Can the C of E do evangelism?
One of Justin Welby's personal commitments for his time in function is to prioritise evangelism. With the Archbishop of York he prepare up the Evangelism Task Group equally part of Archbishops' Council, and it reported to Synod earlier this month. Introducing it, Welby emphasised the centrality of evangelism to the life of the church:
On your phone, apps are merely add-ons, optional extras, suited to those with particular interests and activities. [F]or many information technology seems that evangelism is such an app – simply to be used for those who are gifted, who don't mind existence out of their comfort zones, who are happy talking about faith with strangers, and have a clever way of explaining the mysteries of God's love. Just evangelism and witness are not an app. They are the operating system itself.
He and then went on to explore what evangelism is about:
Evangelism is the annunciation, the setting forth, the property out of the Good news of Jesus Christ, in means that do justice to the beauty, integrity, joy and power of the 1 who was dead and is now alive. The one who lived for us, died for us, rose for u.s., ascended and prays for united states. It is from God, well-nigh God, with God and because of God. Above all, He calls and enables u.s. to be his heralds – those who proclaim the Good News.
The question that immediately arises is whether that is an adequate exposition of what evangelism involves. Andrea Williams, of Christian Business, was quite articulate that it was not, because not plenty prominence was given to the notion of 'repentance':
Evangelism is the announcement of the 'evangel', which publishes the skillful news of the Kingdom of God; that Jesus Christ is Lord and Rex, and that salvation is bodacious past his death and resurrection for those who apologize and put religion and trust in Christ, turning from sin and living in accord with God's Word.
(She goes on to claim that male/female marriage is an essential part of the gospel, which would be quite difficult to defend from the NT and rather undermines her point.) In that location are like criticisms put forward almost the Alpha course from conservative evangelicals.
But Adrian Hilton appeared to take a different view:
With 'Thy Kingdom Come up', the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are shifting the Church building of England away from a fuzzy relativist gospel of 'anything goes' to one of salvific fact: the person and piece of work of Jesus Christ. There will be objections from those who repudiate the cocky-interested claims of the ascendant voices, but this, also, must exist sensitively challenged in the mission of the Church. Nosotros either engage with this, or we die.
In other words, even if you lot don't mention 'repentance' or change these volition follow inevitably once you focus on the person of Jesus and his claims. There is some back up for this idea in the dynamic evident within NT annunciation of the 'good news'. How is theevangel, the 'practiced news', explained to insiders and to outsiders, and is there a difference? Many will point to the preaching of John the Baptist and his explicit call for repentance, or Jesus' own preaching of the kingdom which ever includes a call to repentance, or Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost. But this ignores an essential reality of the context: these are all examples of preaching to religious 'insiders', Jews who are well versed in religious linguistic communication. Information technology is striking that, when talking to religious 'outsiders', Paul focusses on Jesus and his resurrection (e.g. in Acts 17.xviii), and in his summary of what was 'handed on to me' in 1 Cor 15, he focusses on Jesus and what he has done. It looks like, for those who don't yet know the story, the first focus was on Jesus, and the need for repentance was something that became evident as the claims of Jesus were explored further on in the conversation.
This nonetheless leaves the question of whether the linguistic communication and theology of the Church building of England are well suited to the task of evangelism. It is not surprising that, whilst there is plenty of language of repentance in the Book of Common Prayer, this is non set within the context of evangelism, 'conversion' and the procedure of coming to organized religion. This is because of the social state of affairs, where there was an underlying assumption that England was substantially a Christian nation. It seems to me that contemporary 'alternative' forms of worship in the liturgy of Common Worship share this characteristic; in that location certainly is enough of language of 'repenting of sin' (though non in quite the demanding style of the BCP), but this is not always fix in the context of evangelism or the transition of coming to organized religion. Hither, though, we run into the C of E's great redeeming feature: its liturgy is consistently shaped by Scripture, and and then the relevant texts use unremittingly Scriptural language. Thus the baptism liturgy does not concord back from the phone call to modify allegiances, to 'fight valiantly against the world, the flesh and the devil' and to live a new life—so much so that this language really sits quite oddly with its nearly common social context, that of infant baptism.
This raises the question further of the connection between our linguistic communication, our theology and our engagement with evangelism. In a give-and-take about theological labels, a friend made a fascinating comment (disagreeing with me) about what actually makes a difference on the footing in whether churches are engaging in mission:
The distinguishing features of people on the ground are – do they pray? are they focused on sharing in God'due south mission? are they involved in constructive mission? are they cooperating with others in mission? are they prepared to let go of things precious to them in club to welcome the lost? are the churches places of love? And those sort of questions show no real correlation with those labels.
Only this kind of language, in itself, makes theological assumptions. Why do we understand that God has a mission, and what kind of mission is that? Even more than sharply, exercise we believe that people are 'lost'? This is quite explicit language that assumes a fundamental problem with human being beingness outside of relationship with Jesus—and this supposition is one that quite a few Anglicans, in dissimilar traditions and in unlike times, have found problematic. A commitment to evangelism is, amongst other things, a commitment to a sure theological outlook.
This was evident in the small group discussions we had on the Tuesday morn of Synod. Nosotros talked about how we had come to faith, and how religion had become real to us. A number had stories of a particular moment of decision and modify, whilst for others it was a long process, or they had grown up in faith. But one person was honest enough to acknowledge that the language of evangelism was non something he found like shooting fish in a barrel, and some other person (who identified as Anglo-Catholic) merely would not utilize the language of 'a personal relationship with Jesus' in any way to describe her Christian faith.
This raised for me a wider question: what needs to happen for the whole of the Church of England to encompass the call to evangelism? This call is expressed in linguistic communication that most evangelicals would exist comfortable with—but what of those traditions for whom it does not sit down very naturally? If they are to take this seriously, they either need to adapt their tradition to enable it to include such language, or need to observe a parallel set of terms which will work well for them whilst retaining the essential elements of evangelism and witness which Welby calls the 'operating organization' of the Christian faith. If not, then this call to evangelism will end up beingness endemic by one part of the Church, rather than the whole.
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