FOR THE BILLY GRAHAM CENTER EVANGELISM ROUNDTABLE “ISSUES OF
... Richard Foster, Bill Hull, Len Sweet, Todd Hunter, and others) are making a ...
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“THE STRATEGY WE PURSUE” FOR THE BILLY GRAHAM CENTER EVANGELISM ROUNDTABLE “ISSUES OF TRUTH AND POWER: THE GOSPEL IN A POST-CHRISTIAN CULTURE” April 22-24, 2004 BY BRIAN MCLAREN, SENIOR PASTOR, CEDAR RIDGE COMMUNITY CHURCH The Strategy We Pursue I must first begin by thanking Rick Richardson for his excellent introductory paper. Everything I want to say here assumes general agreement with Rick’s setting of the stage. As well, being familiar with Carl Ellis’s and Brad Kallenberg’s work, I am confident that what I say will also build from their presentations. Of course, that doesn’t obligate Rick, Carl, Brad, or anyone else to agree with everything I suggest here!
Even if we are not in a time of philosophical and cultural transition characterized by “the posties” (postmodern, postcolonial, postEnlightenment, post-Christendom, post-Foundationalist, etc.), even if we are still in late- or hyper-modernity, even if the growth of the church in the global south is encouraging (a celebrated “fact” which may be in part at least an “emporer’s new clothes” situation)1, even if conservative religious broadcasting is more pervasive and profitable than ever, even if everything I and others have been writing about the postmodern transition and the emerging culture is a myth, mistake, and false alarm … even then, we are in need of radical strategic rethinking of our current strategy as gospel-oriented Christians seeking to follow the Great Commission.
1
Remember Rwanda.
McLaren 2 Falling statistics tell us so – our own (where 40% claim to attend church regularly, but our culture shows little of the expected effect of Christ-like presence), Canada’s (where 19% attend church regularly), England’s (where church attendance runs well under 10%), and Europe’s (generally under 5%). The dropout rate of Christian kids from church in their first years out of high school (a stunning crisis about which we remain in denial by and large) tells us so. The dropout rate of adults (swelling the unchurched Christian category) tells us so. The fact that so many Christians are mean-spirited, afraid, racist, and isolationist – often in direct proportion to their Biblical knowledge and accumulated “pew time” in church – tells us so. Even Scripture tells us so, calling us neither to make “converts to Christianity” nor to count “decisions for Christ,” but rather to make disciples of Jesus Christ, a much higher and more challenging challenge.
So many things tell us that our strategy deserves a rethinking that I won’t try to enumerate them all, but will rather only paraphrase Dallas Willard, who reminds us that our current system is perfectly designed to give us the results we are now getting.
I’ve gotten off to a negative start, but I’m not by nature a critic or complainer. At heart, I think, I’m an evangelist and mystic with a slightly above average imagination, so I would like to offer five dreams, five strategies which I could imagine or dream leading us to a better place. The first may appear so ridiculous as to discredit the others, but I must take that risk.
1. Admit we may not actually understand the good news, and seek to rediscover it. (Or: Reboot our theology in a new understanding of the gospel of Jesus.)
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Christianity exists on planet earth in three main forms. Its two western forms (Roman Catholic and Protestant) understand the gospel to be primarily information on how to get one’s soul into heaven after death. Although they differ on what constitutes the information, they generally agree on the goal. Its Eastern form (Eastern Orthodoxy) is, by and large, so accreted with cultural barnacles (Greek, Serbian, Russian, etc.) that those not born in the appropriate cultures (and many of those born within them) find it hard to penetrate to find what lies beneath the accretions. There may be treasures there (and I think they are), but they are hidden and heavily guarded.
If Christianity is not primarily information about how one gets his or her personal soul into heaven after death, then almost nobody on earth presently seems to know what it is instead. A tiny number of Christian leaders (including fine bona fide evangelicals such as Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, Bill Hull, Len Sweet, Todd Hunter, and others) are making a daring counterproposal: perhaps the gospel has something to do with the Kingdom of God, and perhaps the Kingdom of God is not equal to going to heaven after death, but rather involves God’s will being done on earth, in history, before death, in the land of the living so to speak.
Along similar lines, a few additional bona fide evangelicals (such as Mark Baker, Joel Green, and N. T. Wright) are suggesting that the gospel is not appropriately understood as atonementcentered, or at least, not penal-substitutionary-atonement centered. Rather, atonement theology may be a kind of prelude to the gospel, groundwork that prepares the way for the gospel of the Kingdom of God, or perhaps it is but one facet of a glimmering diamond which is centered not in
McLaren 4 a proposition but a Person. This suggestion represents a Copernican revolution for Western Christianity in both its conservative Catholic and Protestant forms. It may be judged erroneous – and likely will be judged so by many readers of this paper – but even those who dismiss it would be wise to consider the possibility, however slight, that there is at least some small grain of truth to these ruminations on the nature and center of the gospel. A lot is at stake either way.
Liberal Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) have distanced themselves for quite some time from atonement-centered gospel understandings, but by and large, the result has been understandings of the gospel that are so fuzzy that they are generally co-opted by political movements. (Or course, one could say that the conservative abdication of a gospel rooted in history has led to a parallel reality for conservatives: the gospel of justification/atonement applies to heaven, and the gospel of Religious Right Republicanism applies to earth.) I do not mean to be harsh in saying this: I am simply trying to be brief and not mince words.
Evangelicals have historically considered the battle line to be over justification by works versus justification by faith, but these authors suggest that the new battle line is rather over salvation beyond history from hell by grace versus salvation within history from sin by grace – with sin including both personal and social dimensions. Perhaps these thoughts will be new and disturbing to some of us; perhaps they are already familiar. For the former, I’m sorry if I am the bearer of disturbing news, and for the latter, I hope this serves as a satisfactory summary of the issues.
McLaren 5 For reasons I have detailed elsewhere, I have put my eggs in the basket that suggests we need to rethink our understanding of the gospel – both for the sake of faithfulness to Holy Scripture, and for the sake of mission in the emerging postmodern culture.
What the emerging culture needs is nothing less than a radical new vision of what life can be (personal life, family life, community life, social life, global life in all its dimensions – cultural, business, political, economic, social, recreational, etc.). This “vision of what life can be,” along with a way of life that helps bring that vision into reality, is at least a significant dimension of what I believe Jesus meant by the phrase “kingdom of God.” It is a vision in the truest sense of the word, a gift of seeing that comes from God. Nobody expresses this need for vision better than Methodist farmer/essayist/poet/novelist Wendell Berry, in his article “In Distrust of Movements” (http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/issues/berry198.htm):
People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.
Berry’s concern is the preservation of rural communities and land, but, he realizes, that one concern cannot be addressed without a radical and broad vision for a different way of life, an
McLaren 6 alternative to Industrialism-Consumerism and all that comes with it. Berry then explores the problems of all movements including movements to address his own concerns, and then concludes:
NOW, HAVING COMPLETED this very formidable list of the problems and difficulties, fears and fearful hopes that lie ahead of us, I am relieved to see that I have been preparing myself all along to end by saying something cheerful. What I have been talking about is the possibility of renewing human respect for this Earth and all the good, useful and beautiful things that come from it.
For that renewal to occur, Berry offers this wonderful example of spiritual understatement: In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking inescapably to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between our economy and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own hearts and the originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit as near us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the measures of this obsessively measuring age. We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.
What Berry is calling for, I believe, is gospel, the gospel, not just information on how one goes to heaven after death, by whatever means (admitting that “by grace through faith” in Jesus is far better than by works, by luck, or by another other way) … but rather a gospel that is a vision of what life can be in all its dimensions (not just individual dimensions): the kingdom of God.
McLaren 7 This understanding of the gospel is inherently relational (kingdom is a relational word – implying relationship with the king, with fellow citizens, with the territory, with the laws of the king and standards of justice and mercy, etc.) and missional (meaning it propels us into mission, for the kingdom is also a revolution against the status quo dominated by “principalities and powers”) and monastic (meaning it calls us to shared spiritual practices in community – such as prayer and reconciliation – racial, religious, economic, etc.). It can be diagrammed in contrast to our standard gospel understanding, which focuses on “me and my soul,” and then sometimes attempts to transfer concern from me to the church, and then occasionally attempts further extension of concern for the world:
me
church world
An alternative understanding of the gospel re-proportions these elements, starting with God’s concern for the world, in which God creates a community called the church, comprised of persons who stop (or repent of) being “part of the problem” and choose instead to join God as “part of the solution” – thus simultaneously entering a mission and a community in which one is accepted by grace, through faith in Jesus. The world The church me
McLaren 8 From where I sit, any understanding of the gospel that is not radically re-proportioned along these lines will not be seen or heard as good news by people in our postmodern world, nor should it be. My equally sincere belief is that this alternative understanding of the gospel (postcolonial, post-Enlightenment, etc.) is in fact more faithful to Scripture, more faithful to the life, teaching, and example of Jesus, and more rooted in the call of God to humanity – from Adam to Abraham to the prophets to Jesus to the apostles. While it critiques much of what passes today for “evangelical,” it also affirms what are, in my mind, the true treasures of the evangelical heritage. It could perhaps be called a post-Christian (or post-christendom) understanding of Christianity.
2. (Re)define what a disciple is. (Or: Change believers into be-alivers and be-lovers.)
The call or invitation of the gospel, if this less-traveled fork in the road is chosen, is not just to “safety, certainty, and enjoyment” in heaven, but rather to challenge, risk, and mission on earth, including suffering and self-discipline. Yes, it is by grace from beginning to end, and yes, it evacuates the fear of the death and suffering through a promise of reward beyond this life, but it is not a call to jump by grace on the lifeboats and let the Titanic sink to cold Atlantic depths. It is, rather, a recognition that the world is not a man-made sinking ship (the Titanic analogy is simply inappropriate for the world, although it may be appropriate for the Roman or American empires). The world is rather God’s creation, and though man’s evil is pernicious and threatens all that is good on planet earth, God’s creation must be saved and cherished. The call is, by grace, to leave the destructive path of the kingdoms of this world (including our individual “me-
McLaren 9 ism” kingdoms), and instead, to seek God’s kingdom, which is God’s will being done on earth as in heaven.
The term Christian is full of problems, so let me surrender the term (just for this paper, not in general) and instead work with the word disciple here. Disciples, unlike Christians (as they are perceived in the postmodern culture around us), are not haters of their neighbors. They are not withdrawers from the world, nor are they its critics and judges. They are not hoping they will escape the world as soon as possible, so others are left behind™to face destruction; rather, they are engaging with the world for the sake of Christ, being willing “to spend and be spent” as Christ did.
Discipleship in this sense is one side of the coin: it means being called to learn a new way of living, a way of life which pleases God and fulfills God’s dreams, a way of life characterized by love for God and one’s neighbor, whoever that person may be, including love for one’s enemies. It postures one in the world as a servant, a doer of good works, a light, salt, a friend to sinners, as was our Lord.
The other side of this coin is apostleship (not in an ecclesiastical sense, but in a missional sense): one is called to learn so she can be sent to teach, just as a violinist or artist becomes a student or apprentice of a master, so, after learning the art and craft, she can be sent to make music or art, and eventually take on students herself, in the tradition of the master.
McLaren 10 In this sense, evangelism becomes not the recruiting of refugees who seek to escape earth for heaven in a flight of spiritual self-interest, but rather the recruiting of revolutionaries who seek to bring the good and healing will of heaven to earth in all its crises.
If this redefinition of what a disciple (or Christian) truly is catches on, evangelism will become a radically different task. It will be a new approach for us, radically new, and we will need to unlearn and learn much.
If this kind of redefinition does not catch on, I have little hope for evangelism in the postmodern world, so I can offer no less costly strategy.
3. Do good works, including reconciliation with other Christians. (Or: Recenter the Great Commission in the Great Commandment.)
Earlier in 2004, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ was advertised by many Christians as “the greatest outreach opportunity in 2000 years.” I have not seen the film, but I imagine it will be stunning and powerful, and I hope it will be used by God in unprecedented ways. But I find the advertising slogan to be disgusting. Along with disgusting, it is revealing of much about our assumptions. But that’s a tangent I can’t indulge in here.
If I were to make a list of the greatest outreach opportunities of our day, it would not include recruiting a million people to go to a film, no matter how good. Rather, it would include:
McLaren 11 1. Recruiting a million Christians to sacrifice for sufferers of AIDs in Africa, and so show the love of Christ. 2. Recruiting a million Christians to befriend Muslim neighbors especially, but also all neighbors of other races and religions and political parties, invite them to their home for dinner, accept reciprocal invitations, and so show the love of Christ. This neighborliness must not be a cover for attempts at conversion, but must instead be a genuine outflow of our identity as disciples of Jesus who understand their identity as agents of reconciliation in God’s world. (Conversions are more likely if we aren’t pushing so hard for them, but are instead showing authentic love to the unconverted without conditions.) 3. Recruiting a million Christians to protest the wasteful Industrial-Consumerist system which destroys the planet, human communities, and human culture, and to proclaim in its place a vision of the kingdom of God, and so show the love of Christ.
What is needed then is not the showing of a movie (no matter how great), but rather a movement (with Wendell Berry’s warnings in mind) of Christians who are showing the love of Christ by moving into the world and loving their neighbors. In other words, unless disciples are following the Great Commandment, it is fruitless to engage in the Great Commission. If we replicate people who do not love God and love their neighbors, we are not fulfilling the mission of Jesus.
Ah, someone will say, but that is not evangelism; that is discipleship or social action or whatever. Ah, I might respond, perhaps we need to re-define evangelism. If the gospel is intended to be not just words in air or on paper, or images on film or screens, but rather a message that is embodied in good works by communities of people known as “the light” or “the
McLaren 12 salt of the world,” then there is no true evangelism without embodied action in these areas. If the Great Commission is about the making of disciples (and it surely is), and if evangelism is the proclaiming of the good news of the kingdom of God (the message which calls people into discipleship to Jesus), then if people aren’t being deployed into the world in reconciling and healing neighbor-love, evangelism isn’t happening nor is the Great Commission happening, in spite of our great commotion.
Along with this re-appraisal of the importance of good works done in neighbor-love (not to earn salvation, of course not – let’s get beyond that), we must re-appraise the importance of reconciliation among disciples – denominational reconciliation, yes, but racial, economic, educational, and national reconciliation too. If disciples don’t love one another, according to Jesus, no one has much reason to believe their message. I suspect this is a fail-safe mechanism Jesus built into the gospel: the only messengers who should be trusted are those who exemplify the message.
There was a time in Christian history when one could not become a Christian unless one actually knew a Christian. There were no books, church buildings, TV-Radio broadcasts, billboards, websites, tracts, films, or other “evangelistic tools.” The only evidences for the gospel were the good lives and good works of people who be-lived the gospel. The church did better in those times than it does in ours. Perhaps the reason we focus so much attention (and money) on films, books, broadcasts, and other tools is because our own example is so flimsy. Our lack of example in speech, behavior, love, faith, and purity may also explain why we must rely so heavily on arguments, many of them making claims that appear to postmodern people to be coercive and
McLaren 13 colonial, and therefore immoral, heavily laced with adjectives like absolute and objective to modify the noun truth.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how one looks at it), the rhetoric of good lives and good works is much more costly than the rhetoric of absolute objective truth and the proclamation of Christianity as the true metanarrative. I believe it is also more orthodox. As I have argued elsewhere, I think most Christians grossly misunderstand the philosophical baggage associated with terms like absolute and objective (linked to foundationalism and the myth of neutrality); I think we especially misunderstand the connotations of the word metanarrative, and the special relationship it has to the Holocaust.2 Similarly, arguments that pit absolutism versus relativism and objectivism versus subjectivism prove meaningless or absurd to postmodern people: they’re wonderful modern arguments that backfire with people from the emerging culture. (These arguments only make sense if we believe that postmodern people, like Gentiles in the early church, are not capable of becoming Christians unless they become modern - or Jewish - first.) There is a time and place for modern arguments, and for postmodern ones, but neither will be of great value, in the opinion of this perhaps overly-opinionated author, unless a strategy along these lines is pursued: a gentle, humble strategy which relies primarily on the vulnerable rhetoric of good fruit, good deeds, good lives rather than coercive argument. Without profound change in this area, I have little hope for evangelism in the emerging culture. But, if we were to somehow adopt strategies one through three, I have little doubt that four would flow naturally (not easily, but naturally).
2
See my “Open Letter to Chuck Colson” at www.anewkindofchristian.com.”
McLaren 14 4. Decrease church attendance. (Or: Deploy Christians into their neighborhoods and communities and world to build relationships with everyone they can, especially the last, the lost, the least.)
This radical reconception of what the gospel, the disciple, and the Great Commission truly are will lead to a new missional conception of the church. Rather than measuring the church by its attendance, we will measure it by its deployment. Instead of trying to get more people to attend church more of the time, we will try to get people who attend church to do so only as much as is necessary, and no more, so they can spend more time interacting lovingly with their neighbors as an expression of their life in the kingdom of God as disciples.
“Church” will decreasingly mean a place one attends, and will increasingly mean a community to which one belongs, who share a common mission and a common spiritual practice, rooted in a common story of what’s going on here on planet earth. Whether the word “church” (like the word “Christian”) is abused beyond recovery, I don’t know. Let’s assume it is redeemable.
One of the greatest enemies of evangelism is the church as fortress or social club; it sucks Christians out of their neighborhoods, clubs, workplaces, schools, and other social networks and isolates them in a religious ghetto. There it must entertain them (through various means, many of them masquerading as education) and hold them (through various means, many of them epitomized by the words guilt and fear). Thus Christians are warehoused as merchandise for heaven, kept safe in a protected space to prevent spillage, leakage, damage, or loss until their delivery.
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However, if the church is otherwise imagined, it can be experienced as an open community, welcoming strangers as Jesus welcomed sinners. Thus it becomes the main highway of evangelism. And if surprising people are loved there – people who would not be accepted were it not for the good news of the kingdom of God: the poor, the racially other, the politically other, etc. – the church will once again burst with new wine that no old wineskins can contain.
5. Start new “hives” of Christianity, without blowing up or stirring up the existing hives. (Or: Create catholic missional monastic faith communities, within the context of a “deep ecclesiology.”)
Relatively few churches will probably be able to change from a fortress to something else. The system which sustains “church as fortress” is very strong, and well funded. As many churches as can do so should be encouraged and helped to be reborn along the lines of this strategy, but expectations should probably be modest in this regard.
Meanwhile, new “hives” of this kind of Christianity must be born and nurtured. If even twenty percent of all our seminarians were trained in this direction as church planters, for example, a revolution would begin within a few decades, if not years. For this revolution to be successful, it would need to take place in the context of what my friend Andrew Jones (tallskinnykiwi.com) calls “a deep ecclesiology.”
McLaren 16 A deep ecclesiology seeks to honor the church in all its forms, from highest (most sizable, historic, hierarchical, institutional, liturgical, traditional) to lowest (most ephemeral, relational, small, innovative, grass-roots, organic, disorganized). To reverse the analogy, it sees the church as a tree, with a thick, tall, relatively inflexible trunk, rooted in Jesus, that stretches up through middle-sized branches to countless tiny, flexible leaves which come and go with every season. It honors equally the trunk and the leaves and the branches, limbs, twigs, and stems that connect them, because each cannot survive without the others.
These new hives of Christian vitality could be abuzz in all sectors, forms, styles, or “models” of the church. They would in this sense be catholic – honoring and receiving rather than protesting and rejecting one another, with no sense at all that there’s one “model” or one “right way” of living as the church.
They would be focused on the belief that God loves the world and sent his Son not to condemn it but to save it, seeing the church as God’s agent or collaborator in that saving work. They would in this sense be missional.
They would know that in order to be a transforming community, they must promote individual transformation through practices such as prayer, worship, service, forgiveness, solitude, fellowship, and the like. They would in this sense be monastic. (Monastic is a fascinating and paradoxical word, at root meaning “one” [mono], yet by definition meaning “community.” It suggests persons who one by one share a practice or way of life together, making them a community.)
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These communities may have names (like St. Peter’s Roman Catholic, or Immanuel Bible, or The Open Door); they may be too ephemeral and illusive to have names (like the four people who meet in Jack’s living room, or the circle of friends Mary meets with at a pub in Glasgow every Tuesday night). Together, they become the buzzing hives of the gospel.
They must become these kinds of hives without antagonizing the pre-existing hives that do not like these five strategies at all, and would rather stay with business/ministry as usual. Hornets’ nests of controversy do not need to be stirred up in times like these; such controversies will not further the gospel and the making of disciples, but will rather impede and frustrate both the considerable good already being done by fortress churches which constitute the status quo, along with the potential good that could be done by new “hives” of Christian living. Perhaps then, a strategy like this should only be pursued in the strictest secrecy.
As I said at the outset, I am offering these strategies as dreams. They are deeply demanding, terribly impractical, and humanly impossible, even if they are wise. And, of course, many will think that they are not.
A postscript about crusade evangelism: Crusade evangelism requires advanced preparation, the kind of preparation encouraged by Operation Andrew, for instance, in the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The five strategies recommended in this paper could set the stage for an increased demand and effectiveness for crusade evangelism. Hives abuzz with vibrant Christians who
McLaren 18 connect with their neighbors, demonstrate reconciliation, and believe the gospel of the kingdom of God would create a wave of curiosity and good will (an echo of Acts 2:4246) among unchurched people that would attract them to hear explanations of what they see happening, and why.
Respectfully submitted (Brian McLaren)
