Fire Escape, Sinking Ship and Being Born Again
Some of you might be reading that and wondering, What in the world do those three things have to do with each other? Others of you will already understand.
Some of you have heard the pitch, you have to be born again to escape the fires of hell. Or, to free yourselves of the clutches of this decadently evil and sinking, decaying ship (society). Nowadays, these phrases are probably mostly heard from television or the radio. You might hear them in your church or some special meetings. More so in the past, they were the stock catchphrases of the evangelistic crusades.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not entirely knocking any of the above. I have not only attended but also taken part in and supported crusades in the past by Billy Graham, Barry Moore, the, Ken Campbell and the Sutera twins, not to mention Anabaptism's own Brunk brothers and Myron Augsburger. People have experienced changed lives because of the efforts of these teams.
However, as some of them will also honestly admit, based on their own follow-up surveillance, many who make decisions at or around the time of these events, do not follow through. In medicine, when physicians attend a continuing education conference or learn some new guidelines, but don't really end up putting all of that new knowledge into practice, we call that a knowledge gap or a failure of translation of knowledge from word to deed. The same thing happens with many of these evangelistic efforts, whether it is a crusade or television broadcast.
You see, turning away from your old life to follow The Way, or, if you will, being "born again" or "becoming a Christian," is only a start. Somehow though, over the last two or three centuries out of the nearly 10 centuries that The Church has been in existence, too much attention and effort has been put into a certain way of inviting people into The Kingdom of God. We have had John chapter 3, with Jesus’ reference to being born-again and his apparent final words in Matthew 28 emphasized at the expense of a lot of other important biblical material (I used the word apparent because I think I recall reading somewhere that some believe these words were added later to express a certain point of view and may not have been the original words of our Lord). This emphasis on "winning souls" also causes a lot of guilt on the part of those who are constantly reminded that this is what they’re to be about if they want to earn their "stars" in heaven, but find that they're not very successful in “converting” their families, relatives, neighbors, friends or co-workers. In all of this, we seem to forget that we cannot convert anyone, only the Holy Spirit can, and to do so, it needs to find soil that is ready and prepared for the growth of the CD that is planted with the hearing of The Word. This flask is the test of The Church, but one that often we often fail in. That is in part because new converts are often not successfully linked to the physical expression of The Body of Christ somewhere, or even if they are, the receiving congregation doesn't provide a nurturing atmosphere necessary for growth in The Way to continue.
Christianity has too often been reduced to a program, strategies, aimed at getting people in the door of the church building. To be sure, many churches also do a good job of engaging these individuals, their members, in things like small groups. Sometimes the emphasis here is more on fellowship, helping the newcomers feel more like they belong, then that these are an avenue of serious learning more about it what it means to be a Christian and growing in The Way.
Some of these valiant evangelistic efforts are based on the so-called missionary travels of The Apostle Paul. However, what gets lost in the ‘knowledge translation’ here is that the Acts of the Apostles and Paul's own letters indicate that he often spent months and even years in some of these congregations, trying to make sure they were established in The Way, before moving on to a new destination. Not only that, he often returned to spend time in these congregations or dispatched others to make sure they were doing well. And of course, he wrote letters to them, some of which we still have. He and his helpers worked at the individual relational level. This is often lacking in The Church today.
As for our efforts to try and get people through the church doors, The Church in the New Testament and The Early Church times did not even have church buildings to invite people to. If you read the writings of the Early Church, it does not appear that they were very many come if any, individuals engaged in evangelism in the way we are familiar with it today, as described at the beginning of this writing.
Some of us have come to realize that what we have failed to do is cultivate discipleship in the newcomers. This is what the early church took very seriously and was good at. This was all it took for the church to grow slowly but surely so that by the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire, which had been persecuting them to that point, basically capitulated and became Christian. Unfortunately, that led to a whole new other interpretation of Christianity, which set it on another course that was not that helpful, for the next Thousand use and then some. I am referring to what some called Christendom, with all of its ramifications of the union of church and state, but that would be the subject of another article.
What the early church practiced was the development of spiritual virtues. To be sure, there are recorded instances in the New Testament of individuals being converted and baptized on the spot. In other words, becoming members of The Kingdom. What we forget though is that in many of these instances, the individuals, and sometimes their families, were already following God as they knew him from Judaism, so they new a lot about what it meant to be a follower or live the life of a disciple. However, it did not take long when the church moved into the Gentile world, for it to realize that a lot of time and effort needed to be put into helping reprogram, if you will, the pagans to the Christian way of life. Those who became interested by the witness of the word, and more often the action, of their neighbors, and wanted to become a follower of Christ, were assigned to sponsors who worked diligently and intensively with them for a year or two, while they and the rest of the local congregation observed the catechumenate, as they have been come to be called, to see whether they were really showing signs of having the fruits of the Spirit within them. Here again, we have another example of where a Scriptural concept has been somewhat distorted. “The fruits of the Spirit” has to often been interpreted as the number of souls won, instead of spirit-given virtues cultivated.
Many who have been busy doing what they described in the earlier part of this essay are turning their back on it having rediscovered that what we are called to be is faithful where God has placed us, in our neighbourhood or parish (when I dictated that word with my computer's voice recognition, it came out perish, LOL as they say nowadays, which could be true enough as well). What we need to focus on is cultivating virtue, and making sure the needs of ourselves, our fellow saints and our neighbors are met in ways in which we see God working. I suggest that is where we need to direct our efforts in the future.
