Are Evangelicals too concerned about evangelism?

You keep using that verse. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Sometimes you can know a verse so well that you don’t really think about it any more. You don’t notice what it actually says. Evangelicals like me are highly motivated by verses found at the end of the Gospel of Matthew in which the risen Jesus tells his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations”. (Matthew 28:19)

Christians take this as a mandate to tell everyone the gospel so that they will call on the name of Jesus Christ, repent and be saved. What’s not to like?

That would be the right conclusion if the verse said ‘Go and make converts of all people.’ But it doesn’t say that, does it? Jesus says ‘Go and make disciples of all nations.’ Disciples are not converts. Let’s be clear. Christians should tell everyone the gospel so that they call on the name of Jesus Christ, repent and be saved. But this is just the beginning. The call is to discipleship which is a lifetime of repentance, faith and maturity in wisdom.

Not Thinking Big Enough

The verse says that Christians are to make disciples of all nations. Yes, Jesus is telling his eleven remaining followers to make lifelong disciples of entire countries. This must have sounded truly ludicrous. Maybe with Jesus in their midst, there was a chance. But Jesus promptly ascends into heaven and leaves them to crack on.

It sounds ludicrous to us too. We live in a culture of such rampant individualism that the idea of evangelising an entire nation sounds impossible. Maybe it sounds more sinister, like some kind of Christian power grab. The idea that Christians should target leaders who will in turn bend a nation towards the gospel doesn’t sit right with us.

Except that is what happened. Spirit-filled disciples spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. A baptised eunuch took it to Ethiopia. The book of Acts ends with Paul on his way to Rome where a church was established, and within a few hundred years, the Emperor declared that he and the entire Roman Empire was Christian.

This Sceptred Isle

We see that in British history. A small cohort of monks set sail and set up camp in Canterbury in 597, and within a few hundred years, Anglo-Saxon and Viking leaders surrendered their thrones to Christ. Their tribes and nations were not only expected to follow suit, but seemed to do so willingly. There is little evidence of coercion.

The conversion of England and Wales was so effective that by 1066, William of Normandy found himself conquering a completely Christian nation. It had not been a Christian nation five hundred years earlier. And wasn’t even fully Christian a couple of hundred years earlier.

But the nation wasn’t just converted, but discipled. The Church was a prophetic voice in the power structures of the nation and theological understanding grew and grew.  Protestants, and particularly Evangelicals, tend to ignore the good work done in centuries before the Reformation. While there were clear abuses of power, corruption and errors, there was an entire welfare state run by the Church for the glory of God. The hospitals and rough-sleeping hostels were called monasteries. The guilds all had chaplains and every parish had at least one priest who were at heart of their communities in all kinds of ways, as was the church building itself. England was one of many discipled nations.

This is not about Christian nationalism, although it’s not clear to me why Christians should be in favour of any other kind of nationalism. That’s a discussion for another time. My point here is this: we simply cannot think in national terms, spiritually speaking. Everything, ev-ery-thing, is about the individual and their conversion.

Your and your Household

We even bristle at moments in Acts of the Apostle, like Chapter 16, when entire households are baptised. Some of us look at the text and ask ourselves “How do we know they have all made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ? Have they been converted?”

Evangelical Christians have a reputation for being all about conversion. That’s not just my opinion. That is the widely-accepted academic description of Evangelicalism, known as the ‘Bebbington Quadrilateral’, formulated by DW Bebbington. He argues the four hallmarks of the Evangelical, historically speaking, are the centrality of the Bible, the centrality of the cross, and importance of ‘conversion’ and the importance of ‘activism’. One might argue that the activism is an outworking of the conversion, done in a way that is shaped by the Bible and the cross, but that’s the widely accepted definition.

It’s not hard to find examples of this today. Some of our most popular hymns are about conversion experiences. Amazing Grace might be the most famous Christian hymn, which talks about being lost and now being free. And Can It Be puts a dramatic conversion experience into the mouth of the singer.

Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature's night;
Thine eye diffused a quick'ning ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth and followed Thee.

Singing hymns like this regularly will affect our theology, and create expectations of the Christian life. Do you have a conversion story? Were you spiritually chained in a dungeon that was then flamed with light? Do you have a testimony? If you were brought up in a Christian home, baptised as an infant and have been to Church all your life, the temptation is to manufacture a story that fits with the desire for a conversion story.

I mention this because we discuss this on the latest episode of Cooper and Cary Have Words with my friend Matthew Fisher who is doing a PhD on this sort of thing. Naturally, I lay much of the blame for this culture of ‘biblicism’ at the feet of John Bunyan, and those who preached the gospel in those days, hoping to ‘convert’ people who were already baptised members of churches. Were they being converted or discipled? Have a listen.

Either way, we need to acknowledge that the Reformation paved the way for all kinds of individualistic ways of thinking that are entirely valid, but not the whole story. Christians are to make disciples of nations as we are united as the body of Christ to proclaim his kingdom. Like Jesus’s first followers, the crowds and those who could not grasp what Jesus was really talking about, we’re not thinking big enough.

The Theology of Roald Dahl

As we await a new Willy Wonka movie, how about some thoughts on the classic version? Nate and I had a chat about that for Popcorn Parenting which you can now find here on YouTube: