(Part Seven)

(Adapted from chapter one of ‘Recent Trends Among Evangelicals’ by Rowland C.Croucher, John Mark Ministries 1986/1995.

Evangelicals and mission

Since Lausanne I, evangelicals have been concerned with three dimensions of our mission to the world: strategy, social concern and the supernatural.

1. Strategy

Presently, 1.5 billion people consider themselves Christians and are associated with 26,000 distinct denominations. However, the world percentage of Christians has declined from 34.4% in 1900 to 32.8% in 1980. Half of all the world’s people are separated from effective contact with the church. And half of the ‘Christians’ are probably nominal or non-practising, still needing to be evangelised.

One key to effective evangelisation in the future is the concept of ‘people groups’. So congresses on evangelism recently have tended to major on specific peoples: the Chinese, city-dwellers, or Muslims. There is now a clearer understanding that when the Bible speaks of ‘nations’ it is primarily referring to peoples: groups defined not so much by artificial political boundaries, as by ethnic origin, language, group loyalty, custom and religion. So strategies of evangelism today focus on becoming ‘Greek to Greeks and Roman to the Romans’.

A Christian mind also must come to terms with the defections from the church due to secularism in Europe and materialism in the US.

Then there are the ‘untapped resources’ (gifted women denied positions of leadership); the possibilities of co-operative evangelism (‘biblical evangelism and biblical ecumenism have always belonged together’ – Leighton Ford) and the training of church members for sensitive, effective evangelism (‘the evangelisation of those without cannot be separated from the rekindling of devotion of those within’ – William Temple).

2. Social concern

The Lausanne Covenant affirmed that we should share God’s concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of persons from every kind of oppression: ‘The message of salvation implies also a message of judgment upon every form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist.’

So evangelicals are now convening conferences on simple lifestyle, justice, peace, nuclear disarmament, poverty and development. Evangelicals are tending to become ‘culture- affirming’ rather than ‘culture-denying’. That is, they are moving towards engagement and away from escapism.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen a more concerted effort to be involved in socio-political action rather than merely holding conferences about these issues. Conferences may actually inhibit constructive change because, while we’re talking, we may be deluded into thinking that we’re ‘doing our research’ – and isn’t that important?

But when the need to do more research comes along, we still haven’t done very much. Certainly reflection and action must go together, but in the final analysis love is a verb. Remember Eliza Dolittle’s cry: ‘Words, words, words. I am so sick of words… I get words all day long… Show me!’ Evangelicals are now being killed in some parts of Latin America because they are encouraging the poor and oppressed to understand their rights.

Then there are the ‘liberation theologies’: Catholic, evangelical, conciliar – all concerned with ‘lived reality’ (Leonardo Boff). The earliest of modern liberation theologies (note the plural)

grew out of the 1968 conference fo Roman Catholic bishops in Medellin, Columbia, and the writings of Gutierrez. In their earlier expressions, the story of the exodus was foundational, but recently they have majored on a theology of Jesus and the Spirit. Earlier some might have been too uncritically Marxist but now, for Boff, ‘Marx is neither the father nor the godfather of liberation theology’. Perhaps in the early 1970s (reaching its nadir at the WCC Commission on World Mission and Evangelism at Bangkok in January, 1973), there was a tendency to equate salvation with political and economic liberation. The Lausanne Covenant rightly affirms that reconciliation with other humans is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation.

However, Leighton Ford (for many years chairman of Lausanne)

asked: ‘Do our deeds match our beliefs? Will the followers of Marx show more concern for the poor than the followers of Christ? Over 600 verses of scripture have to do with our Christian responsibility to the weak and the poor.’

3. The supernatural

Herbert Kane’s ‘The Christian World Mission: Today and Tomorrow’ suggested that ‘the proponents of church growth, with few exceptions, have emphasised the human factors and all but overlooked the divine factor’ (i.e. the role of the Spirit of God). Then in ‘Missiology’ (January, 1982) Paul Hiebert wrote an article called ‘The Flaw of the Excluded Middle’ in which he observed that, because Western missions had not adequately come to terms with the supernatural and how it influences everyday life, they will be seen to have been ‘one of the great secularising forces in history’!

Peter Wagner, professor of church growth at Fuller Seminary, studied the doctrinal statements of seventeen evangelical mission agencies (purposely excluding Pentecostal or charismatic bodies)

and found that ‘not one mentioned the Holy Spirit’s power for healing the sick or casting out demons’. He goes on to talk about a ‘third wave’ of the power of the Spirit in the twentieth century (the first being the Pentecostal at the turn of the century, the second being the charismatic renewal around the middle of the century):

The third wave is an equally strong manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit among us who are neither Pentecostals nor charismatics, but mainline evangelicals. It is the same Spirit with the same power, but with a slightly different flavour. Sick are being healed and evil spirits cast out as they were in New Testament times… We need to know much more about how miracles and wonders are signs of the kingdom of God… We need to discover the dynamics through which the Pentecostal and charismatic movements have grown, mostly since 1950, to an astounding 120 million persons worldwide (Evangelical Missions Quarterly, October, 1984).

In this area, Westerners are learning from their Two-thirds World counterparts. We in the West have a tacit assumption that ‘if we can’t explain it theologically, don’t believe it – and don’t encourage it’! But that evangelical rationalism is, hopefully, changing.

Evangelicals in the future will perhaps become more reluctant to use sentences beginning with ‘the primary task of the church is…’, regardless of whether the sentence ends with worship, evangelism, Bible teaching or social concern. All of these are integral to the life of the church. The only generalisation we can legitimately make is that ‘the purpose of all Christians, everywhere, is to continue to do in the world what Jesus did in the world. Our ministry is Christ’s ministry. In the same way as he was sent into the world, so are we sent.’ Biblical evangelicals will have an expectation that God can still accredit his word with signs and wonders.

More…