The Pew Research Center’s Report and church-less evangelism (Matt Claridge)

The new research from the Pew Research Center’s Report on the decline of professing Christians is making the rounds on the relevant sites and blogs. Justin Taylor has highlighted Russell Moore’s thought-provoking response to the numbers. I find myself in agreement with Moore’s assessment, and thought I’d throw in a few more supports under the weight of his argument. Our church has been making its way through Ephesians, and we just passed by chapter 2:11-22 where Paul gives what I believe to be his third summary of the gospel from a “situational” perspective (to use John Frame’s categories). Paul gives a “normative” definition of the gospel in 1:3-14 (God’s perspective), and an “existential” definition of the gospel in 2:1-10 (our individual perspective); but in 2:11-22 Paul provides a view of the gospel in terms of its corporate, communal, and interpersonal impact and reach.

I want to highlight just one aspect of Paul’s community definition of the gospel as it speaks to the current decline of professing Christians in American culture. The fact that Paul brings up this third definition of the gospel is incredibly helpful and brings balance to our evangelistic efforts. We Evangelicals tend to focus exclusively on the doctrinal (normative) aspects of the gospel and tend to focus on individual conversion (existential) through one-on-one interaction. But Paul suggests in 2:11-22 that there is crucial third aspect to evangelism—community witness.

The broad strategy for evangelism we should take away from this passage in response to the news is this: our witness to the gospel as a community is greater than our witness as individuals. When it comes to evangelism, the whole church community is greater than the sum of its parts. You’ve heard the expression: it takes a village to raise a child. When it comes to evangelism, it takes a Christian community to win an unbeliever for Christ. As churches we need to pursue strategies that take into account just how critical our witness as a collective body is in bringing someone to Christ and indeed keeping someone for Christ.

Notice the image Paul uses to describe believes and their relationship to the church. He describes believers as basically individual building blocks which are then incorporated and fitted into something far greater, a temple, a house for God. The apostle Peter also uses this image in 1 Pet. 2:4-5. If all you had to look at is an individually shaped stone, you would really have no idea what its used for, or perhaps even what it is. Without a context, without seeing that piece in light of the grander design, its very difficult to know what it is. Its kind of like being a non-mechanic looking at an alternator for a car—it just looks like a random piece of machinery. Only when you seen it working and fitted its function in an automobile do you realize what it is and what its purpose is. It’s the same way with Christians. Christians outside of the Christian community are often ineffective in giving unbelievers any clue what it means to live as a Christian or what the goal of the Christian life really is. We vastly overestimate our own individual contribution to getting someone saved; it usually takes experiencing Christian community as the tipping point, the catalyst, to move someone all the way toward Christ.

Now, I’m sure we can all readily agree that the best way of reaching people is through a healthy Christian community, but I’m not so sure we really understand what is at stake. One big reason why we need to seriously think about how evangelism happens through a community is because our community, our tribe, our churches are becoming increasingly bizarre and unfamiliar to the outside world; and this growing unfamiliarity is only going to heighten the importance of maintaining a healthy community life in the church. For example, if I were an unbeliever being reached by the Mennonite community we have here in Grangeville Idaho, it would be very clear to me that to become a Christian does not just mean believing in Christ, it means changing my lifestyle, my social circles, and my culture in significant ways. I would not only mean identifying myself as a Christian, It would mean identifying myself as a Mennonite, a part of a new community that is very different from what I am used to. Now, if everyone in our secular culture wore plain clothes, if all women wore head coverings, if all men sported bushy beards, and all people lived fairly technology free lives, I would probably only think I was converting to Christianity, period. I wouldn’t feel the pinch of changing my lifestyle because I would already be familiar with it, and probably I already respect it. I would already be a cultural Mennonite that needs to become a practicing or faithful Mennonite.

Like it or not, mainstream, evangelical Christianity is going to, and it must if it is remain evangelical Christianity, look more and more like a Mennonite community. What we believe, how we live, and what we are preoccupied with is going to and ought to look increasingly different from the surrounding culture. There is less and less common ground between the church and the world. The church will be less and less familiar, and less and less respected. For people to come to Christ, it is going to feel like embracing an alien culture, a different way of living, a different way of thinking, and a different set of values.

You might say, “doesn’t everyone who comes to Christ count those types of costs?” Well, not necessarily, and you can see this when you compare how evangelism has been done for the past several centuries in America. As late as 20 years ago, you could give anyone on the street a simple gospel presentation and you could assume they understood most of your terms, and even posses a basic respect for the church. Going even further back 50 to 60 years ago, just about everyone had some history with the church. The evangelical church and American culture was still very closely intertwined, prayer and Bible study occurred in public schools, going to church on a regular basis was still considered a mark of being a good public citizen. Even when people didn’t live according to church teachings on marriage and lifestyle choices, there was a consensus that those moral standards were good and healthy. Most unbelievers were Christian unbelievers, atheists were Christian atheists, drunks were Christian drunks, murderers were Christian murders. That is, unbelievers really had to make a clear and obvious decision to reject the Christianity of their families and culture, even as they quoted their mother’s Bible. What that means for evangelism is that becoming a Christian didn’t require too much explanation and joining a church wasn’t all that difficult or a cause for tremendous soul-searching. When you got right with Christ, you finally submitted to what you respected in others all along, a life of integrity, community, service, and spiritual purpose. You were finally catching up with the mainstream Christianity of American culture. (Of course, there is a dark side to this cultural consensus as Moore points out. It incites hypocrisy as people begrudgingly conform to the moral expectations of Christian culture without the experience of actual conversion.)

Another example of this is the term “Revival,” used throughout American religious history. An evangelistic revival was certainly intended to bring many people to Christ through mass preaching; but the term itself suggests that a revival is about calling people back to Christianity. The term “revival” assumes that people once identified themselves as Christian, grew up in Christian homes, drunk from the wells of an American Christian culture, but needed to be revived, called back to a heritage that should be theirs. To go over to the Middle East and call an evangelistic campaign a “revival” wouldn’t really make sense, would it? They don’t need a revival, they need a Pentecost.

What I’m trying to do here is make us all aware that we can’t just tell people the simple gospel message and expect them to join the church without much ado. For an increasing number of unbelievers, its impossible to distinguish the gospel call to repentance and faith and the call to join a church—that foreign, weird, peculiar thing called the church—and to leave behind all that is comfortable, known, and accepted. The different values between their circle of friends and the church community are increasingly huge: different views about gender identity, different views about individual freedom, different views about family life, different views about what it means to have a good time, different views about basic courtesies and how you ought to relate to people. Today, you can’t just call someone to Christ, you have to call them to the church as well. Previously, you could assume they would jump right into Christian community, because it was respected and understood. We just can’t do that anymore. People who do respect and understand Christian community life are the anomalies. Those types of people probably grew up in Christianized or religious families. Our culture will more and more resemble a Muslim world where joining Christ means joining a community that is utterly different and hostile to the one you are used to.

What really is the tipping point for most people coming to Christ is not necessarily getting all their intellectual objections to the gospel overcome. More often the tipping point is when they feel more loyalty to a Christian community than they do to any other community. By loyalty, I don’t mean “brand loyalty”—that they feel like we provide the “services” they want. If the church tries to compete with the world in the area of “services” we will fail miserably. The world has more money, more resources, and honestly, sometimes more talent than we do.  We should certainly do what we can in making sure our bathrooms are clean and our gatherings well organized and compelling, but earning an unbeliever’s loyalty by being a friend to them, learning from them, and respecting them—that’s when the tipping point in their life is going to be reached. That’s when an unbeliever says, “I may not understand all that I’m getting into, but if I get into it with these people, I’ll be ok.”

Russell Moore is right: “The number of Americans who identify as Christians has reached an all-time low, and is falling. I think this is perhaps bad news for America, but it is good news for the church.” Evangelical ecclesiology has suffered irrelevance in the past precisely because of our “christianized” culture where one could get away with church-less evangelism. In the ever darkening horizon of Christendom, the time for the church to truly shine has come. Notice the plurals in Paul’s call to arms: “[live up to your title as] children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.”

Matthew Claridge is an editor for Credo Magazine and is Senior Pastor of Mt. Idaho Baptist Church in Grangeville, ID. He has earned degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is married to Cassandra and has two children, Alec and Nora.