the fellowship of the Church.”

What is not evangelism? It is not as one Bishop famously said, “everything the Church does.” It is not diversity, inclusion, and equality. It is not demanding social justice. It is not offering a food bank, or providing shelter for those who need it. It is not marching for someone or some group’s rights. As important as all these things are, they are not evangelism. I would add that if everything we do is evangelism then nothing is evangelism.

However, I would strongly like to repeat an observation often made by Bishop Payne. He would point out that “evangelism is the most inclusive thing the Church does.” Remember the biblical witness. In the beginning, all Jesus’ followers were Jews. Then the gospel was shared with the Greek Speaking Jews. Then it was shared with the Samaritans. Then it was carried to the gentile Cornelius and his household. And Acts tells us that the home of Paul’s missionary work was not Jerusalem but in the multicultural community of Antioch. And, of course, it was there that the followers of the way were first called Christians. This was the risen Christ’s intention, “go and make disciples of all nations (“etna” or “people groups”) baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and teaching them all I have told you.”

Clergy often say that the decade of Evangelism was a failure. That is not correct. From 1995 to 2000, TEC was the only growing mainline Church in the United States. Why was this true? It happened because with a clear definition of evangelism, we expanded the ways that we presented Jesus Christ to our own members and to the non-churched. Many congregations started offering different methods for evangelism and many dioceses sponsored them. Are there Episcopal congregations and clergy who still do evangelism? Yes, there are, but they are now seen as outliers and are few in numbers.

In this series, I intend to explore this topic more fully. In my next blog, I want to share how I learned to do evangelism and what I learned about evangelism by doing it.